Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios, three hack philosophers from ancient Greece, find themselves in the year 2019. After catching up with the following millennia of philosophy, they find themselves in a state of deep confusion...

Emfýlios: The answer seems clear in this accursed age: Believe nothing, believe not even the seemingly obvious truth.

Kítrinos: Then are we not following the metanarrative of skepticism?

Emfýlios: Perhaps... but we will be the least metanarrative followers among men, and thus as wise as one can be.

Kítrinos: Can we even have ethics beyond the pleasure principle? Utilitarianism is flawed because it just projects what you thinks is good onto everyone we can cover basic needs, but desire is complex... so all we can do is let people do what they want...equally.

Ton: Well if you choose a different set of ethics you are projecting that set  onto people, based on you thinking that those ethics is correct.Utilitarianism, in practice, will never be 100% correct, but I think it's already by far the most useful and accurate ethical theory that the modern man has come up with.

Kítrinos: But how would you apply utilitarianism to a masochist?

Ton: I don't know, this question is, perhaps, unanswerable.

Emfýlios: Negative Utilitarianism, however, can answer this question just fine: You should probably not torture the masochist if he no longer wants to be tortured.

Kítrinos: We need to deconstruct the pleasure/pain dichotomy...

Ton: At this point, we don't know what ethics really are. Or if it's anything at all!

Emfýlios: ETHICS ARE A METANARRATIVE.

Kítrinos: Your mother is a metanarrative! And she sodomizes goats.

Ton: Well, that's the one thing we know that ethics are...

Kítrinos: Can there be unknown unknowns if I know I don't know everything?

Everyone:...

Ton: Perhaps... You don't know the scope and significance of the unknown unknowns? Having read Thomas Ligotti, I must say I agree completely that human psychology directly and contradicts any sort of completely accurate self-awareness or perception.
Emfýlios: Why, of course! We specifically evolved to not be accurately self-aware. The same we evolved to breed and nothing else, which is to say, you did not evolve to be happy after you procreate, only to think that the act of procreation will bring you happiness.
Kítrinos: Nature is our stepping stone. Well, that and the language that precedes us.
Emfýlios: Nature itself must be destroyed if we are to solve this problem. Someone grab a torch, I'm going to do it!
Kítrinos: Nature is... an anchoring? In the Zapffian sense? From which you can later detach and reattach to something else. But you won't get anywhere without taking the first step.
Ton: Nicely put about evolution Emfýlios, but I must ask, what is being "accurately self-aware". Would being accurately self-aware just be not being aware at all?
Emfýlios: Good question, bad answer... What would it be?
Ton: I mean, evolution constructed all meaning for us, or so say many people, but I see this as pure delusion, perhaps even a deliberate fabrication. I don't think there's any awareness, or that hypothetical awareness would be completely empty, motionless and unchanging, nihilistic, for anything else would be fabricated meaning.
Kítrinos: And those meanings are anchorings.
Emfýlios: Perhaps accurately self-awareness is nothing but an acute awareness of oneself without the four remedies for life [Zapffe] that give "meaning" to our lives.
Ton: I guess that's an accurate, but certainly it entails severe despair?
Kítrinos: Rather, it's a point from where you anchor everything else, like an axiom.

The three philosophers are stuck in a state of aporia.

Rhetoric and Crucifixation (Tragic Pyrrhonism Pt.1)

Let us imagine a narrative, any narrative, whether that be communism, Nazism, nationalism of any kind, any political stance, any narrative whatsoever, regardless of its truth and falsifiability.
Let us imagine a cross, it's bloody timber and the holes caused by the nailing...

I know an individual, who goes by ze/zir pronouns. Ze is a communist (a Marxist-Leninist, if I am not mistaken), anti-family, anti-childhood, anti-age of consent, anti-gender and so on. While this person is real, it is hard to not think of zir as being sort of emblematic of the so-called "internet leftist".

Let's call this narrative, or this amalgamation of narratives, cross #1.

Before this, ze was a white nationalist.

Let's call this second narrative cross #2.

We do not control our own beliefs. Because of the way time works, we never "are", rather, we are always becoming. So we are always crushed between who we were (a white nationalist) and who we are becoming (a communist). When we reflect upon who we have become, we will see a multitude of people (a multitude of crosses...): Our "younger self" as effectively died, as will our "young adult self" and our "adult self", until our "old self" suffers a more literal death.

Think about the suffering this can cause. Any look at the average white nationalist will notice that these people are unhappy, constantly complaining about this and that, of the degeneracy of the world, of the multitude of imaginary conspiracies that they need to anchor themselves to in order to not fall in the black hole of despair.

Likewise, changing ("dying") from a white nationalist to a communist can cause quite a lot of suffering as well: One has to completely reinvent oneself, to admit their wrongness completely, to see what they thought of as truth as being repulsive. Perhaps this would be nothing if we were completely rational creatures, but we are not: We associate what we think is the truth (narratives) with our own identities. To change this radically is to effectively commit metaphysical suicide.

And now communism causes them the same sufferings.

I hope the message is clear: We do not carry our cross. Instead we are crucified on our own narratives, and when we think we have "figured it out", when we change narratives radically, we merely change crosses, we go from Cross #1 to Cross #2, but we are crucified on our own rhetoric all the same and thus suffer all the same.

We are either this way, or we are not at all...