Cursed are the Forgetful

A modest mnemonic proposal

Blessed are the forgetful, says Zarathustra.

Bullshit.

…

I bet you forgot how bad suffering is.

You’ve suffered before. Maybe recently. But unless you are suffering right now, maybe you know what I’m talking about. It’s all too easy to forget. And who would want to remember?

Sure, you remember that suffering is bad. But do you remember just how bad it is?

While you’re in the thick of it, you do. But now you’re sitting there well-fed, comforts all around in your climate-controlled den, with a little voice in your head reminding you that people like and respect you—and it escapes you.

Remembrance of Things Bad

To know how bad suffering is requires experiencing it (duh). But like everything, use-it-or-lose-it applies. If you haven’t experienced it in a while, you may just never think about how bad suffering is.

Which, if you consider yourself at all concerned about morality, is nuts—because suffering is the single worst thing ever.

And—open your eyes—it’s abound.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt

Dr Samuel Johnson

It’s pretty hard to transport yourself from your current experience to any other one. You have to close your eyes and focus on it deeply, and even then it only kinda works.

Maybe you’ve tried this before. But I bet you chose to relive, or fantasize about, the experience of impressing your crush with a guitar solo or a winning goal. Bet you didn’t try to simulate the experience of appendicitis.

As I type these words, about 100 million men are making love to their pillows and couches, trying to “recall” the experience of sexual intercourse with a real woman. There’s a giant industry for fantasy pleasure. There’s basically no market for fantasy suffering—horror films and BDSM obviously don’t count.

And we’re talking about your own experiences, your own suffering! If you can’t recall that and appreciate how bad it was/is, how are you going to appreciate how bad others’ suffering is?

In other words, if you can’t empathize with your own self—or your traveling “personites”—how are you gonna empathize with beetles like me?

We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others

François de la Rochefoucauld

It’s not merely that we don’t tend to reflect on the suffering of others much. That’s part of it, of course, but I think we also literally forget how bad their suffering is. So that, even when we do think about the horrors of the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, factory farming, and the killing fields of wild, we don’t come close to appreciating the moral catastrophes they are.

Which is nuts and criminal but all too predictable.

The Forgetful Animal

Nietzsche links forgetfulness to health and strength, tying memory to ressentiment and sickness of the soul. Strong, noble types forget—they don’t dwell on the past. This enables swift, decisive action. Weak types remember. They obsess over past errors, which shackles them.

Nietzsche thinks we are naturally forgetful beings but modern Christian morality has corrupted us, institutionalizing memory in the form of guilt and self-hatred.

EvoPsych might agree that we are naturally forgetful. Well, not too forgetful—just the right amount of forgetful. Nature punishes those who forget what they should remember. But just as harshly, it punishes those who remember what they should forget.

Adapt or die often means forget or die. If you want to survive and reproduce, you’ve got to remember worked and what didn’t, but you can’t remember everything. It’s a waste of time and energy—and it can be quite demotivating.

Nature created pain, of course, as a mnemonic device to remind organisms to avoid certain things. But it had to make sure that this device didn’t go too far—and remind organisms to kill themselves! If pain were too strong, too intolerable, it would have made everyone agoraphobic.

I don’t know exactly how Nature pulled it off, but it seems to have designed pain in such a way that we fear the causes of pain more than pain itself. Pain trains us to avoid pointy objects, extreme temperatures, and social humiliation. And we remember to steer clear of these without fail.

But pain itself? And suffering? If we truly remembered how awful this stuff was, we’d probably be way more risk averse. Why bother leaving the den if you know pain awaits? Hell, why move at all? And why bother with life itself?

Nature didn’t want us to think about these tradeoffs. Pain had to warn, not paralyze.

One way to accomplish this would be to make pain not so bad. But this would have weakened the signal—and quickly ruined our genes’ prospects. Also, some pain is minor, but the pain I’m really interested here—which quickly turns to suffering—is not at all minor. It’s major bad. Try burning yourself or getting stabbed. Try getting no sleep for 6 days. Try being lonely for a decade. So there goes that theory.

Here’s a better theory: Nature just decided to make it more painful to be risk-averse and worry about pain all the time. Hunkering down in the den away from predators and the elements may sound nice and cozy, but it’s not if you’re starving. It’s not if you have no friends. It’s not if you have no access to high-speed internet porn.

So Nature punished us not only if we went near dangerous stuff. It also punished us if we tried, Schopenhauer-style, to even for one moment “give up the fight”—stop being a marionette of the World Will and take a break from the perverse game of life.

Not in the mood to hunt down your dinner? Bam! Hunger pangs. Pause to contemplate the beauty of the hills? Bam! A predator bites your neck. Try to off yourself by the overlook? Bam! Primal fucking terror.

By the overlook

Genius—and cruel.

