Track Marks

They gave me drugs. They took my blood. They popped the radioactive tracers into my bloodstream; I imagine it as a green (why green?) miasma sprouting out like a tree from my left brachial artery, aimlessly wandering until it finally lights up the circle of Willis and various smaller wraithlike arterioles, plunging into the darkest of all mysteries (ever since we demystified God by refusing to talk about it) within the brain. They injected me there repeatedly, and I didn't put enough pressure on the hole in my venous endothelium, so there will be a bruise. They poked my legs and tapped my forehead, made me go limp as a marionette, "opened up" my skull to look at my cerebellum through indirect testing of motor function. I now have some solidarity with the schizophrenics I sometimes interact with, having had the ascending mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway (the "reward pathway") blocked for a few hours. What do we have in life if we don't have that? What would you surrender your sense of reward for? Let me rephrase that: what would it take for you to willingly give up on feeling pleasure? Imagine making them make that choice. Every day, you must either function as a kludge or be stigmatized out of civil society. What kind of choice is that? What are you living for? The question here isn't one of whether this is unjust or not. The question is deeper. What kind of justice can there be in the world if some people are born with this limitation? I have no problem answering why schizophrenia might persist in the population. But the moral superstructure cannot deal with it. This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of any great sentimental universal justice. Those that grow to expect it will inevitably be disappointed. This in no way advocates that everyhting is meaningless; on the contrary, isn't it the case that injustice inserts a lot of meaningful goals into any life? I have never found "freedom" more meaningful than when it is trampled on. So is meaning the same thing as salience? It's similar: I don't know how else I could characterize it. How would you characterize it?

Wisdom from the East: "Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful."