The Best Thing

What is the best thing one can do with ones life?

Not what is the best thing to help oneself and one another lead a happier life, no. What is the best thing to do with your life as a whole in the greater context of humanity?

We would (probably) all be happy with Big Brother on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for the centuries at a time. Constant releases of new albums of cheesey, disgusting, vile, churned out formulaic music. An x amount of new films coming out everyday. A Gladiator arena in every city and daily fights between atheists and lions. We'll all be happy if all of us were at the intellectual level of Jade Goody or George Bush, and this could fairly easily be accomplished within a generation. Indeed I could start a world revolution now, kill all resistors; these so called 'intellectuals' running the world. I could make sure no one in the world would be educated rendering the new generation as idiots as they would grow up watching/doing things including but not limited to what I've mentioned above, and we'll all be happy.

Or, I could just kill the entire world and every person alive, which would probably be frighteningly simple and therefore rid the world of all agony, pain, suffering and tumult.

But I wouldn't do either of those things; and I'm sure any sane person wouldn't either.

My friend says the best thing he could do with his life is to convert every living person to his way of thinking which would be a rational, unemotional, stoic and calculated way of thinking where everyone was wise and unemotional and did everything to advance science and technology and had no art to accompany life (don't let that taint your judgement of him - he's a really nice guy). In this world of constant advances in science and our newly found rationality there'd be no wars, quarrels, fights etc and we could all concentrate ONLY on expanding our knowledge and technology, there would be no art or literature. Essentially a socialist society where wealth is equally shared, no one has emotions and everyone is working on making our civilisation better is, he says, the best thing he could do. We could finally reintroduce emotions and art back into our human nature once we become an advanced type 1 civilisation in the Kardashev scale or the like. Then we could go back to having art and literature again.

That sounds tempting but I think art should be given the same priority as science. If we remove emotions from our being then we would no longer remain 'human'. Emotions are powerful things but they not only serve malevolent desires but also great altruistic and selfless ends. My idea of the perfect society would be similar to my friend's (which incidentally is based on 'The Culture' in Ian Bank's novels) however art would be given the same priority as science. However I'd be very elitist about it and dismiss all forms of 'low culture' or 'popular culture'. I know I sound like a complete snobbish bastard but I think man can get a lot more from Bach and Michaelangelo than Tracey Emin or 50 Cent.

I don't know.