“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Albert Camus once said this. I'm not usually the kind of writer who begins by quoting dead French philosophers, but sometimes I succumb to laziness and allow myself to become one big cliché. While this quote doesn't nearly do Camus' entire philosophy of absurdism justice, it provides a nice introduction to the project of this blog and my petty little opinions on the world. I suggest anyone who has not read The Myth of Sisyphus to stop reading this blog immediately and look up a PDF copy online. Also, Kierkegaard technically wrote about absurdism first, but I doubt you care.
I've read most of the great existential philosophers (although I wouldn't technically call Camus an existentialist), and they all leave me feeling pretty bummed out. I often ask myself why I even bother thumbing through Sartre (another of the great dead French philosophers) if all I'm left with is the reminder that beyond our make-believe world lies a pretty bleak reality devoid of meaning and value. That's why The Myth of Sisyphus holds a special place in my heart. Ignoring for a second the very obvious fact that we tend to like certain ideas simply because they make us feel better, Sisyphus truly is the book/essay/whatever that changes all that for me. Embrace the absurd; embrace the fact that we are all going to die and be forgotten and that none of this matters. Live your lives, frolic from time to time, while keeping in mind that none of our values do not exist a priori.
Sadly, you can't get that kind of insight from the average American. The average American is too busy drinking Starbucks and watching Fox News to pick up a book that isn't Fifty Shades of Grey or The Bible. The select few who do get the chance to go to college or think for themselves are all too often met with the total bummer that is realizing that everyone else is still talking about whether gay people should be allowed to get married or what happened to that goddamn Malaysian airplane.
Today there is nothing more useful in our national consciousness than the constant reminder that while our politicians have the IQ of a potato, our national bestsellers are about little kids who went to heaven, and there's actually an ongoing debate about whether or not children should be given vaccines, absurdity is everywhere and we should love it.
This blog is called True Absurdity. I will be writing long-winded and largely irrelevant commentary on politics, news, philosophy, music, literature, culture, hell I might even throw a sports post in there once or twice, all with the unflinching focus on pointing out the absurdity of it all, while keeping a jovial tone about how fantastic it is that our world is so ridiculous.
Welcome to True Absurdity
tl;dr- It's a blog, I rant about shit, but I like to keep it positive; read more dead French philosophers
-David Benjamin
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