The Philosophy of Paranoia

By Jack R Ernest

This collection of short stories contains seven stories that revolve around science-fiction and existential themes. In one story, the unnamed narrator who lives in solitude in the wilderness, discusses his life of seclusion. In another story, a planet called Elysium is the last refuge of mankind. The stories encompass themes of alienation, escapism and existentialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244983444

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The Philosophy of Paranoia

The Philosophy of Paranoia

Jack R Ernest

Copyright

Copyright © April 2018 by Jack R Ernest

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing:  April 2018

IBSN: 978-0-244-98344-4

On the Fringe of Being

Diary Week 57

We are all prostitutes. We are all trying to convince our peers of our worth. We all prostitute ourselves daily to achieve in this world. Every man, woman and child must sell themselves in order to make forward gains. Seldom do people accept they are prostitutes though. They live an illusion of a life. They convince themselves of their esteem. Marriage and jobs become the fulcrum of how one lives. We are all trying to market ourselves, to make ourselves more profitable. Men try to appear desirable to women and women to men. This is the great game we play with everyone. Life is not about savouring one’s existence; it is about trying to seduce the object of sexual desire.

It is not the government that has you enslaved; it is yourself. The gods of your world are the devils. They are the very people you love. It is your friends and family that keep you in shackles. They are the ones that implore you to marry and work. They are the ones that condemn you. The Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing once said that we are effectively destroying ourselves through violence masquerading as love. It is one of the great existential quotes and yet people are clueless to its meaning. The stars that sustain life often kill life too. People are programmed to have friends and be in love. They are not told that these things suck one’s soul from them. They never realize that it is our dearest that put us under such stress. If you had no friends you would be free. That you are held under their gravitational pull means you cannot dictate your calling. Love is an invisible killer.

I just want to be forgotten. Is that too much to ask. I sit here on shop street in a coffee shop dreaming of this other world where I am all alone and no one can bother me. I dream of an island where I can just be let be. The twenty first century man is not free. He is in chains. Bounded by the eyes of his peers. He cannot see or dance. He must adjust his life to those who recognise him. This is the threat I wish to liberate myself from. Life would be so much simpler without people. I just want to be ignored and left behind. I don’t want to be famous.

Intelligence is not success. Intelligence is becoming your own psychologist. We look to the world to give us answers when all the answers lie within. Far too many people beat themselves down because they expect the world to subsidize them. They wait for the world to reward them. A woman expects to be entertained by the man and the man by the woman. This is it. They yearn to be emotionally vindicated by society. They lie in wait for it to comfort them. It seems that existence itself is not enough for some people. They want more. Life is the failure in itself. The greatest gift that one has is not their looks or their genius. Their greatest strength is that they exist in this world.

There exists a disparity that must be realized, between the life we live and the life we dream of living. We have our lives planned out before we have even started to live. We will date, work, marry, start a family and retire. We will do all these things purely because we have been told by society to do them. But what happens when this good life does not materialize? What becomes of our protagonist then? So many people strategically plan their lives and their enjoyment and when the dream life fails to crystalize, they become broken.

We believe we need to be saved from the darkness of life, but seldom do we think that that darkness is ourselves. It’s always someone else. The evil in this world is done by another person. Seldom do we realize that we are the masters of our own destiny. We blame the boyfriend or girlfriend for not making us happy. We become a drug addict that is dependent on others to be content. People become our heroin and when they castigate us, we become torn internally. How we live is in actuality destroying us. We don’t realize that we are the captains of our soul and just as the heroin addict must fight his addiction, man must fight his.

I am a writer and that is all. That is what I spend my days doing. I write about different things. I reflect on how lucky I am to be alive in this universe, where existence and happiness are rarely found together. Writing is my redemption. Just like my dog, it gives me a reason to live, to get up in the morning. It enables me to have control. Most jobs in this world involve liaising with people day to day. But I cannot tolerate people at all. They are rash and unpredictable. My dog on the other hand is predictable. I feed him, I take him for walks and I let him sleep and that is all he demands of me. I, like the wild animal have learned to avoid people at all costs. When one deals with people they deal in the game of chance and I detest chance.

