Apocalyptic Wagers:

the logic of Pascal’s Wager:
Humanity’s relationship with the infinite

Anyway, on with the show: Blaise Pascal was French philosopher, mathematician, inventor, etc around the same time as René Descartes – the “I think, therefore I am” guy, and around the same time as the rise of Nation-States and the European Imperial Virus they spewed forth unto the World and was at that moment spreading to North America to disastrous consequences as well as ravaging the peoples of Africa in ways that European-inspired Societies still minimize and dismiss to this day.

Anyway, Pascal’s Wager is explicitly about “Belief in God,” but what it’s really about is how to navigate a World that is changing faster than anyone can keep pace – I mean, Nation-States rose out of something. There weren’t just a bunch of people milling about with no Political or Social Institutions to speak of just waiting for Nation-States to fill that void.

In fact, Nation-States arose originally as a solution to a very specific kind of Social and Political Problem:

The question of the relationship of “The People” to those in Power, specifically should “The People” have to follow the same Religion (or slightly different sect of the exact same Religion really) as their Ruler? Keep in mind The Thirty Years War was one such way that people asked this question – Pascal was simply posing the same question in a different way.

Again, it was very much not an idle question – this was a period of general Political Consolidation in France, which means that for a lot of people their Rulers are getting new Rulers, which means that whose lead you have to follow might change as well.

Okay, enough context, I’m gonna present Pascal’s basic argument for why you should Believe in God:

In case you were wondering, I have no interest in the theological questions being pursued here – if that’s your jam then cool, but you’re gonna need to look for that sort of thing elsewhere, sorry. However, the Logic of what Pascal is doing here has much wider applications to some very important questions concerning Life.

To Believe Or Not To Believe?:
That Certainly Is A Question

First thing to note is that Pascal’s Wager is about Belief and not about the Object of Belief. Now, maybe you’re asking yourself, “How are people supposed to pick what they believe? Doesn’t something either speak to you or not?” Well, because I am the type of person who likes to answer questions with questions, I’ll ask you: “How do you even know what you actually believe in the first place?”

Habitual Behavior, that’s how. That’s the only way to know what anyone actually Believes: you look at their Behavior Over Time and look for Patterns, which only really make sense when you apply them to a System of Beliefs, whatever that may be given the context.

Everyone does this whether they consciously recognize it or not, so much so that if someone’s Habitual Behavior didn’t fit into something that other people would recognize as a Belief System then that would be a clear sign of mental unwellness, and an indication that that person needs Help (because that is what we are supposed to do for each other no matter the particular unwellness). Ah well, the Reality of what needing and getting Help constitute in a Neoliberal Hellscape is beyond the scope of this little what-have-you, so I’ll move on.

Anyway, Pascal is working under the assumption that a person’s Behavior, especially the stuff people do repeatedly over a long period of time, is a reflection of their actually held Beliefs. I’m totally with him on this btw, it’s a very helpful way of looking at the World.

Habitual Behavior & Belief:
The Relationship Goes BOTH Ways

This is an important insight by Pascal. I’m not sure if he’s the first to make it, and that honestly doesn’t really matter generally ever and this case isn’t bucking the trend, so what matters is what he did with this insight, which is actually pretty interesting:

What if you looked at your own Patterns Of Behavior and don’t really like what you see? Honestly, anyone who came of age in The Society That Broke The World should have this feeling at least once in their Life – because there is a one hundred percent chance that you internalized some truly awful Beliefs along the way and pretending that you are somehow immune to soaking up the World around you does nothing to help you heal any of your many broken bits. This whole column, and indeed this whole website were born from attempts by me to heal some of my broken bits.

Like I said, what if while investigating your own Deeply Held Beliefs by analyzing your own behavior over a substantial period of time you find that there are beliefs that you hold that really don’t jive with your Core Beliefs at all – and in some cases may actually violate them to a very uncomfortable degree. No one likes this feeling. At least, I don’t – it’s honestly one of the worst feelings in the world. I come at this question from a different angle here, but what I want to focus on now is that when you find something like this in yourself, you generally want a reliable way to change it.

