As I've gotten deeper into the course of study I've set out for myself, I've increasingly questioned things I've taken for granted for years. It's a good feeling. But the more I question, the more lines of inquiry open up before me, and it gets overwhelming.

To ground myself, I need to start somewhere.

PART I

"The philosopher treats a question; like an illness." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations

"There are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the 'equality of man,' the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men ... Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness––even for the sake of our virtue––and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particulate does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

1. Life does not justify itself.

2. What makes life worth living is to live beautifully.

3. A beautiful life can take many forms, but life is not intrinsically beautiful.

4. Ugly life: Life ruled by failure, fear, ressentiment, bad conscience, pettiness, ill-will, and small-mindedness. Why? Because they are diseases.

5. Disease is necessary. Good health can only be appreciated after experiencing bad health. Our capacity for pleasure is proportional to our capacity for pain––likewise for hope/despair, meaning/meaninglessness, fulfillment/depression.

6. Beauty always contains ugliness within it.

7. The question is how to balance the two, how to make the world more beautiful while retaining its necessary ugliness.

8. Terminal diseases thwart the project. The greatest ills of humanity——war, famine, oppression——are not necessary and even risk ending the whole endeavor. While disease might be necessary, cancer isn't.

9. To aspire to enact heaven on earth is a category error. Heaven is in heaven, and we are on earth. POSIWID––the purpose of being on earth is to be on earth.

10. Many strive for the elimination of violence. They make the same mistake as the salesman in Le Petit Prince who wants to eliminate thirst. The task is not to eliminate thirst, but to satiate it, knowing fully that it will return.

11. What makes life worth living is believing there exist things worth dying for. That is, that such a death is beautiful.

12. The state must be greater than its citizens. The species must be greater than its members.

13. Beauty is greater than ugliness.

14. The most important healths and diseases are those borne by the individual. The state's role is to provide the space for each citizen to live their own life fully, to experience its fully range of health and disease.

15. I say this out of respect to the individual. There is no greater subject.

16. I should part with my health more readily than I will ever part with my disease.

17. Ideological dogmatism requires the (often self-imposed) subjugation of the individual. Dogmatists are stunted people, and a dogmatic politics leads to a worse society.

18. There is something uniquely and irreducibly beautiful about being human. Perhaps it could exist in other forms of life, but it certainly exists in humans. I am a human, and this is what I know and understand––anything else I don’t understand, and I pass over it in silence.

19. Ugly life is incoherent. Like the disease that kills itself the moment it kills its host, it's self-negating, self-invalidating, a fallacy.

"That's a draw!" - Norm Macdonald

19. Beauty is necessarily unknowable. This is the mistake of science and utilitarianism—failing to recognize that there are multiple healths.

20. The virus might not see itself as ugly. I don't care.

21. Someone else might see humanity as a virus. I do not.

"Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type." - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 109

PART II

22. I'm a materialist.

23. Materially, there is no free will. Humans are, at our core, complex algorithms, and any given input will produce a given output. The resolution of our image of this process is low enough that, at a certain level of complexity, there appears an emergent phenomenon we call free will. But when we look with higher resolution at less complex creatures, no such property exists. A single-celled organism is deterministic, and we can predict exactly how it will turn inputs into outputs, a worm will always turn away from excessive heat, a healthy baby cries when its born.

24. The fact that free will is an illusion does not make it any less important a principle. All of the truest things are paradoxes and contradictions and illusions. There is no God and that does not make Him any less real.

25. You begin in error if you begin by thinking you are special. Everyone is more like everyone else than they are different. In all the most important ways, everyone is normal.

26. One problem with society is that important decisions are made by people who think they’re special, that they’re not like normal people. Even the most well-intentioned decision-maker begins to think that they are different than all non-deciders, and they look down on them because of this difference. Thinking they’re special, they can no longer understand what is best for normal people.

27. Rights are imaginary and bad. You are entitled to nothing. Rights make people think they are special.

28. Rights can be a helpful rhetorical tool, tho.

29. Society is defined by the ways people use their time. At any given moment, there are a certain amount of people alive on the world, with a certain capacity to do things. The question is how we distribute that capacity.

30. The more choice people have in how they use their time, the better.

31. People will often choose to use their time poorly. There is no getting around this.

32. Every invention that increases societal efficiency is good. The steam engine is good. The internet is good. Amazon is good. Walmart is good. Automation is good. All have been deployed poorly, but these inventions allow us on net more choice over our collective future. It's just a few people have monopolized that choice.

PART III

33. GO BIG OR GO HOME

34. The most powerful ideas are simple. If an idea cannot be expressed simply, it rarely catches on. Complicated truths never change the world.

35. The world needs the abject.

I'll likely keep expanding this in the future, but these are some starting points.