The Romantic Animal

We don’t only forget about suffering’s badness. We also romanticize suffering. Wondering “How bad can it be?” can lead to believing “Suffering is kinda good, actually.” We’re drawn to Nietzsche’s “tragic worldview,” which not only accepts suffering (as Buddha and Jesus do?) but revels in it.

Revel in suffering! Good psychological advice? Perhaps. Idiotic philosophy? Yes.

It’s all cope, of course. We just gaslight ourselves to make the world tolerable. We definitely don’t have Stockholm syndrome!

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

Doctor Samuel Johnson

Sure, suffering can make one stronger and “build character.” But all this speaks to its instrumental value. And we probably often forget that this is very different than intrinsic value.

Laypeople of course aren’t even aware of this distinction. They just think of suffering as this package that includes everything it touches. And I suspect that even philosophers spend most of their lives thinking like laypeople. System 1 is a stubborn little bastard.

Never forget. No matter how instrumentally good suffering can be, it is very, very, very intrinsically bad.

…

I consider myself someone who strongly believes that suffering should be at the center of our moral concerns. That suffering is bad is easily my strongest evaluative belief.

And yet, even I find myself slipping.

Take depression. I’ve been there. At the time, it felt—how to put this—completely fucking unbearable.

But sometimes I just forget how bad it was. I’m not totally nostalgic for those times, but I feel the amor fati bubbling up inside of me and pushing me forward. I feel the pull of layperson idiocy too.

“It was all for the best, so it couldn’t have been so bad.”

“Weren’t there parts of it you enjoyed?”

“You don’t spend your life in constant regret—so it must have been kinda good actually!”

Yeah, sure.

A Modest Proposal

Pain, once again, is a mnemonic device. It reminds us to steer clear of danger. But Nature conspired to hide from us a crucial truth, the noblest of truths: that suffering is bad. Extremely bad. We suffer but we soon forget how bad suffering is.

What do we do when memory fails? We employ another mnemonic device, of course.

I have an idea.

In 2008, Christopher Hitchens agreed to undergo waterboarding. At the time, the U.S. government was insisting that this “enhanced interrogation” technique didn’t qualify as torture. Hitchens volunteered himself to find out.

He found out alright.

After this experience, he wrote a piece called “Believe Me, It’s Torture.” I highly recommend it.

How long did he last?

I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

Was it torture? Yep:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I was inspired by Hitchens’ stunt to make the following modest proposal. I have drafted the legislation, here is the key bit:

…Once a year, at a randomly selected time, every legal adult shall be sat gagged and blindfolded on a bench. He/she shall then be waterboarded by a trained technician for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, he/she shall be waterboarded until he/she genuinely agrees that suffering is the worst thing ever. The presiding warden shall exercise discretion to gauge his/her genuineness.

That’s it. I told you—very modest! And very simple: We wield suffering (just a dash of it) to remind people how bad suffering is.

Critics say it will increase the amount of suffering in the world. Temporarily, yes, but I assure you that early trials in prisons reveal what experts call an “enlightening” effect: Once people realize how bad suffering is, they suddenly have more sympathy for others and work hard to reduce suffering.

I wish there were an easier way to trigger such enlightenment, but experts say there isn’t. It’s the best, most cost-effective way to remind people that suffering is bad.

So who’s with me?

How Can I Make a Difference?

People often ask me how they can make a difference. Beyond supporting policies like the above, I always tell them that the best way they can make a difference is by getting “SUFFERING IS BAD” branded into the back of your hand.

You can of course waterboard yourself like Hitchens. But this is very dangerous. You really need trained professionals. Until my policy is enacted, you should start small.

I got the idea because I was seeing so many memento mori tattoos. It was really getting on my nerves, reminding me of how much I hate it when bioethicists care more about preventing death than suffering.

Now, with the widespread availability of branding irons and greater social acceptance of body art, it’s the perfect time to get involved.

Go with branding rather than inking—it’s way more memorable that way. Do it on the hand—you see it more often than if it was on your forearm or chest. And you’ve got a ton of nerves there, especially on the back of your hand:

• Touch sensitivity (fine tactile discrimination) is much higher on the front (palmar) side of the hand because it has more Meissner’s corpuscles and a denser arrangement of mechanoreceptors.

• Pain sensitivity is more closely linked to the density and type of nociceptors. The back (dorsal) side has thinner skin, less fatty padding, and closer proximity of nerves to the surface, making it more reactive to painful stimuli like needles, cuts, or burns.

Nice!

Blessed are the Remembering

We need to get this through our thick skulls. Otherwise we’ll keep making stupid, cruel decisions. We’ll accept preventable suffering because we forgot how bad it is—or because we stupidly believe it’s good.

Don’t be forgetful. The forgetful are evil—to themselves and to the world. The remembering, by contrast, are good. They have no illusions about suffering. They know how bad it is and work hard to reduce it.

Be like them. Remember suffering. Memento doloris.