There’s the rub, though, eh?: Deeply Held Beliefs that you aren’t aware of without some intense reflection are not gonna be the easiest things in the world to change. It would be weird if they were, honestly. Yeah, you gotta dig for potatoes, too, but if you think that’s all you gotta do before you eat ’em then you are in for a rude awaking, my friend. The humble potato takes Time and Preparation and Work to go from inedible dirt apples to what is objectively and inarguably the best foodstuffs on the Planet.

Infinite Asymmetry:

The Universe’s Most Unlikely Love Affair

Tolstoy framed Religion as Humanity’s Relationship with the Infinite – I’m aware of Tolstoy’s misogyny in general and certainly in framing this, but honestly I hope that some day people look past the stupid way I say things to see all the wonderful Seed-Potatoes of Wisdom that I’m trying to plant in their Thought Gardens, so I won’t draw attention to the way that he belittled the women in his life, but instead focus on the idea of the Relationship between Humanity and The Infinite.

***All this applies to individuals and groups in the same way really – it doesn’t matter how far you scale up, Humanity as a whole is still as nothing when compared to the Infinite, so I’ll just keep saying Humanity to be consistent, but every time I do so you could substitute any human grouping or individual into the statement without changing the essential meaning at all.***

Religion is one such way to live that Relationship, but far from the only way – and I am interested only in the fact here that whether your relationship with the Infinite is religious in nature or not, it is definitely, very overwhelmingly one-sided. It doesn’t matter where it ends up, it begins in Awe and not in Mutual Recognition.

Because Humanity’s Relationship with the Infinite begins in Awe and continues in total asymmetry, it generally continues in Awe even if all the other details of the Relationship might change. It’s weird, but the things that truly inspire Awe tend to inspire a lot of other things to. People like to express their Awe – I’m sure we can all think of a million examples off the top of our heads for this little phenomenon.

But people also like to do things that they believe align with the thing that inspired their Awe – it could be a parental figure, a religious figure, a political ideology, or like for Doomers: Life. You gotta admit: Life is pretty Awe inspiring when you experience it in large doses – and even in small doses, too, when you allow it to be.

The Doomer’s Wager:
Or How To stop caring & learn to Love the bomb

The first thing that you should notice about the Doomer’s Wager is that the values for the Happiness Points are a bit different than in Pascal’s Wager. For Pascal, the “Happiness Points” (I don’t think he called them that btw) in the “God Does Not Exist” column don’t really affect the Belief Calculus because it doesn’t really matter what their actual amount is when you’re comparing the numbers to infinity. So why not plus or minus a hundred?

The World being doomed or not, however, is not a matter of Belief for Doomers, so I’m not really concerned about Belief or possible existence. I know that Life As We Know It exists, the big issue that I have – that all Doomers and most of the rest of Humanity has – is that Life As We Know It is on the cusp of not existing – that what we have always taken as Life As We Know It has a Before and an After, and right now we are in between those two places and it is a very terrible place to be.

The Doomer’s Wager is a Coping/Survival Mechanism for how to deal with The Death Of The World, which by definition is made up of millions upon millions of other deaths. How to deal with this Tide of Overwhelming Grief when you have trained you brain to not look away but to always look closer at the connections, turning every tragedy into a thousand more just by following the lines? It’s bleak, man. This is a tough damn question that I don’t think has a good answer, so I only offer a bit of well-meaning advice from someone else who is also traveling this Path.

Anyway, the Doomer’s Wager is a gambit to not be overwhelmed by the World, so that you can survive the Stupidest Apocalypse Ever. But here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s achievable for one very important reason, and that is we are not talking about Belief, which has a special relationship with Habitual Behavior, but instead we are talking about Caring, which I think is much more of a personality trait and probably beyond our reach to manipulate very much at all.

Trust me, you can’t turn it off – all you can do is turn away. But you know as well as I do that because everything is interconnected there is no direction you can turn where you won’t eventually notice it. There is nowhere it won’t Overwhelm you and Crush you and make you Spiral until you start turning again. It’s not sustainable, though. It’s a trap. It’s always a trap.

It took me a solid year to pull myself out of this trap, and believe me when I tell you that it is always there beckoning. How could it not be? How nice would it be to really and truly turn off Caring for a little while? To just be able to switch it off from time to time? But, alas, such is not our Fate. Which, conveniently enough, brings me to how I personally feel about Our Fate:

The “Fuck Fate” Wager:
Weren’t we always gonna say it sooner or later anyway?

