Our Rulers Don’t Want Us Have-Nots Even To Think about the Meaning of Life; But We Do, and We Should

Our rulers say there IS no meaning to life, so just do your job like we tell you to

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This wonderful egalitarian man, like billions of egalitarians, knows that one of the meanings of life is to make a better world by removing the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. The rich tell us there is no meaning to life. Go here to see 500+ photos of more wonderful egalitarians in my postal zip code.

Our billionaire ruling class wants us have-nots not to think about the meaning of life, and especially not to think about whether our lives are the way they ought to be, or could be.

It wants us instead to think only about the mundane, the utilitarian (and certainly not about utilitarian for whom.) It wants us to think about how to be well-behaved (i.e., how the ruling class wants us to behave) and how to perform the tasks it assigns us at work so that we don’t get fired. It wants us to think about how to work skillfully at our job. It wants us to think about which of the things offered for sale we want to consume, and about which of the entertainments made available we want to be entertained by.

The ruling class wants us to talk with each other only about these mundane topics. Its school system (K-12 and undergraduate and post-graduate college) teaches mainly utilitarian skills (the foundations for, and then later the actual STEM, business management, etc., curriculum), never how to think philosophically about the meaning of life. This is what the ruling class wants because it makes its domination over us far more effective than it would be if we have-nots were engaged, from childhood onwards, in robust conversations about the meaning of life and how we want our lives to be.

But try as it will to prevent us from thinking about the meaning of life, the ruling class cannot stop us from thinking about it and talking about it. The ruling class may prevent such discourse from taking place in the institutions and platforms it controls, in school classrooms and university lecture halls and yes, in most places of worship, but we do it in other places and by other means anyway, surreptitiously.

As Simon and Garfunkel sang in their Sounds of Silence, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. And tenement halls. And whispered in the sound of silence."

While organizing our entire society to be bat shit crazy and evil—organizing it so that the trillions of dollars of the wealth we are made to produce end up becoming nuclear weapons and missiles that may kill us all, and huge conventional bombs for the Israeli government to use for genocide, and military weapons galore for the Kiev regime of Nazis to commit ethnic cleansing of Russian-speakers, and God knows how much secret weaponry for the murderous evil CIA to commit assassinations and run bio-weapons laboratories and carry out covert regime changes to squelch anything that even smells democratic in the world—while using our STEM skills and labor for this insane. demonic purpose, our rulers tell us, “Move along, there’s nothing to see or talk about here; go to work and buy stuff and stay entertained.”

Three cheers for all the have-nots who are not just “moving along”!

Three cheers for the have-nots who shout that the meaning of our lives is NOT to support genocide, and who shut down business as usual in the universities to demand an end to U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Three cheers all the have-nots who shout that the meaning of our lives is NOT to support the satanic AI data centers, and who are rising up to prevent them from being built.

Three cheers for all the people who are shouting that the meaning of our lives is NOT to submit to a fake democracy.

Three cheers for everybody who is trying to figure out how to stop the ruling billionaire class from having its way and from treating the have-nots of the world like dirt, like we were (as the ruling class ideology of materialism¹ discussed below asserts) nothing more than objects blindly following the laws of physics and existing in the world for no other purpose than to be used by the rich for their whims and amusement and greed and unlimited craving for power.

Three cheers for everybody who is thinking and talking about what IS the meaning of our lives.

How the meaning of life became a taboo subject

In the past, some ruling elites dominated the have-nots by talking about the meaning of life, not by discouraging such talk. The Catholic Church, for example, told the have-nots that the meaning of life was to be “saved” and thereby enable our soul to spend eternity in heaven after our death.

The problem for the Catholic Church’s original method of controlling the have-nots is this: it hinged in large part on a view of reality in which humans were special in the eyes of God as evidenced by the supposed fact that the earth was the center of the universe. But then people such as Copernicus and Galileo cast great doubt on this earth-centric view, and subsequent precision observations of the changing apparent position of stars at six month intervals proved that indeed the earth moved relative to the starry firmament, that the sun-centric view was thus far more reasonable than the earth-centric view. This undermined the notion that humans were special (meaning able to be saved and spend eternity in heaven.)

But belief in the specialness of humans was still nonetheless saved for many years by the idea that humans were created by God “in His image” and that we were therefore not “just animals.” Then came Charles Darwin, however, who persuaded lots of people (now the great majority) that humans were not divinely created by God but rather emerged by purely mundane non-supernatural means: evolution by natural selection of inheritable random (genetic mutation, as was later discovered) variations.

The intellectuals who claimed in the past to know about the nature of reality were shown to be wrong, first regarding the earth’s supposed central position in the universe and then later about the supposed supernatural origin of human beings. This intellectual class today does not want to be embarrassed again by being shown to be wrong on such a fundamental question as the meaning of life. In order to avoid this embarrassment most scientists today bend over backwards to insist that there is no meaning—no purpose—to life whatsoever.² They tell us that reality consists only of dead (inanimate, purposeless) matter (subatomic things or waves or excitations of fields) blindly obeying various laws of physics, and that’s it. That’s it! Nothing more! Even our brains, our behavior, our societies are nothing but that, just very complicated doings of dead matter ruled by impersonal physical laws, no more meaningful our purposeful than the behavior of bouncing billiard balls.

