The Burden of Truth: On Choice, Illusion, and the Things We Call Good ( Part 1 )

Why do humans admire truth so much? Why do we think discovering truth is inherently good? What desire inside us makes us worship truth?

Why is it our inherent belief that discovering the truth is the ultimate good? What need inside us makes us believe that only the truth will set us free? How can we not consider the possibility that the illusion exists to ensure our survival?

The truth will halt the journey of the immigrant, the voyager will stop paddling if he knows there is no land in his direction.

So how do we label the truth as mighty? Why must we know the truth when it is the very thing that can reduce our will and perseverance?

Why must the source of purity , must also be pure?

Why must we the common conception that reality is divided into absolute opposites ?

God and nature are absolutes but there cannot be one without the other.

Taking pride in questioning everything, however missing the question of all questions, why are we questioning in the first place?

Avoiding the radical does not eliminate its existence.

Take for instance the example of charity, the charitable one is automatically charachterized as good, but what if that need (to be charitable) generates from a form of selfishness, concealed to human perception? such as feeling good about oneself, gaining respect or some form of means of negotiation with the higher power? Does that disqualify them from the threshold of goodness?

No, yes or I don’t know ?but the distinction is much more complicated than that.

Every perspective is subjective, even morality is a perspective, even philosophy is a perspective, even logic is superficial. You have no view, if you are no where.

Then on what basis must one qualify the distinction between good and evil ?

And why must we dig the truth ?

We survive on the illusion that tomorrow will be better, justice prevails, a higher power exists and sees all. So why do we fuel the need to the very impulse that will shatter the very basis of our survival?

Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago :

Whatever you choose , you’ll regret it – because the problem isn’t in your choices , its in romanticizing a life you haven’t lived . One always finds an untraveled path alluring and mysterious. That’s why the issue isn’t making the right choices, its choosing and deciding which regret you’ll live with .

These lines express a tension that has occupied philosophers, psychologists, and novelists for centuries: our suffering often comes less from what we choose than from our inability to stop imagining the lives we did not choose.

This is deliberately paradoxical. At first glance it sounds pessimistic, almost radically skeptic, but it is describing a feature of human consciousness rather than claiming that every decision is objectively bad.

Every decision is simultaneously an act of creation and an act of destruction. By choosing one future, you eliminate countless others. If you marry one person, you lose the possibility of every other relationship. If you become a doctor, you bury the artist you might have become. Choice is inseparable from loss.

Humans don't simply experience what is; we experience what could have been. That capacity creates regret.

It is stupid to imply your choices don’t matter, but essential to understand that one choice will eliminate the possibility of all others. There is no good or evil in what you command, only perspective.

The battle is not between what you are and what you want to be, the battle is between acceptance of who you are and the “What if’s” that acquire a corner of your mind.

The path we walk reveals every crack, while the one we miss reveals mystery.

For clarity, lets take the example of mountains. They seem beautiful afar, but when we climb them, they give us pain, exhaustion and even blisters.

Hence the theory of “it and that” :

… which claims that no problem is "it" and no solution is "that".

Let me demonstrate is through an exemplum.

Let us say you have a problem, you can either study abroad, but lose the luxury of spending time with your loved ones and being in your comfort zone. Or you can choose a career path in your native town but lose the opportunity to see the world, experience different cultures, learn things that are not present in your environment, and even earn more than what your current education and prospects are offering.

So, is there any solution present to begin with? or it is an illusion, that shatters only after a few steps taken on it?

No path is the right path. No choice is the right choice. No person is the right person. There is no right and wrong, no Good and evil. There is only perspective and choice.

We choose what resonates with our values and what serves our instincts.

Now here is where the existential crisis will peak, where you being to understand that there is no “It” and no “that” to follow. Every "that" is linked to every "it" and the positive forces of the “ that” negate the negative forces of the “it” . Leaving behind a void. Going in a circle will have you had covered a certain distance, meaning your struggle is ineluctable, but there is no proof that there has been any displacement or more importantly, growth.

Every commitment excludes alternative; therefore every commitment contains grief.

So, when we choose, when we commit, we do not select a regret free life, we place our bets on the ones we think we can bear.  

-Mutaal Zaheer

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