David Pearce - Hedonism & the “Pan Species Welfare State”

I think David Pearce is trying to escape something in his pursue for imagining a sort of (blissful, ultra positive) emotional utopia. Where alla species are free from suffering. Something he calls the:

Pan Species Welfare State

But I can understand that, because where there is no understanding of youth, aging, life and death there is only the idea of soothing out and ending the bad aspects. Which in the end is a cultural thing, not a homogenous way of dealing with it. For me what he really alludes to is the ultimate state of Nirvana, be that through technology or spiritual evolution. This is something I wrote about earlier in the post The inevitability of singularity. Back to David Pearce, I understand that he has suffered from depression and that of course leads him to this battle against suffering. Sort of like some former alcoholics or drug abusers go super-anti their former addictions. What they miss is to handle the reality of whatever is going on, voluntary or involuntary. Nevertheless I listen to David’s talks and follow up and also agree on many points, like ending factory farming and other plain-in-sight unnecessary suffering.

But there is something to this kind of thinking, that the universe will never balance up. First of all, as we can se a human society can be so much improved and all necessities of life granted plus the extra of all the consumer choices and pleasure/hobby alternatives. Yet even with that, some new disease or shortage is manifested. I’m not the kind who seeks a regression or a stop in development – but I’m certain that there is a balance and we can’t just through our individual, or at best collective human understanding, understand and expand our perception to all other species. That’s why I find David Pearce’s focus on abolishing suffering to be a fear or an escape of dealing with reality. Look at it, when we all were, supposedly, inside the Big Bang, did we suffer? Did we suffer more than we do now? Alan Watts puts this very deeply yet light heartedly in this short segment.