Unaccountably I woke an hour before the alarm. Better to get an early start on a Friday than to insist upon sleep, when already awake. So with ample time at Starbucks, I read a three page commentary that I found on the internet which treats Truth and Lies Beyond Morality. I regret that I didn’t note the source, maybe from Medium, or another such chat service. Truth and Lies Beyond Morality is an essay penned by Nietzsche right after he finished writing his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. I am sure that Nietzsche desired a better focus on the role of language within the moral universe of human beings. One writes to achieve more clarity… That is my motivation.

I offer you a quotation from the unattributed commentary:

Man prefers the indifference
to his ignorance,
he likes to look at pretty pictures
and never tries to get a deeper understanding.

He will
forever buy
illusions for truths.

Since I also am a member of the homo sapiens species this would apply in my case as well. Who of us does not enjoy fading away into an indifferent, dreamlike stupor viewing cat videos, or absurd falls on the Fail Army TV channel, or (confession) vintage video clips of track competition when drag racing was in its heyday…

In our time, are we not all “guilty as charged”? A generous segment of daily life is lived online. The mesmerizing feature of a LCD screen are the streaming images. We prefer to be ceaselessly  entertained by pretty pictures, than to allow our ignorance to serve as background, motivation to seek a deeper understanding. I never think about my ignorance, am loathe to admit ignorance about anything. We have a funnel into our heads, preferring someone else’s dancing distraction.

A concluding statement such as this one is expressed by Nietzsche in his writings over and over in many forms. We are quite willing to pay for being mystified, fooled, deceived, misled, – betting that somehow we will avoid harm, a consequence of damage entailed in the deal we have struck. Who doesn’t desire ‘something for nothing’, a seductive and harmless lie?

Language is the sole tool available as the basic medium of discourse. Words, are symbols, stand-ins for reality. Metaphors are agreed upon representations, those “good enough approximations” of reality. Not exactly the truth, or to say it bluntly – lies. Still to live with others, in a state of cooperation, avoiding every-man (woman)-for-himself conflict, agreement is sine qua non for civilization. We agree to traffic in less than “the truth”… Because there is no better option.

So, we’d rather pay to entertain our brains out than to probe more deeply into the truth of what we are all about. Should we probe more deeply, – we risk discomfort and disagreement.

Amusing oneself until well, – one is intellectually and emotionally dead. Townspeople continue to move around, standing in line with me in the Jewel checkout line, or taping out the order for a Lavender Crème Frappuccino, in hand an iphone screen, – spiritually we are “the walking dead.”

Cheer! There is a tune for a Friday. This one by INXS is perfect: Mystify.  Wembley Stadium 1991.