The Existential Elk Theory - The Darkest Philosophical Essay Ever Written - YouTube
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This video is sponsored by Zbiotics. Enjoy a few drinks and still feel great the next day. Use my link in the description to get free shipping and 15% off your first order. One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body.
All things dissolved before his testing thought. Wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Peter Vessel Zapa. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a species known as the Irish elk, often referred to as the giant deer, emerged. Up until just a few thousand years ago, this creature roamed Eurasia as one of the largest deer species to have ever lived.
Standing at around 7 ft tall, 10 ft long, and with massive antlers spanning up to 12 ft across, millions of years of evolution led to the immense size and proportions of this giant deer and its antlers. Their antlers were weapons forged by and wielded against nature, used for mating, display, and survival in a highly competitive and gruesome world.
After a certain point, however, as these antlers continued to grow, their use and function were eclipsed by the problems they imposed onto the species. The antlers weighed their heads down and made swift mobility in most environments essentially impossible. They could no longer easily navigate the forest to quickly evade predators and human hunters, and access to nutrition could not readily sustain the overgrowth of their antlers, often leading to nutritional deficiencies in the rest of the body.
What was supposed to be a feature for survival and thriving turned into an obstruction of these very goals, a maladaptation of evolution. In the end, these overgrown horns ultimately contributed to the giant deer going extinct in the year 5700 B.C.E. Alongside the Irish elks existence and extinction was humankind's emergence and evolution.
By the time the giant deer had reached its fate, humanity and civilization had long since formed, playing a role in the deer's demise through hunting. With the most advanced form of consciousness the planet had yet seen, humanity not only roamed but assumed the planet. Millions of years of evolution led to the unique form of consciousness found inside the heads of humankind.
This consciousness is a weapon forged by and wielded against nature. A means of survival and thriving in a highly gruesome and competitive world. Though this consciousness has allowed for achievements like highly organized hunting, agriculture, morality, civilization, and industry, 20th century Norwegian philosopher Peter Vessel Zapva argued that our consciousness also exhibits the same maladaptive evolutionary qualities as the antlers of the giant deer.
Our consciousness, Zappa argued, has extended past its practical functions, leaving us with an excess weight and size of awareness that we don't know what to do with, and that has turned existence into a problem for us. A superolous outgrowth of nature destined to extinguish its harborer. Zappa writes, "Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart.
A species had been armed too heavily by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything. But he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself. Zappa was born in 1899 in Trazzo, Norway.
Much of his life was split between three areas that seem, at least on the face of them, quite different. Mountaineering, law, and existential philosophy, which he expressed in both academic and artistic forms. Despite writing about the deepest creasses of despair and anxiety, Zapa spent a substantial amount of his life ascending the literal heights of mountains, becoming a notable early member of the Norwegian rock climbing community and the first to ascend several peaks across the Scandinavian mountains.
In 1923, after obtaining his degree from the University of Oslo, he also became a lawyer, though his focus quickly moved away from law. Underscoring his life and what Zapa is most widely known for was his perceptiveness and work in literature and philosophy. With profoundly intense and melancholic pros, his philosophical work can bring even the most innocent unthinking individual down from the peaks of optimism and into the valleys of uncertainty, at least if they're not prepared for the journey.
What connected much of Zapa's work, sensibilities, and life in general appeared to be an intense awareness of death. More specifically, he exhibited a kind of death anxiety that contributed to a highly lucid awareness of human awareness itself, our sensitivity towards suffering, decay, and futility, and the interplay these things have with the human desire for meaning and solace.
In 1933, at age 34, Zapa published his first philosophical work, an essay titled The Last Messiah, a short but devastating piece that with the precision of the tip of a nail shatters the tempered glass of comfortable and socially acceptable ideals. 8 years later, in 1941, he expanded on the concepts of the essay in his book, On the Tragic.
In these works, Zapo measures the weight and size of human consciousness as it teeters back and forth inside the human skull. Like the antlers of the giant deer, he argues that consciousness weighs us down with its immense awareness, revealing to us the conditions of being in all its horrors. We see in plain sight that we are subjected to and limited by the corporeality of the body, controlled by the laws of a chaotic and unknowable reality, and abandoned by the universe in our need for meaning and redemption.
For Zapva, like the antlers of the giant deer, this seems like it would make long-term survival for humanity very unlikely. In his words, he has lost his right of residence in the universe. Has eaten from the tree of knowledge and been expelled from paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.
