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  • 3 min read

Original Sin

There was something about the message in Viktor Frankl's book "Mans's Search for Meaning" that didn't sit right with me: "Meaning" is is simply made up or subjective, and when new facts about reality gets revealed to us in time we have to adapt whatever meaning which we saw as driving our lives. And to create such "meaning" that can last, or keep creating new ones to get through the day is a futile endeavor in my opinion because the subjective stuff lack substance unlike the objective stuff. It just can't last.

Yet despite its lack of substance, subjectivity is something that shapes our perception of reality, and certain views of looking at the world has a sort of deathgrip on our minds. I understand that such ways of looking at reality is called "archetypal". While the stories in religion have no reality value, their form seems to have some ungodly influence of our mind. One such form is that of the "Original Sin".

I don't care about the specific plot of the Original sin, but its basically an irreversible decision that has done irreversible damage, a kind of betrayal of your (man's) true nature, the consequence of which you have to live with for the rest of your life.

Now if you were a Christian, you might believe it was the devil that tempted man to make the irreversible catastrophic decision. Atheist might look at the content of this myth and reject it because it sounds nonsensical, but yet they're just as likely as the Christian to fall prey to such narratives or maybe even more.

The irreversible decision could be anything that lead to a setback or disappointment in life. You're not going to blame it on the devil because you don't believe in such things. You'll put the blame on your own incompetence or that of others. For the rest of your life, you may be haunted by memory of the point in time where you made that decision. You might look at it as the point at which everything fell apart. Your future self informed by hindsight might be unable to accept you could do something so stupid. Your psychiatrist will diagnose you with OCD. Pop psychology will say you're just on the extreme end of perfectionism. You'll be put on psychiatric drugs, which in itself may cause irreversible changes to your brain which becomes the new original sin your brain will latch on to. The intensity with which the Christian blames the devil you'll blame others or yourself. I reckon the latter is what drives suicide more than the actual consequences

I hope you see where I'm getting at. Even though we can rationally dismiss the contents of myth, we're still susceptible to the archetypal patterns of myth. Its almost as if religion was designed knowing that our minds were susceptible to such patterns and made use of it as a means to control us (for the sake of the greater good it seems).

This brings me back to the my relation with the general theme of subjectivity: why I felt the search for meaning is a futile one. Any "meaning" is getting progressively corroded by the new information revealed in time. The most practical advice you can give someone is to delay decisions that has irreversible consequences.

Search for meaning and subjectivity must be viewed as something that deserves to be studied as a hindrance to objecivity and has objective worth because some of them are archetypal: pervasive across minds and capable of possession.

So I think its more useful to see them as possessions rather than viewing them as a personality trait or labelling them as a condition like OCD or what not.

  • 2 min read

Dealing with systemic problems

The problems we deal with in everyday life is an entirely different beast compared to the problems we're trained to solve in schools: even those problems you're trained to solve in school like programming, transform into something much more complicated, with many unknown factors, when they become projects in real world.

All the real world problems that vexes you are systemic problems and you'll never find a solution that completely rectifies the issue by treating its root cause. To adapt in the real world you'll have to make compromises and lower your standards.

There are many systemic problems which probably have shaped your life more than you realize: like school education with its myriad of issues, but the example which I want to talk about today is about craniofacial development: the most apparent way this problem manifests itself is in crooked teeth, but undersized jaws could also result in more concerning problems like sleep apnea because the there's not enough room for the tongue in the jaws and it falls backward and obstructs the airway, especially during sleep when all the muscles relax.

The solution offered to crowding, which is widely accepted despite it only exacerbating the root issue, is extraction of teeth and orthodontically rearranging the rest of the teeth with the space made available from extraction. Another solution works for adults is MSE or Maxillary Skeletal Expansion. It addresses the root cause in that it creates space but it does so by splitting the maxilla laterally, yet this isn't a complete solution either because it ignores the mandible.

The root cause is said to be our diet, which only has soft food which doesn't stimulate the jaws enough, but it goes even further: supposedly the jaw doesn't develop because mothers don't breastfeed their babies and just bottlefeed them. Bottlefeeding makes the baby suck the milk while breastfeeding makes the baby push the nipple against their maxilla in order to draw out the milk. The former sucking movement leads to narrowing of the jaw while the latter motion leads to expansion of maxilla.

So how far do the roots of these problems go?? This is just one kind of problem that plagues our society but there are others like poverty which too have deep roots and solutions that address just the symptoms.

Our emotions are woefully inept at solving the systemic problems of civilizaiton. Against systemic problems, anger is not just fleeting source of power, but unable to make out who or what its target even is. You could try your best to direct anger at the people that deserve it but in the end you only feel conflicted.