Break Free & Be Broken (10 page)

"With the most basic piece of knowledge we have."

“The what?”

“What's the most basic thing you know?"

I shrug. "You're losing me."

He grunts. "I'm sorry, but try to stay with me, all right? This is a riddle I’ve been working to solve for a long time. I take the subject very seriously, I assure you. It appears you have some wisdom. Maybe you can help."

I glance over at him. He looks dead serious, like there's a great weight on his shoulders that he genuinely needs my help with. I'm taken aback. "Okay, but I'm not sure how to answer that."

He flicks his hand. "No matter. Answer this. What do you know for certain, without even a sliver of doubt?"

"Well... I know I'm alive, I know we are driving, I know that it's night, I know the sun will rise tomorrow, I know if I reach out, I can touch you. I know-"

He silences me with a raised hand. "I get the point, but all of those things can be doubted."

I give him an incredulous look. "Huh?"

He sighs. "Let's play a little game to help me illustrate. Take any of the things you just said you 'know' and tell me a way you could doubt it."

"How I could doubt any of that?"

"Easy. For example: you say you know you're alive, but maybe you aren't. Maybe you slipped and hit your head while you were hiking, and everything happening now is actually some weird death dream."

A slippery kind of fear drips down my back, causing my heart to skip a beat. "Why the hell would you say that?"

His mouth falls open, but confusion holds his tongue momentarily before allowing him to speak. "I'm just trying to demonstrate something. If you don't like that example, consider this: you say you know that it's night, but maybe it isn't. Maybe a giant bat is actually covering the sun."

I, too, must take a second before I'm able to speak, but rather than confusion holding my tongue, it’s the ridiculousness of his statement. "That's nonsense."

"I know. That's kind of the point. It may be extremely farfetched and not at all believable, but it's at least conceivable, right?"

"No, not really..."

"Of course it is. If it wasn't conceivable, I wouldn't have been able to think of it. The same type of thing can be done with all of your examples. Maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow, perhaps the earth will stop rotating. Maybe if you reached out to touch me, you'd learn you can't because I'm a hologram. Or maybe you aren't really driving, maybe this is just some elaborate simulator and everything around us is a projection."

"Okay cool." My tone is flat. "Where are you going with this?"

"I'm taking you to the bedrock of all knowledge, the one and only thing we can know without
any doubt
whatsoever: I exist
.
"

"You exist?"

"No, not
you
exist,
I
exist. I can doubt your existence. I cannot doubt my own, just like you could never doubt yours. There's no way."

"Are you sure?"

"Test it. Try to doubt your existence. Feel free to get as inconceivable as you must."

"I could say... well... I could say that maybe I don't really exist, that I'm just a computer program or a dream or something. Or dead, like you said before."

"That isn’t doubting your existence, that is doubting the reality of all that's around you. You, the computer program, or the dream, or the dead man, still exist. Try again."

"Try again? ...I don't see what I can say where you couldn't just use a variation of that same response."

"Right, which is precisely what I'm getting at. There is simply no way to doubt your own existence. Hell, the very act of trying reaffirms it! And do you know why that is? Because trying to doubt your existence is an
experience
, and to experience is to
exist
. 'I think, therefore I am.' Does this make sense?"

“It does...” I gaze into my thoughts, trying to pick out the tower he is taking us to. "Are you about to say that since the only thing you know for certain is that you exist, that made it okay for you to kill that woman?"

"You got it, my friend. Just look at my options. If there is nothing after life, then the experiences I get now are of the utmost importance. Even if I'm 99.99999% sure that everything else is real, there is still that 0.00001% chance that nothing else really is-no one else really feels pain, no one else really thinks, no one else really exists-so if this life is all I ever get, it would be foolish of me not to experience anything and everything I want to experience.

“Faced with the wicked scythe of endless nothing, equipped only with a certainty of my own existence and a consuming belief in the absolute importance of experience, how could I be wrong for choosing in my own favor? That woman and I both wanted something in a life that ends with nothing. All I did was bet on the sure thing. Selfish? Maybe. But wrong?" He laughs.

I stare ahead, not sure what to say, trying to process all I've heard. I don't get too long to think before the stranger continues.

"That said, I'm not sure I believe nothing happens when we die. There is something now, so it's logical to believe that something will follow, right? Surely something didn't spring from nothing, so why would it become nothing? But I digress. As far as I've been able to see, there is no more evidence over here to explain why killing is wrong than there is on the side with nothing. In fact, there is less. If there is something after death-no matter what it is-experience will continue. So really, by killing someone, you aren't robbing them of anything at all. You are simply sending them to another realm of existence."

"But wouldn't it be wrong that you stole all the experiences they could have had here? Why should you be able to make that kind of decision?”

"Same reasons as before. If we try to take that route, we run into the same issues we had when dealing with nothing-about who's right it is to experience what."

"Well... what if that other realm is worse than this one? It seems like it would be wrong if you sent them to a worse place."

"Maybe, but who's to say my experiences here wouldn't be worse if I didn't kill? And besides, that's only one hypothetical possibility of many, and hypotheticals are unreliable. Hypothetically, if someone killed Hitler's mom when she was a young girl, they would have saved millions of lives, and hypothetically, one of the millions Hitler killed could have invented a doomsday device that would have ended the entire world. Things can twist too easily in either direction to weigh such matters on anything but direct results. If you try to expand outward, it quickly reduces right and wrong to nothing more than random chance."