We get drip fed our convictions. I reject this romantic drivel that is spouted by poets and novelists alike. Relationships are promoted because the government, the illuminati need a healthy economy to thrive. Secondly, we are programmed from evolution to desire the other sex. It is not love; it is pure Darwinian psychology. We use each other’s bodies as objects to obtain pleasure. There is no love involved except what we desperately want to believe. Take away language and man’s motivations become animalistic. But yet the masses believe. They are inculcated on love. But what if the world was to end tomorrow? Would love exist in a world of anarchy?

If you want to see what a man is like, give him a mask or give him money and then he will reveal himself.

I starve myself to appreciate my food; I freeze myself to appreciate my warmth; I deprive myself of life to appreciate life itself. The problem is not that we don’t have enough but rather that we have too much and don’t appreciate what we do have. Man must limit his life to truly value it. He must go homeless to see the virtue of living in a big house. We get too conditioned and too institutionalized on the good life that it loses its appeal. People come to realize that when they wake up tomorrow they will be the same as they are today. Perhaps if they lost everything they would begin to cherish their existence all the more.

Solitude is my wife; writing is my mistress. Man can achieve so much in the loneliness. He can find himself in the world through partaking in the quietness of life. In the dim solitude I can write and writing is my redemption. It makes me feel alive. Life on the other hand is troublesome. Dealing with people daily takes a lot out of me. I am not like the ordinary man who is addicted to conversation and enjoyment. I find my enjoyment in the loneliness of life. I am that lone wolf that scales the mountains of some desolate terrain, whose heart bleeds on its solitary quest to survive each day. I would love to retreat to the cold and live off the land like some do. I would love to be self-sufficient and to not depend on money to survive. I think man to fully appreciate his existence would have to live in the wild for some amount of time. Perhaps then he would finally realize how lucky he is to be alive.

Before we learn to walk within life it has been decided how we will walk through life. Our lives are planned. Our happiness, our success and our glory have been scripted from the offset. We are not free. We are living a mundane existence of predictability. We get lectured by the powers that be that our future will be unique and special and in our naivety we believe them. People are like robots all living the same lives and the tragedy is that we convince ourselves that we as a human are special. The indifference of a forsaken universe escapes our thoughts.

In giving up arguing I found within myself an ocean of calmness. In eroding my ability to speak I saw a universe of truth before me. We are condemned to speak in this world. This is our gift that elevates us above the rest of the animal kingdom. But do we speak too much?

Life the fantasy is exceptional; life the reality is anything but. We dream of this island of paradise where we relax by the blue sea with our loved one and sip a nice cold beer. Everyone has this utopian dream of what their life should turn out like. But the life we live is anything but utopian. The men and women of this world are guilty of dreaming when they should be living. Our anticipation of the future is always much more endearing than the future. How we dream our lives should turn out is always warmer than how we actually live as.

I cannot bear myself; I am scarred; my skin is rancid; I look in the mirror and see a vile monster staring back. I am not human. I cannot make love to a woman; I cannot let her rip my mind out; she would laugh at me. Hopefully when I die I will be forgotten.

It is the most bewildering thing. I see so many people who have good lives and yet are unhappy. They take their existence for granted. They do not acknowledge the universe or the chance of reproduction that led to them being born. They are not grateful for what they have which is a life and believe me it is a privilege to exist in this world. Their daily ritual involves gratification as a means to enjoy oneself. They must suck warmth from the world before they can feel good. This is vital for economies to succeed. Countries need a population that is obsessed with image and gain.

Every time I dream I go far beyond the boundaries of this universe. There are two ways to flee: to escape from life or to escape into life itself. The world are parasites with regards gratification. They must in order to feel enlivened suck from life. A man and a woman in a relationship both live off each other. They both lose themselves in each other. Furthermore, they must like the shark keep moving at all times in order to maintain this spirit. Thus, they travel the world, they meet new people, the watch sports teams and more, all so they can feel alive. Seldom do I meet a person who escapes into his own existence and boredom as a means to live. This is a man who enjoys being alive so much that he does not need to escape externally to receive pleasure.

I failed at everything in life except failing. I was an academic at that. I cannot function in this world like the masses do. I look at people and wonder why they want to do this and that. Why are people friends? Why do they fall in love?  Why do they all want to work and get married? I am like an unmanned ship on the quiet desolate sea that drifts in the calm wind, without order or direction. I am not part of this world. I am a shadow. I am a ghost. I do not belong in this world. In the midst of failure, I finally found myself. It was only in battle with my greatest foe, myself, that I truly found peace in this universe.