This of course, is just a matter of switching perspective, of how we view The Fate Of The World and our Relationship to it. It is an important shift in perspective though, and hopefully changing our perception of what is emotionally manageable as well.

I want to talk about the most important aspect of this Change In Perspective before going into detail about the whys and wherefors, because it’s what all of my friendly advice here hinges upon, anyway: this Perspective aligns far better with your Nature than the Doomer’s Wager does, which resists your fundamental Nature and forces you to try to be something you simply just are not. That’s why it never works.

It seems easier to just give up on Caring and turn a blind eye to the World, but you are physically incapable of doing that and every time you try it just ends up taking another little piece of your soul, and that, my friend, is a bummer.

So my incredibly Wise and frankly Sagacious Advice is to accept who you are: one of Life’s Little Bitches. You already know it – and whatever ends up happening you are going to continue to Love Life and Care deeply about what happens to it.

That’s the core of the shift in Perspective: the negative infinity (ie the worst possible scenario imaginable if you had infinite time to imagine bad possible scenarios) has shifted from Continuing To Care to Doing Nothing while the thing that inspires Awe in you is flagrantly and publicly murdered right before your eyes.

The shift is huge because it also changes the perception of what a “manageable” amount of negative Happiness Points means. The Doomer’s Wager is predicated on the assumption that there will be a very asymmetric net negative amount of happiness points during the Collapse of so many Ecosystems and Societies. Seriously, it’s gonna be a bummer.

The Doomer’s Wager says that in order to be able to survive the Collapse emotionally and ultimately physically, you have to minimize the amount of traumatic shit that you’re exposed to, because everyone has a Breaking Point – and when everything is connected, traumas multiply and Breaking Points rain down on you like the Furies fulfilling a mission to destroy you personally. It’s not awesome.

To Care Or Not To Care?:
As If one of life’s little bitches has a choice lmao

So the George Carlin meme got me thinking about this, because I think it is easier to default to the Doomer’s Wager because you do see Breaking Points all over the horizon ready to rain down on you like the Furies on the War Path plus all the Demons of Hell coming at you to for good measure. It can get pretty bleak out there for real. However, the Doomer’s Wager also relies on what turns out to be some pretty sloppy reasoning.

***Sorry if this is how you find out – I found out by seeing a George Carlin meme and being inspired to apply the logic of Pascal’s Wager to doomerism, and then finding that there is an alternative to the Doomer’s Wager that is actually more in line with our Nature, and as I’m about to argue, our Core Beliefs as well. Life’s funny that way, but that’s why we Love it, right?***

Anyway, the shift of perspective of what the Big Bad (the outcome with negative infinity happiness points) is and why also changes what a manageable amount of unhappiness is and exposes some sloppy reasoning in the Negative Happiness Calculus as well. (I bet you can’t say that three times fast and still retain any illusions that you are not in fact a nerd).

First off, it’s pure “Ends” thinking – looking at how things will end up and then basing decisions purely on the best “ending”. That’s fine for sports gambling, but terrible for making decisions about Life. But you already know that, don’t you? There are no true endings in an interconnected world – all the stories bleed together.

So let’s break this down a bit further. The Doomer’s Wager:

• Assumes the End Result is the only (or even just the most) important consideration. This should be enough right there to toss it imho.
• Assumes “Breaking Points” are some some kind of objects that can be dodged. I don’t know, I’m not sure how to put this, but I think that framing Breaking Points as things that happen to us, or come to us, rather than as personal Events that are themselves parts of larger Events is misleading. I think that slight shift in framing is significant though, especially for how we view the long term.
• And/or assumes that “Breaking Points” are like some kind of Health Meter that once it’s depleted your mind goes “GAME OVER”. But this quantifies things like trauma, joy, and mental resilience in kinda weird ways. Idk, I can see why people would frame mental well-being like this, but it just doesn’t sit right with me.

I think that’s enough to make my point, I don’t really want to dwell on the framing that I think is a trap, I want to talk about the framing that I find far more useful and helpful – because that’s the whole point of all of This, isn’t it? To Help each other any way we can. Well, I ain’t got much, but I do have “Chaotic Swings Of Happiness Points” to try and brighten your Future with. lol but I did say I ain’t got much.

