Sci-fi, Orgasm Machine, Pure Pain Machine, and Human Suffering

By Xah Lee. Date:

There is a agent, in scifi, that causes orgasm, non-stop, at will, at girls you want. Wonderful. But am thinking, perhaps in a similar train, that there be a agent that causes pure pang for human suffering.

No, not pain. Pain, as in torture, is of course popular. Human animals is of no lack of imagination of causing extreme pain to other human animals. There are plenty pure pain machine in scifi. But am talking about a emotional pain, a pain for human suffering. Like, for example, when you are not in the mood and saw a girl being violently raped to death, or such. But if you have the feel of this, then imagine the general suffering of humanity. The poverty, the hunger, atrocities, little wanting, desires, the little kindness, gratitude, even a little innocent smile …

it seems am afflicted with such a neurotic disorder. So, am thinking, on scifi train, of such a pure agent that could cause this at will. So, perhaps, others can feel what i feel.

there are 2 historical figures i can identify who share my this idiosyncratic empathy. One is Bertrand Russell. The other is Franz Liszt.

Bertrand Russell is on record about this. See, first 20 seconds.

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This is from his autobiography. Buy at amazon Quote:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

I share with him EXACTLY these sentiments. These sentiments describes my life EXACTLY. The longing for love, the eager want of knowledge, and the pang of human suffering.

For about Franz Liszt, read Wikipedia about him, or hear 2 of his music here: Liszt and Bach, 4 Songs to Die For.