This view of reality is called materialism. I discuss the enormous problems with this materialism view in my article, “An Egalitarian View of Physical Reality.” Scientists cling to materialism, despite its ridiculous shortcomings—such as its total inability to account for, or even purport to account for, the existence of consciousness—for fear of embracing any notion at all of meaning or purpose in the universe and then being embarrassed by that notion turning out to be wrong. But they bend over backwards to the point of absurdity to deny any meaningfulness (purposefulness) in the workings of the universe.

For example (as pointed out by Bernardo Kastrup whom I mention in footnote #1) scientists today take it as an article of FAITH (without ever admitting it’s just faith) that genetic mutations are random, that the only source of increasing complexity seen in biological evolution is the result of natural selection selecting those rare random mutations that just happen to be beneficial for the reproductive success of the individual organism with the mutation. How do scientists KNOW that the mutations are random? It is extremely difficult to prove that a sequence of numbers (or anything else) is random. And it is virtually impossible to prove that a sequence is random when one only can see a very limited sample of that sequence. Scientists cannot see the full sequence of random genetic variations throughout biological history. Scientists don’t know what all the supposedly random mutations were, since only the ones that got selected had even a chance of making it into the fossil record, which is itself extremely sparse. Nobody knows if the genetic mutations are random, or whether they are in some way aimed at creating more and more complex life forms in which case it would be fair to say that the universe has some purpose in creating us. Scientists are loath to admit they don’t know the answer to this question. (You can read a top notch philosopher explain why he thinks the universe intends to create greater complexity: “Mind and Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel.)

Our ruling-class-supported culture, what our rulers want us to believe, is that there is nothing meaningful about our lives; we’re just the result of random mutations for which there was never any purpose. We are, so our rulers would like us to believe, just biological robots with only the illusion of free will;³ we were not put here for any reason at all; the facts of our past life are pointless and so is our future. So just keep working and consuming and being entertained without ever thinking about whether there might be more to life than that.

To this ruling-class-promoted culture, this egalitarian says NO WAY! We have the power to bestow deep significance and meaning onto anything we wish, and when we do so that significance and meaning is every bit as real as anything else in the universe because our feelings and experiences are every bit as real. Materialism denies this, but it’s true nonetheless.

1. I refer here to metaphysical materialism, the view that physical reality—the real world, what Philip K. Dick defined as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"—consists exclusively of stuff that is in no way mental or subjective.

2. I read this idea in Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher whom I greatly admire. Here is an extract from his book:

“It’s legitimate to optimize our lives on a practical level, but obviously not at the cost of failing to explore what life is about in the first place. Failing to provide a philosophical education that foments the growth and expression of thoughtful and sensitive human beings, attuned to their own place in nature, cannot possibly be a healthy way forward. Yet, the educational system in most modern societies today is almost entirely focused on utilitarian aspects. Why is this so? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand: a purely utilitarian education tends to turn people into controllable tools; cogs in the machine. Unequipped to even conceive coherently of the higher questions of existence, we’re left with no option but to blindly leverage our utilitarian skills day in and day out, contributing to economic output and wealth generation. From the point of view of entrenched power structures–which stand to gain most from this wealth generation–the benefits may seem to outweigh the risks: not only does the current educational approach favor production, it may be seen to increase social stability, reduce unrest and, perhaps most importantly, ensure the preservation of the power structures. The more unquestioningly one performs one’s tasks in the system, the less commotion and disturbances are to be expected.

Of course this isn’t natural. Human beings aren’t tools. We’re here to express ourselves–What else?–not to be cogs in a mechanism. A civilization of stupefied drones going blindly about their practical tasks is constantly flirting with collapse. But the power structures may believe that this can be managed through the right combination of alcohol, tobacco, television, pornography, commoditized shopping culture and, in more severe cases, cognitive behavioral therapy145 and dependency-creating psychiatric drugs. 146 The mainstream metaphysics of materialism enables this by rendering culturally legitimate the outrageous notion that unhappy people are simply malfunctioning biological robots.

The way to wake up from this all-too-real nightmare is a form of education that we, worryingly, seem to have lost familiarity with. Only a philosophical education can provide a truly human alternative for our future. Some may argue that, without a strong focus on optimizing the practical aspects of life, we would be so busy with securing food and shelter that we wouldn’t have time or opportunity to consider philosophical questions. Yet, a superficial look at the world’s pre-literate cultures proves this to be simply false: aboriginal societies have always made significant room for philosophy–which, in their case, we call mythology–despite their ever-present and rather formidable survival challenges. 147 We look upon them as primitive and unenlightened whilst, in fact, it’s we who have become sick. Unfortunately, our sickness seems to play right into the hands of entrenched power structures and, in this way, self-perpetuate.”

— Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

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3. Bernardo Kastrup in the book mentioned in the above footnote argues that we have “limited free will.” Here is an excerpt from my above-linked “The Illusion of Free Will?” article:

To the extent that people are persuaded that free will is just an illusion, they will find it harder to object to the ruling elite’s surreptitious manipulation of human beings. If human beings have no more free will than inanimate objects then it follows that manipulating the former is no more objectionable than manipulating the latter. The idea that free will is just an illusion thus perfectly suits the needs of any manipulative ruling class. (I owe this insight to the author of the Dilbert cartoon for February 4, 2015, in which Dilbert says, “I’m programming our robot line to emotionally manipulate their owners into buying upgrades”; his colleague then asks, “You’re teaching cloud-connected robots all over the world how to surreptitiously control humans?” to which Dilbert replies, “Technically, yes. But free will is an illusion anyway.” This shows that the people employed to do the manipulating will find it a lot easier to rationalize what they’re doing if they believe free will is just an illusion.)​

The “free will is just an illusion” view claims that none of our behavior is determined by our conscious choice; all of our behavior is totally determined by the atoms that make up our brains, in obedience to the impersonal laws of physics. In this view of reality, the existence of consciousness is a complete mystery, since it is impossible to imagine subjective consciousness emerging from purely non-sentient matter. (Some scientists admit this impossibility, while others who try to explain consciousness end up just waving their hands and revealing that they haven’t a clue.) Scientists with this “no free will” view either deny the reality of consciousness (as B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist psychologist, essentially did) or they admit that it mysteriously exists but only as an “epiphenomenon,” meaning that consciousness only reflects (somehow), but never causes, the decisions made by the atoms of our brain following the laws of physics.​

If there is no free will, then it follows logically that the governance of society is rightfully a matter of social engineering and not a matter of taking seriously what individual people say they want. In this view, democracy is an irrelevant pointless idea. Society should be controlled by people who understand what makes people tick (i.e., how the laws of physics controlling the atoms in our brains yield the laws of chemistry that control the molecules in our brains, in turn yielding the laws of molecular biology that control our brain cells, in turn yielding the laws of neurology controlling our behavior and (possibly) our merely “epiphenomenal” consciousness.)​

For example, the recently released online film, Zeitgeist III, which has more than 16 million viewers and which is a very slick expensive production that appeals in the beginning to people like us in many ways, ends up denying free will and calling for essentially a dictatorship of scientists.​

The “no free will” idea does indeed derive very logically from the idea that all there is in nature is non-sentient matter/energy. This notion that there is only non-sentient matter/energy in the world is the chief premise of the modern scientific view of the world. Here’s where it gets interesting.​

The modern scientific world view (that there is just non-sentient matter) is purely based on faith. It does not derive deductively from empirical observation. Historically, this view emerged and gained ruling class favor in the Enlightenment period of the 17th century because it was originally linked to the idea that the world consisted of purely non-sentient matter on the one hand and fundamentally different divine things (human souls and God) on the other hand. The ruling class at this time feared the “animistic” ideas that (the ruling class feared) influenced peasants and made them stop fearing the Church and start revolting against the rulers who claimed to derive their authority from the Church. The animism idea was that there was no fundamental difference between our souls and our bodies because, like our souls, our bodies (and all other ordinary things in nature) had an aspect of subjectivity and did things for reasons of their own, i.e., were self-moving (like our souls) and not merely passively controlled by laws of nature. According to animism, our body and our soul are fundamentally similar, not dissimilar. The fact that our body dies and decomposes means that our souls, being fundamentally similar, also die and decompose. And this means that our souls are not eternal, and do not go to heaven or hell depending on whether we obey the Church or not. The Church, naturally, saw this as blasphemy, and relied on the new Enlightenment scientists such as Newton and Boyle (famous for his law of gasses) to rebut animism with non-sentient materialism. Newton and Boyle, themselves, were ardent defenders of the Church’s claim that God and souls existed and were fundamentally different from ordinary matter.​

The Church also needed ordinary nature to be completely non-sentient matter in order for the miracles of Jesus to be truly supernatural. If matter were animistic it would mean that such miracles were things that happened routinely and were common place. This in turn would mean that Jesus’s performance of miracles would no longer provide evidence that Jesus was divine, which in turn would undermine the basis for the Church claiming to be the one true religion.​

In subsequent centuries, most scientists lost their belief in the divine component of reality and were left with the non-sentient material component, stripped of sentience for no reason other than the historic fact (largely forgotten) that it was formerly required in order to defend the existence of the eternal souls and of supernatural miracles. The scientists’ belief today in the non-sentience of matter is based on faith just as much as the belief of people in the past in eternal souls and God was based on faith.