Going out with grace & fury:
Time for life’s little bitches to enter the chat

Okay, time for some tough love, Doomer style. You’ve let the people who destroyed the World replace some of your Thought Potatoes with dirt clods and all you’ve done about it is to say, “Aw well, I guess I eat dirt clods now.” That’s bullshit. That ain’t you – you’ve been throwing faux-potato dirt clods back at the people who broke the World well before you had any political awareness for no other reason than how dare they try to rob you of your precious Thought Potatoes!

I’m not even kidding. You would never have started down the journey to The Big Picture unless you’re the type of person who has always said “Fuck That!” loud enough for the other kids to hear whenever anyone told you not only what but how you are supposed to think about something.

So why start eating dirt clods now about the biggest most important Thought Potato of your life? It’s a bitter taste, dirt clod – I know because I spent a couple few years chewing on some, too. It wasn’t awesome. The bastards are using potatoes against us now, too, and that is unforgivable!

Chaotic swings of happiness points:
riding your clinamen Through pox & abyss

It’s time to swerve, baby! But that’s all good, because you were built for chaotic swings – you’re one of Life’s Little Bitches, after all. And what is Life if not infinite rhythms woven together to make new rhythms that are then woven together to make new rhythms, and on and on in such varieties that none of us can even come close to wrapping our minds around it.

Remember the whole thing about the Infinite as the thing that inspires Awe in you, and Religion is a common way that people do this relationship. The way that you and I express our relationship to the Infinite though, is that we Love Life – and now that Life As We Know It (not just in the “Human” Life as we know it sense, but in the “Life” Life as we know it sense) is under serious threat (to put it mildly), how is your entire being not consumed with the thought “Nobody hurts my friends, and nobody and I mean fucking NOBODY fucks with Life!” and all of your effort not be directed by the single thought, “Not if I have anything to say about it!”?

That’s you. That’s who you are, it’s your Nature. Up until now you have been fighting against your Nature, but you’re used to that because up until recently you had to conceal so much of how you really feel about the “normal” functioning of Society in order to maintain your own sanity. But that’s a strategy for how to navigate a shitty but generally stable Society – and honestly it was probably the best strategy for surviving the past few decades in a Society that was only in the process of destroying itself and the World around it.

But now instead of breaking it is broken and at long last everyone else admits it now, too. You no longer need to pretend that any of it is “normal” – so stop allowing yourself to do so behind your own back. No, but seriously: all of the reasons for you not to pursue any one of your Passion Projects belong to The Society That Broke The World, so leave them there.

Yes, now may be the time of monsters, but there’s more than enough room for a horde of Life’s Little Bitches to help Life run amok in the most amokiest ways possible. That’s your nature. Leave the literal fighting to others that are better suited for it, there are all kinds of people on the side of Life, and the kind of person that you are is at their best in Projects that nurture, celebrate, and proliferate Life, whatever form that takes (honestly, your interests are varied, but the Projects you gravitate toward always have that in common, I’d definitely take the wager that this is true about you, if you really are a Doomer anyway).

To sum it all up: yes, a lot of really bad shit is on the horizon – man-made horrors beyond your comprehension and all that – but who says that’s the only Story of the Apocalypse? Fuck that! You sing the Song of Life – hey, you never shut the fuck about it before, so why would you now when the World needs to hear it the most?

If this truly is the End of Life As We Know It, then we are gonna sing the Song of Life with such Grace & Fury that the echoes still ripple through the World long after the years of Crises have been resolved for good or ill. We have nothing to lose but the Chasms of Loss we’ve allowed to come between us and our Love for Life – and I don’t know about anyone else, but I am so fucking over Chasms of Loss it ain’t even funny.

One last thing: always remember that none of us can do any of this alone. The biggest problem with the Doomer’s Wager is that it treats us like isolated individuals with our own Personal Health Bars that we have to protect from getting depleted all by our lonesomes. That shit belongs to The Society That Broke The World, not to one of Life’s Little Bitches.

We can persevere even when I can’t. And likewise: we can persevere even when you can’t. That’s how we survive – we be there for each other when it all gets too much, allow each other to Feel those lows without going too low, but also tending to each others Joys and Triumphs. We just need to be Pack for each other; you know – start living how Humans are supposed to Live – as a way to say “Fuck Fate!”, because tbh Fate deserves it at this point, wouldn’t you say?