Published 2011-01-25T21:14:00Z”/>
Earl Parsons
The universe is random and indifferent to suffering, but here’s the good news – we’re all going to die, no matter what happens, so we can stop lying to ourselves about it.
Americans spend millions of dollars every year listening to people who would tell them otherwise. Snake oil salesmen pat them on the head like children and tell them everything’s going to be all right. They say they have the secret to the universe.
The sheep buy every one of their books and attend every seminar, following each word like gospel. Their “secret of the universe” is usually some variety of self-confidence. If you believe in yourself, they say, the universe will open its doors to you and all form of success and riches will come your way.
That all sounds nice, but here’s the truth – the universe does not revolve around you.
Contrary to what your mother and your grade teachers may have told you, you are not special, and I’m not special either. We share the same timeless desires. If there is such a thing as God or fate, it’s not going stop on a dime for one guy because he likes himself.
The self-esteem movement is a scourge, poisoning the notions of personal responsibility that helped build this wonderfully dysfunctional country. Feeling good about yourself is key to projecting a positive public image, but success and failure is dependent on your actions and the perception of those actions by the people around you.
So if your dream is to make the Hitler mustache fashionable again, people probably won’t listen to you, no matter how hard you work or how much you believe in your dream. Besides, Michael Jordan already tried it in a Hanes commercial and failed miserably.
Self-help documentaries like “The Secret” and “What wthe Bleep Do We Know!?” use pseudoscience and psychospiritual nonsense to convince people that perception is reality. Under their line of reasoning, the only cause of suffering is the belief in suffering.
There are six billion members of our species on this planet, and most of them are mired in the depths of uncontrollable poverty. If “The Secret” were true, then world peace could be achieved with posters of dangling kittens saying, “hang in there, champ.”
Unfortunately, suffering is a certainty of life. You’ll probably achieve most of your goals if you try hard enough, but you will inevitably be disappointed at one point or another. If everybody got what they wanted all the time, there would be no janitors or cashiers and half of all marriages wouldn’t end in divorce.
In the end, the universe doesn’t care about you. It would be here if you never existed, and it will be here long after you die. But it doesn’t care about me, either, or anyone else, for that matter.
At least the universe is fair.
Earl Parsons can be reached at
