Tag Archives: Conditioning

The Purpose of Life is to Look for a Purpose

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Bam! You are born. What now? What are you going to do? Well, for the first couple of years, it is pretty clear what you will do: you will listen to your parents, go to school, play with your friends, and do all those other things ‘children just happen to do’. You don’t even think about what might be the purpose behind all of it. The only purpose you think about is training your Pokémons to level 100 and ruling the Pokémon League.

After this period, you start attending high school, in which you are forced to deal with all the insecurities that arise: what do I have to do to be popular? What do the cool guys do? How can I be more like that great – but not so nice – guy in my soccer team? But you’ve still got the child-like purposes driving you forward; purposes that make you know what you have to do.

Then you start attending university. The first two years or so are as usual. You get your points, work on your social life and do all sorts of stuff you like. Until suddenly disaster strikes: you don’t know it anymore. You start reflecting upon your life and ask yourself: what the fuck am I doing? Is this who I am? Is this truly what I want to do for the rest of my life, just becoming another brick in the wall? And it is at this point that your life really starts.

Living someone else’s life is easy. You just follow the rules and you will get by. You might not even be consciously aware of the rules, like when you were a kid. You just live your life, not even thinking about what it is that you’re doing. But at some point in your life, whether it is in your ‘mid-life crisis’ or in your twenties, you become aware of the rat-race you’re a part of. You become aware of the goals that society has imprinted on you: ‘Get a good job,’ ‘Get married’ and ‘Think about the career possibilities’. And you are slowly but steadily approaching the point of destruction; you’re slowing reaching the why-phase.

When you’ve reached the why-phase, all social conditioning you have been put through in your life will be reconsidered: ‘Why do I need to get a “good” job?,’ ‘Why do I need to get married?’ and ‘Why do I have to think about my career possibilities?’. And while the why-phase you had as a child was innocent and happened without you even being aware of it (‘Daddy, why do we celebrate Christmas?’), this why-phase you’re involved in happens fully consciously. Maybe even a little too consciously.

Everyone experiences this (in fact second) why-phase in life. However, the point at which it kicks in is likely to differ from person to person. You might know those 50-somethings that get divorced, move to France and start a Bed and Breakfast? That’s their why-phase. Or do you know students that quit their study after a year or two? That’s the why-phase as well. But it is not only the way you live your life that gets reconsidered – and revised – in the why-phase, it is the entire notion of life itself. What is life? Or more importantly: what is my life?

When you start asking these existential questions, you encounter a whole range of different answers, each one being just as much – or even more – dissatisfying as the one before. You keep coming up with answers that have been imprinted in your head, the indoctrination as I mentioned before. But when you start asking yourself why it is that none of these answers satisfies you, you stumble upon an eye-opening but scary conclusion: maybe your life doesn’t have a purpose.

That is: maybe there is no purpose in life besides the one you’ve created for yourself. Maybe there is no inherent meaning of life, or goal you should strive for in order to be able to live happily ever after. But then – suddenly – the answer shows its face: if I want to live happily ever after, I better create a purpose for myself. And if I don’t, I will be dead soon enough anyway.

You’ll always have to create a purpose in your life, no matter how mundane this might be. Although there might not be an inherent purpose of – or meaning in – life, there is always an underlying drive present in your life, and that is the drive forcing you to create a purpose in life. That is not to say that there is one static purpose you should live your entire life according to. No, your purpose might be changing. But still, there must always be a purpose, and its yours to find out. That’s the one and only true purpose of life.

But what do you think?

What’s Wrong with Pedophilia and Bestiality?

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Pedophilia and bestiality: sex by an adult with a child and sex by a human with an animal. Most people consider the former to be disgusting and the latter to be twisted. Both of these activities are illegal in many countries. And that’s the way it should be, right? We all feel that both pedophilia and bestiality are wrong. But why is that exactly? What is it that makes us so creeped out by the thought of an adult having sexual intercourse with a child? Or the noise of the neighbor enjoying the companionship of his dog a little too much? And in what way do both pedophilia and bestiality differ from rape? Aren’t they ‘just’ rape, but disguised in a different form? Let’s take a look at these questions.

I believe that – as it is with all matters in life – you have to come to understand why it is that you find something right or wrong, and that you should not just take society’s word for it. After all, there are many societies in which gay marriage is believed to be morally wrong or even illegal, but that doesn’t imply that gay marriage is in itself morally wrong or illegal, right? Of course not. It is morally wrong or illegal because the society in which it is morally wrong or illegal made it so. And so it is with pedophilia and bestiality. However, in contrast to gay marriage, there might be more compelling reasons to make pedophilia and bestiality wrong and illegal.

Let me ask you the following question: what is it that you find so repulsive about grown up men (and women) having sex with (little) children? Responding with, ‘They are children!’, is not an argument; merely a shout of disgust. A better – but still unsatisfying – response would be, ‘Children aren’t outgrown yet. Therefore an adult who has sex with a child does not have intercourse with a “complete” human being, only with some entity that has the potential of becoming a fully developed human being. And it is not until someone is having intercourse with a full-grown member of his own species that he is engaged in a “normal”, or “morally right”, endeavor’. But that’s nonsense, right? That would imply that sex with any person who is not believed to be ‘fully developed’ according to the moral rules of society would be an act worthy of condemnation. Also, if you make this claim, you might be asked to answer the question of when it is that someone is fully developed; when someone has ‘reached’ his full potential as a human being. When he has reached the ‘normal’ IQ-level? When her breasts are ‘sufficiently’ matured? When he has got the ‘right’ amount of hair on his chest? These measures seem utterly arbitrary and incapable of explaining our repulsion with pedophilia, let alone bestiality.

The reason why we find sex by adults with children – and sex by humans with animals – inappropriate (to say the least) is because we believe that the someone, or the ‘something’, we have sex with should in potential be able to assent to you and itself engaging in the sexual transaction. Note the prefix ‘in potential be able to’. Why is the addition of these few words so important? If we would skip them, the act would still be worthy of our condemnation, right? If you engage in whatever kind of relationship with another person (whether this is trading collector-cards, selling a motorcycle or having sex), it is always ‘appropriate’ to make sure that both parties agree to the deal, right?

That’s true, but somehow we find pedophilia and bestiality to be different from – or even ‘more wrong’ than – rape. Thus, it cannot only be the absence of mutual agreement for entering into the sexual transaction that explains our repulsion with both pedophilia and bestiality. No, it is the fact that a child or an animal does not even possess the capability of making a conscious decision to enter the deal or not. They don’t even have the sense of consciousness required to deliberately consider the ‘pros and cons’ of having sex with a person. And where in the case of rape, the rapist doesn’t take into consideration the intentions of the person being raped, the case of pedophilia and bestiality is different because children and animals might not even have – or at least not to the same extent as human adults – the potential to consciously reflect on the situation they’re in, and hence to decide whether or not to engage in a (sexual) transaction. And it this absence of potentially being able to consciously reflect on the situation, of consciously (ab)using another living creature while knowing that it is – in principle – incapable to consent with ‘the deal’, that we as a society seem to find more inappropriate than the act of don’t paying attention to another person’s intentions. And that’s why we think that the former should be punished more severely than the latter.

But what do you think?