"Well, yeah... but... what if you killed me and I came back as a tree? Or a dog? If it isn't
me
that comes back, you still robbed me of
my
experience."

"True, but that would only be a problem on a finite scale. We aren't working on a finite scale. We are saying something
always
happens when you die, so it would be the same for the tree you or the dog you. At the core, there are only two things that can happen after death:
something
or
nothing
. If at any time along the line of something it turns to nothing, then the end result is still nothing, and we might as well save the time and just say it's nothing after this life. Both lines must be infinite or they just become the other, and along the line of infinite something, you will live an infinite number of lives. Every single combination of things will happen. You'll kill me, I'll kill you, you'll kill the lady, the lady will kill me; again and again for eternity. So even if you spent a million lifetimes as a dog, or a tree, or a cat, eventually
you
- the very same you-will spawn again. That's just a result of infinity-an infinite number of things will happen an infinite number of times-and such a view reduces killing and being killed to little more than a type of experience that infinitely churns in the endless sea of existence."

I shuffle around for a way out of the universe he is spinning around me. "Huh... but wouldn't nothing have to be included in an infinite number of options?"

A crestfallen smile spreads across his lips. "That, I don't know. God and the devil may be options as well, but this is as far as I've been able to reach. Contradictions such as these have prevented me from stretching my mind completely around the ramifications of an endless universe. It’s difficult to process infinity-maybe impossible. But have you seen my point? How can killing be wrong when these are the cards we've been given?"

"It just feels wrong..."

"Not to me."

I start to lash out, angry that this man is somehow making sense. "Your beliefs are fucking selfish."

"Of course they are. They're centered on
me
, as they should be. Why is it you think that's such a bad thing?"

"Because, the world would be a shit place if everyone believed how you did."

"Really? The world would be a shit place if everyone believed there was nothing more important than following their own heart? Then why do people say things like, 'Be yourself' and 'Stay true to who you are?' Those messages are heralded for being positive, are they not?"

"Well, yeah, but-"

"But what? People wouldn't say those things if they didn't recognize the good, life affirming truth in the words, but if the underlying message isn't true for all, it isn't true for any. The phrase 'Be yourself,' is meaningless if you throw an asterisk behind it that says,
*so long as you follow certain guidelines
. I don't put any such asterisks on myself, nor do I think I should."

"But don't you see? That's the selfish aspect of your beliefs that doesn't work. If everyone just put themselves first without any regard to right and wrong, the world would fall apart."

"You really think so? Then tell me, what horrible, society dismantling things are you not doing because they're 'wrong?' Do you secretly want to beat up old people? Maybe burgle organs from children? Or is it some other twisted perversion?"

“I don’t want to do any of that.”

"Then what makes you think everyone else does? I’ve got a secret for you, brother. For the most part, people already do what they want. Those who want to do 'wrong' do 'wrong,' and it's the same for those who seek 'right.' The reason most people aren't running around the streets killing everyone they see is not because they really believe it's wrong, but simply because they have no desire to do so."

"Just because they don't want to do it doesn't mean they can't recognize it's wrong."

"Bah, all they're recognizing is that they wouldn't like it if it happened to them. It's easy to call something wrong if you have no intention of doing it, especially if it's something that could hurt you. But don't you think your perception might be different if, for whatever reason, you were born with innate desires like mine? Think of this from my perspective. I didn't choose to have a love for violence, and yet, it is a part of me, no different than my skin or bones. Why should I chain myself? Because I’m different? I will not! I will not be shackled to morals I don’t share. Sure, the world may say I’m broken-a misanthrope, one that doesn’t fit-and most would be happy to see me thrown away, but despite the opposition, I’m living. I’ve chosen to be free, and I’m doing it as me.”

"You're making it sound like there's no such thing as right or wrong!"

"Not necessarily. If anything, I'm just saying they don't extend
beyond the individual
."

"Of course they do! They have to! I don't know how to dispute everything you've said, but hurting people-giving them a bad experience-has to be wrong, if nothing else." I'm clutching at straws here and I know it, but my world is falling apart, and I'll do anything to find some solid ground.

The stranger's quiet for a minute before he continues. "So it's never okay to hurt someone?"

"No, not if they're innocent."

"What about break ups?"

"What?"

"Break ups can be extremely painful for the party that doesn't want to be broken up, wouldn't you agree?"

Fucking bastard. Why does he have to make me think about Her at a time like this? "They can be horrendously painful. What's your point?"

"It's not a point, it's a question. Why is hurting someone okay in a break up if hurting people is never okay?"

"Killing someone and breaking up with them are not the same thing."

"No, they certainly aren't, but we aren't looking at the action here, remember? We are looking at the result: hurt. If you say that hurting people is always wrong, and we focus on that, then killing someone and breaking up with someone can be quite similar in all the major ways to those left behind. In both cases, you rob somebody of someone they love and can leave a hole that can be very difficult-sometimes impossible-to fill, and in both cases, the pain can last a lifetime. I'd be willing to bet more people have hurt or killed themselves over a bad breakup than the death of a loved one, so in some ways, you could even argue being broken up with is worse. If hurting people is always wrong, why is it okay during a break up?"