Hail Humanity - Notes from his Underground
Swarming disgusting
thoughts, that felt to some extent as a déjà vu. Somehow, we all could easily
recognize the desperate idea we had about consciousness, shaking our grounds
about questions such as our being, what are we supposed to be, how we must
behave and from where the "normal" people excerpt their values and behaviours?
And the eternal question that we all thought about at a younger age: Is cultivated/conscious
the new unhappy? The etching questions of:
does the wages and human welfare the reason to his happiness, is it enough?
Is it the right thing to seek?
"I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful." - F. Dostoïevski
Dostoevsky, in an allegory to the cave of Plato, claims that if it is to be
thought that consciousness is the key to the humankind success, their behaviour
remains, however, irrational, silly and even ludicrous. While Plato in his
assertion, affirms that “on the walls of the cave only shadows are the
Truth", Dostoevsky is making an appeal to all his readers to break the
wall, and not care to restart the whole reasoning and building every Truth
related to his "underground" point of view.
Nonetheless, when the
narrator tries to challenge these standards, he fails. Just by relating his own
misfortunes of 40 years of underground existence. Some sort of monstrous
existence, as he commits unexpected loathsome actions.
But should we even
mind appreciating his words, absolutely not, as he confirms in a ceremonious
procession of complete haggardness: "Because I only like playing with
words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should
all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I’d sell the whole
world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the
world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go
to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well,
anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard."
Briefly, a sick and
spiteful man, who is hopelessly trying to institute his own set of ideas
instead of just fitting in, in the "stupid" society as he calls it,
maybe it's his curse. His high self-esteem, no doubt led him blindfolded to his
misfortune... Driven to sanity by the number of books he read, that he can't
help but speak like a book, sermon people as he was far more superior to them
all, a wretched fellow who has ignominiously preached sense using the absurd words.
Come to think of it, maybe Dostoevsky has a
point there on his characters tongue, or hand, or whatever, that indeed we have
to reconsider our moral obliquity, and economical rapacity: instead of longing
for extra-wages, and unnecessary welfare or even seeking knowledge that leads
us remotely nowhere. Instead of it, we must accordingly turn to preaching that humanity is The Solution to the lot of depravation and misery that the
humankind has engendered. Here we are again face to face with his cherished subject:
Humanity and Humanness and the lot that follows of what really makes us humans... :)
"You know the
direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious
sitting-with the-hands-folded."
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