Infinite Jest part 1: letting go of control

One theme in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is letting go of control of the self. The characters in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) learn that control of the self is what got them into trouble with alcohol and drugs. Don Gately calls it his Spider. By squishing his Spider, by handing over his brain to be washed, by letting go, Don Gately learns to live without alcohol and drugs. He is set free of the cage of control. He doesn't even understand why it works and understanding why it works ruins the loss of control. He is told to Fake It Until He Makes It (DFW's all caps). The AA/NA nightly meetings are full of trite expressions like One Day At a Time. Rejecting these obvious truths is to regain control and end up back in the death spiral of alcohol and drugs.

In DFW's list of things you might learn at AA/NA is the claim that God does not care whether you believe in God or not. Don Gately prays every day for sobriety even though he doesn't believe in God. He doesn't know why his prayers for sobriety work, and he knows that knowing why they work will probably ruin it.

At the elite tennis academy bright Hal obsesses over over-analyzing his tennis game because self-awareness ruins the zone that top athletes strive to achieve. The zone is the Zen like lack of self-awareness that can be achieved when one has hit a tennis ball a few million times by age seventeen.

A prominent bar in Infinite Jest is The Unexamined Life. According to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Infinite Jest may suggest otherwise.

Liberalism is not Relativism

Relativism is the belief that there is no One Truth. Instead, every group (or perhaps everyone!) has their own truth. My truth is different from your truth. Our truth is different from their truth.

But this is nonsense. You believe something because you think that it is true -- you believe that it accurately describes the world. It sounds trivial but you believe that your beliefs are true, otherwise you'd change your beliefs!

It is easy to prove that we live in the same world because we can interact with each other without traveling to another world.

We all believe different things and each of us may be wrong about our beliefs. In fact, it is logically impossible for all of us to be right since we believe different things about fundamental issues. It is logically impossible for all metaphysical systems to be true since they are contradictory. It is possible that all of them are false. It is possible that one of them is true.

But it is most likely that we will never truly know the answers to life's biggest questions.

I believe in atheism, materialism, environmentalism, liberalism, a mix of socialism and capitalism, some modified form of utilitarianism, and a laughing Stoicism. I believe these because I think they are true.

Liberalism is not Relativism. Relativists reject Truth and embrace multiple truths as the One Truth. Liberals acknowledge that everyone believes their beliefs to be true and they realize the lesson in humility there.

Morality Doesn't Need Religion

We all know that religion can be used for both good and evil purposes. We all know that a religious person could be either good or evil. This proves that morality is not grounded in religion.

Atheism scares some people because they think that morality requires religion -- take away religion and anything goes. But if that were true then it would be impossible to be an immoral religious person or to be a moral non-religious person. Since both options are possible it follows that morality does not need religion.

If you honestly believe that being watched by God is the only thing keeping you from doing evil things, then please believe.