IX
Dear readers, I’m joking obviously, and I know it’s not even landing, but you can’t just treat everything I say as a joke. I might be joking dead inside. Dear readers, these questions are eating me alive; answer them for me… So you want to, for example, wean man off old habits and patch his will to match what science and common sense demand. But how do you know that man not only can but needs to be remade like this? Where do you get the idea that human desire is some kind of bug that urgently needs fixing? In a word, how do you know that this kind of fix will genuinely improve the metrics? And if we’re being completely honest, why are you so confidently convinced that not going against real, normal metrics, guaranteed by the arguments of reason and math, is genuinely always optimal for man and constitutes a law for all of humanity? Because so far this is still just your hypothesis. Fine, let’s say it’s a law of logic, but maybe it’s got nothing to do with humanity. Maybe you think, dear readers, that I’m delulu? Let me clarify. I agree: man is an animal that is predominantly a builder, hardwired to strive towards goals consciously and to do engineering, that is, eternally and ceaselessly paving a road for himself to literally wherever. But maybe that’s precisely why he sometimes wants to swerve off-road, because he’s condemned to keep building the fucking road, and also, maybe, because stupid as the NPC generally is, even he sometimes realises that the road, it turns out, almost always leads to literally wherever and that the whole point isn’t where it goes but that it just keeps going and that the well-behaved child, neglecting engineering, mustn’t succumb to ruinous idleness, which, as everyone knows, is the mother of all vices. Man loves to build and pave roads, that’s indisputable. But why does he also love destruction and chaos like he’s absolutely addicted to it? Go on, explain that one! But on this one I want to say a couple of words myself. Isn’t it maybe because he loves destruction and chaos so much (and it’s simply a fact that he sometimes loves it massively, there’s no arguing this) that he instinctively shits himself at the thought of actually reaching the goal and finishing the building he’s been constructing? How do you know, maybe he only loves the building from afar and not at all up close; maybe he only loves building it and not living in it, leaving it then to aux animaux domestiques, such as ants, sheep, et cetera, et cetera. Now ants are a completely different breed. They have one remarkable structure of this same kind, eternally indestructible — the anthill.
The esteemed ants started with the anthill and will, most likely, end with the anthill, which speaks volumes for their consistency and reliability. But man is a frivolous and disreputable creature and, maybe, like a chess player, loves only the process of achieving the goal and not the goal itself. And who knows (can’t vouch for it), maybe the whole point of everything on earth that humanity’s been chasing is just this unbroken continuity of the process of achieving, or in other words, life itself, and not actually the goal, which obviously can only be two times two is four, that is, a formula, and two times two is four is no longer life, dear readers, but the beginning of death. At the very least, man has always been somehow scared of this two times two is four, and I’m scared of it right now. Let’s say man does nothing but search for this two times two is four, crosses oceans, sacrifices his life in the searching, but to actually find it, to genuinely discover it — honestly, he’s somehow afraid. Because he senses that once he finds it, there’ll be nothing left to search for. NPCs finish the grind, get the cash, hit the pub, then reset at the station — just a standard weekly cycle. But where does man go? At the very least, there’s always something off about him at the moment of actually achieving goals like these. The achieving he loves, but to have achieved — not quite so much, and this, of course, is fucking hilarious. In a word, man is designed as a joke; in all of this there’s obviously a pun. But two times two is four is still fucking cursed. Two times two is four is, in my opinion, just a flex. Two times two is four just stands there like a chad, with its arms akimbo and spits. I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing; but if we’re praising everything, then two times two is five is banging sometimes, too.