Man is both the anti-venom and the cancer of this world. The only way I see a solution is if man no longer resides on this planet. Then the world will become perfect.

If people can be manipulated into believing God, they can believe anything. That is a fact. If they can believe that they are destined for eternal life when they die, they are fools. That the majority can be manipulated with such drivel speaks volumes about the mentality of men and women. They are emotional. They are susceptible to emotional manipulation by the powers that be.

Life is a hallucination and man is the nightmare. Man is the cancer of this universe. He is the saint and the sinner in one. This world would be much better without him.

I can starve myself and I can freeze myself, but I cannot take people’s opinions. The wild animal fears the cold, it fears hunger and it fears predators. What does conventional man fear? He fears being labelled. He is afraid of being known in this world because once he is, he becomes condemned. To be known is to be condemned and to be condemned is to be known. We don’t understand this however.

The privilege of owning yourself is what one should seek in life. What one should chase is not career or relationship success, but self-fulfilment. The goal of existence is to love your existence and this can only be done through finding your freedom. Discover your liberty and be grateful for being alive.

Fame is not what it is made out to be. Those who want it take their anonymity for granted. That level of scrutiny when famous is poisonous. People don’t realize how fortunate they are to be nothing. Nothing can hurt the man who is nothing. Then when you are famous they track you and the vilify your every action and word spoken.

I remember once a man gazing into the stars one night asking where his life had gone wrong. He couldn’t see how lucky he was to be alive. The stars and the darkness may have well not existed for he was clueless to them. This is the tyrannical sadness of life I feel. We exist in this glorious universe where life is bleak and yet we are not happy because we don’t have a partner or good career. The indoctrination when young has us deceived to think only in terms of love and work. The freedom that comes from looking at the stars is negated. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who is unhappy to be alive. Ones greatest success in this world is not their looks or the size of their bank balance. No, ones triumph is that they exist in this savage world.

Writing is a form of incurable madness. It is an escape. The true writers of this planet write to become hopelessly lost in their art. They do not labour for money or image. They exert themselves to escape the reality of this world just like any drug addict does. The real world is cold and callous and uncertain. Writing gives order to the artist.

I hear about sharks having their fins cut off and left to drown; dogs being set on fire for fun. It breaks my heart being human sometimes. How can a rational man behave irrationally?

I fear the executioner’s axe of fame an infinite times more than being an irrelevant failure. Failure enables me to walk down the street and sit in a coffee shop, drinking a cappuccino without disturbance. Fame on the other hand means they peer into my darkness. Just as the wolves hunt the prey in unison, they will hunt me. They will hunt me.

Some of us live in fear of our fellow species. Their retinas cast such a dark shadow on our habitual living. Society with its prowling eyes figuratively skins our identity until we wilt to the echoing’s of the herd. To be known by this world means you must validate those who know you. This is why I choose a life of destitute. At least in being nothing I can be free.

I am a dead man. I am dead within. I am not alive in this universe. The call is ignored. I cannot do what other people do. I cannot live like they do. I am on the fringe of being. I am bludgeoned by my own conscience. I am blind and in a bind. Life wishes me to do this and I wish to do that. I want to follow my own calling.

People need to be psychologically awoken from this induced coma they lie in. They need to see the universe and the atoms that constitute their bodies. No one ever thinks about matter warping space time or the quantum theory of the electron. Individually man is an illness; collectively he is worthy. 

If living is nothing but sheer euphoria, you are doing it wrong. To exist is a miracle beyond comprehension. That we can recognise this miracle is another miracle and yet so many worry at the setting sun. Every day you exist is your glory. Forget about this drip-fed mentality of ambition and success. Measure your self-worth on the fact that you are alive and living and that you have the ability to be self-fulfilled. Be happy if only because you can be happy.

A man is the summation of his choices. The reputation that we bestow on a man is what we have observed him to do. You are your choices in this world. Whether you are a criminal or a genius is down to the decisions you made prior to this moment. We forgive the genius though, but can we forgive the criminal?

The world isn’t perfect, but it’s all we have. There is no other world; we must make do with this universe. So many of life’s patrons dream. They look beyond the boundaries of their existence and attest that