Secrets

I don't know about you but every time I meet a new person I think to myself: what is their secret? And I don't mean that they are secretly dating Kyra Nightly or that they secretly want to be a lounge singer. Not that kind of secret.

I think to myself: what is this person doing alone in their house when nobody is looking. That's what I'm thinking in general. But in particular, it is really pretty bad. It is bad and as usual I don't blame myself for thinking these things, they are real.

What I've realized recently about humans is the extent of their secret life. It is a life of aberrant behaviors that are produced by a secret world of ideas. So as a pretend philosopher I'm usually thinking about these ideas even if I don't care that much about the person.

What's horrifying is that I'm right. Maybe not right every time about the exact thing, but right about the secret world. Human thoughts are and perhaps always have been so loosely built on what we might call "the way of ideas (see below)" that in lieu of a philosophy of the world, they arbitrarily construct a philosophy of fantasy. In their fundamental beliefs exist these constructs: that mass prayer works, that we can read minds, that there is one God who created everything and is perfect, that pro-choice humans are out to murder babies, that American founding fathers were Christian, and on and on.

Why am I saying this? Because this world of ideas (not way of ideas) leads to the irrational behaviors and the inability to see them as irrational. This is why everyone is out there secretly strangling sex partners, dressing up as the opposite gender, injecting chemicals to attain instant gratification, and out all night delivering food for Uber Eats.

All I'm saying is that what characterizes modern human life today is the surface show (what Freud called the superego) and the secret. The secret to which I refer is a dramatic detachment from reality and it is often a thing that brings humans to the brink of ruin. We aren't talking a failure to return library books. We're talking about the secret that defines them and which ultimately manifests as self-destruction.

Maybe you don't see this. Or maybe you separate these behaviors, as insignificant, from personal philosophy and don't care what they do in their spare time. And that's fine. I'm not judging. What I am saying is that I'm afraid to get to know anyone because when I open the closet door a bone is going to fly out and hit me in the forehead. And I'm too old for that shit.

* The "way of ideas" is the empiricist philosophy that persists and claims that mind and world are separate to the extent that all a mind can know is ideas. All a person can rightly know is there own "ideas" about things, not the things themselves.