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by Gary Z. McGee
September 18, 2022
from
Self-InflictedPhilosophy Website
Spanish version
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Gary
Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned
philosopher, is the author of
'Birthday Suit of God' and 'The Looking Glass Man.'
His
works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages
and his wide-awake view of the modern world. |
Image source:
Transcender by Andy Kehoe
"The
secret source of humor
is not joy but
sorrow;
there is no
humor in Heaven."
Mark Twain
In the face of an absurd universe, we have the choice to
balk, to fear, to ignore, or to laugh at the absurdity of our finite
condition within a seemingly infinite precondition.
Of the four,
Only laughter has the
power to get us out of our own way.
Only laughter sets
the stage for courage, imagination, and the ability to create
meaning despite absurdity.
Only laughter can get
us past sadness.
If the heart of humility
is humor, then the heart of humor is sadness.
Why sadness...?
Most of us are
culturally conditioned to have unreasonable expectations.
We're indoctrinated
into believing the world works a certain way.
Most of us,
eventually, mature enough to rise above this indoctrination.
But in our rising, there
is also a falling:
-
a fall from grace
-
a fall from
innocence
-
a fall from faith
This fall hurts
existentially. Our heart breaks. Our soul aches. Our ego is humbled.
This creates a deep
sadness...
In the face of our
shattered expectations, discovering a good sense of humor
becomes our only saving grace.
Good humor tends to
be a reaction to unmet expectations.
From the hard ground of
truth, our shattered self is left with a difficult choice:
either we cease being
mistaken or we cease being honest...
A good sense of humor
gets us out of this existential briar patch by choosing honesty as
an attempt at not being mistaken.
Of course, mistakes will continue to occur...
Which is all the more
reason to cultivate a good sense of humor moving forward.
The universe will
continue to be absurd despite our attempts at making sense of
it.
The universe will
continue being uncertain despite our attempts at being certain
of it.
No matter how much we
attempt to pigeonhole truth, truth will continue to be
un-pigeonhole-able.
All the more reason to have a laugh...!
The "toothache" in our own humor:
"There are men so
philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches.
But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could
see the toothache in his own humor."
H.
L. Mencken
Challenge accepted, Mr.
Mencken...
The ache in our humor is twofold:
Once going through
the killing of our expectations leading up to our sense of
humor, and again in retrospect...
Looking back on our
journey,
We see how our grief
gave birth to our humor.
We see how our ideal
had to die for our soul to fly.
We see how we had to
break our heart open for the light to get in.
We see how our growth
came from honoring our wounds rather than rejecting, fearing, or
repressing them.
We see how our wisdom
could only have ever come from the sacred wound of our fall from
grace.
This doesn't make it any
less painful or sad.
If anything, it makes it
even more painful, even more sad. It pinpoints our pain. It
quantifies our sorrow. It magnifies our humility. We're made even
more aware of our grief.
Our fallibility,
imperfection, and utter wrongness as a species becomes even more
poignant.
From the ashes of our will to power arises our will to humor to
solve the equation.
And the solution is
laughter:
high laughter, high
humility, high humor...
A toothache? Forget about
it. Everything aches. That's life...
As the Dread Pirate
Roberts tells the princess in The Princess Bride,
"Life is pain,
highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."
But even as everything
aches, we have the power of a good sense of humor to fly over it
all.
The human condition is a
fleeting spark in the eternal dark. Our aches and pains are
transitory things, like slow-moving clouds in the sky. Tragedy won't
last, but neither will triumph. Even suffering is laughable when you
have a good sense of humor.
So what if our sense of humor has a toothache? We have high laughter
as existential salve.
A humorous disposition dispossesses:
"Humor is not a mood
but a way of looking at the world."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
High humor is not a
philosophical diet or passing psychological fad... it's a lifestyle.
It's a way of looking at
the world that keeps us in an almost perpetual state of healthy
detachment,
If, as Wittgenstein
further stated,
"philosophy is a
battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence",
...then it stands to
reason that we use high humor as a philosophy against bewitchment.
When we don the cloak of high humor, no belief, no matter how true
it may seem, is off the hook for being questioned with ruthless
skepticism.
In the battle against
bewitchment, the destruction of a belief, no matter how
powerful, is mere collateral damage.
The opposite of belief is neither disbelief nor doubt, but
curiosity and clarity of thought.
It's only through a good
sense of humor that we come to realize the concept of belief is
anathema to curiosity and clear thinking.
If we can manage to
replace all usage of "believe" with "think" then we get ahead of the
curve of our clinging.
This way, we don't BELIEVE that we CERTAINTY exist:
we THINK that
we PROBABLY exist...
But we could be wrong.
We remain circumspect,
for even our interpretation could be an illusion, no matter how
"true" it might seem.
Free of the mindset of a settled mind, we move into the mindfulness
of a curious mind.
Curiosity is a
philosophical phoenix that continually rebirths itself even as
it flies over it all in honest detachment.
We become a powerful question-generator that counterbalances the
delusion-generator of the human condition.
We remain ahead of
the curve, surfing Aslam's Infinite Circle on the
surfboard of Occam's Razor.
In absolute awe over
the beautiful unfolding of an ultimately unknowable universe.
On the edge of our
own curiosity, questioning all "answers," countering all
beliefs, eluding all delusions.
We're a self-inflicted
philosopher with high humor, and not even God is safe
from our ruthless inquiry...
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