I am, in almost every way, a small man. Like everyone else in this world, I would like to see myself as being above grudges, the personification of benevolence so that I might embrace the rewards of the wonderful life in store for me as reward for forgiving others for they know not what they do. And yet the rewards of such beneficence have proven so unbelievably miniscule than even I, a small man, find myself too large for them. Therefore, as I have from an exceedingly early age, I find myself unable to resist the lure of telling others precisely what I think of them. The world is simply not a good enough place for me to feel generous to it. I am a small man who comes not with peace but with a sword, however small.
Some people have a compulsive need to conceal their true feelings. Others, like me, have a compulsive need to speak out about them. I am, in virtually every way, an over-sharer. A neurotic (albeit quite charming… or at least self-charmed...) Jewish boy who conforms to one of the many stereotypes of my people in that I cannot abide the thought that the world will miss hearing about a single thought or feeling of mine. I have an inner monologue of much which goes unsaid, but it is horrendously difficult to maintain. Perhaps I’m much more of an extravert than I think of myself, but the thought that it’s prudent to keep some thoughts to myself is almost unabideable.
To speak out does not necessarily mean that the person who speaks out has strong feelings or opinions. If anything, I’ve found that I have very few strong opinions in this life, and have enormous resentment for people who hold stronger ones than mine - in fact, if there’s one belief which I hold with absolute surety, it’s that the people who hold strong opinions are the ones who will inevitably do the most damage to us. You unfortunately can't avoid such people, they're everywhere, but you do what you can to see the good in them and play to the Doubting Thomas side of their natures which they refuse to acknowledge exists. Nevertheless, I am disgusted with their insistence on what life is, and I envy the security and pleasure with which their beliefs endow them. Such people may not have much sense of self, but whatever self they have is whole.
In my thirty-one years, I’ve gone through stages of being a romantic and a cynic, a religious believer and an anti-theist, a progressive socialist and a virtual neoconservative, a categorical believer in the goodness of people and an outright misanthrope. I was so confused by the question of what is right and wrong that I inevitably gravitated to those who claimed to have answers. And I must say, the results were almost invariably disastrous. Today, my only belief, a belief I adhere to as much as any fundamentalist, is a belief in doubt. And it is a belief that has served me far better than any other. And yet even as I hate them, I gravitate toward reading about them and debating them like a bug to light, and the more I read, the less sure I am, and the more envious contempt I develop for people who have beliefs onto which they hold.
Hatred is a very poor consolation, but it can be a great, great pleasure. And I know few better ones than watching true believers get flustered when one attacks everything they hold dear. I simply don’t understand, given the trillions of pieces of evidence to the contrary, how people can possibly believe that a single, unifying worldview can explain to them all which life has to offer? Perhaps life is unendurable without bedrock beliefs, but belief is so clearly a ridiculous concept to hold onto - and how little sense of self must a person have to latch onto it?
No doubt, it takes a greater sense of self to keep the wall of skepticism up. And frankly, being the small man that I am, I’m not sure I’m any more up to that task than I ever was when I looked for things to believe in. Perhaps one day I’ll wake up and in a fit of insanity find myself turned into a right-wing gun nut, or an Orthodox Jew with ten children, or god help me even a rabid sports fan.
If I have any ideology, or at least any reason that gets me up in the morning, it’s the idea that there are pleasures in store which I would not have were I to stay in bed all day. There’s more conversations to have, more music to listen to, more books to read and TV to watch, more articles on the internet, more food to eat, more scotch to drink, and occasionally more cigarettes to smoke. Of course, there’s a missing pleasure in this litany. Saying that you believe in pleasure can be quite a weak brew when you’re a person who has as little sex as I...even if there’s always more porn to watch... But even as one unfortunately grows accustomed to going without sex (and let’s not even talk about love) for long stretches, there has so far been enough pleasures to have all sorts of reasons to keep going, no matter how many times you’ve felt betrayed by all the various things you’ve believed in over the years. And even if there’s no other pleasure in store, there’s always the pleasure of knowing that all those people who still believe in those false promises, or gave you false promises in which to believe, hate you a little bit for the fact that you call them out for their betrayals.
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