And yet, of course, humanity has endured for hundreds of thousands of years, thrived. This left Zapoa wondering why. Why has humanity endured its apparently futile, terrifying, and absurd condition with such fervor? And perhaps more accurately, how in the face of no clear definitive wise, how does humanity continue on and deal with such lucid awareness of the inherent tragedy of its existence? For the giant deer, Zapa points out that if it could have cut or trimmed its horns every time they grew too large, it could have relieved itself
of the antler's burden and increased the likelihood of survival individually and collectively. Of course, however, they couldn't do this. They were dear. Humans, however, can do something like this. In a sense, we can shave down and saw off our antlers. We can dilute and soften our consciousness, using it for less than it is capable of and leaving much of what it affords us untouched and unexamined.
And this is what Zappa believes we do. How we endure and survive. He writes, "Cultural history as well as observation of ourselves and others allow the following answer. Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness." Specifically, Zappa argues that there are four primary methods by which we do this.
Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Isolation essentially boils down to deliberate or unconscious ignorance. That is, ignoring or repressing thoughts about the reality of our condition. Despite horrific and unfathomable qualities, arguably being so fundamental to our nature and experience of existence, both our minds and our conversations almost never bring them up.
This is clear in the conventions of most social interactions. It is bad decorum to bring up death, suffering, the absurdity of reason, and the futility of everything in most conversations. And so, by not talking about these existential matters, and better yet, not thinking about them, we essentially operate in the same way we would toward a young child, but toward ourselves. That is, we selfshelter.
We change the TV station to cartoons. We answer hard questions with simple answers. And we deny the horrific and complex truth of things, believing everything will be okay. Anchoring is similar, but on a more organized social scale. It is the Santa Clauses, Easter bunnies, and tooth fairies we participate in and carry with us into adulthood.
It is the traditions and systems we anchor to in order to feel purpose and guidance around our decisions and aims in life. According to Zappa, the most common anchors include God, the church, the state, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future. Distraction refers to the explicit actions individuals carry out on a regular basis, often based on anchors, to occupy one's mind away from thinking about the reality of their condition.
We set up industries and markets so we can carry out tasks and goals. We play and watch sports and entertainment. We form and sustain the responsibilities of tradition and culture and so on. We putter around and do menial things that don't require the true force and violence of our consciousness. It is like playf fighting inconsequential battles with swords made of nerf instead of steel.
We avoid the harm while feeling a sense of active participation. Lastly, sublimation refers to a sort of creative process in which one takes the dread and anxiety of existence and transfigures it into something aesthetic and expressive, functionally alchemizing the suffering of human consciousness into whatever human consciousness can produce that is more pleasant or at the very least novel.
This is according to Zapva the least common method but the most powerful and self- embracing one. The problem with all these defense mechanisms for Zapva, including sublimation, is that they are temporary and self-destructive. They require constant upkeep and constant denial of what makes a human human. They do not resolve or meaningfully face the root cause, the nature of human consciousness.
Instead, they reject it in the same way that if the giant deer constantly trimmed its horns, it would merely be self mutilating itself, having to always be something other than what it is. Zapa sees the defense mechanisms of humankind as the same sort of self-denial and mutilation. We gain survival in continuence as a species, but we lose ourselves as humans in full form.
To be truly whole in our consciousness, according to Zapa, would mean to see and know the reality of our condition in all its horrors and inongruities. This, however, would equate to a sort of inevitable annihilation of the species, as we would determine it no longer sensible to reproduce. Here we find a dilemma at the foundation of human existence.
We possess both the desire to continue as a species as well as the desire for ultimate solace and purpose. Solace and purpose, however, can never be obtained through continuence because they cannot really be obtained at all. Continuence require sustained blind striving toward these things that we can never achieve.
But realizing we can never achieve them, at least at scale, would result in a contradiction to our desire to continue. And so these two binaries clash and explode inside us. Their fragments emerging at the top of our heads like pointed horns of absurdity. In his essay, the last messiah, Zapo refers to a figure, the first and last only real messiah of humanity.
He invokes this figure as an embodiment of his philosophy, an individual who will show humanity that its existence has no redemption or higher meaning, only the burdens of its awareness. And through this, humankind would once and for all see through the illusions and self-deceptions and realize its despair in full force, flopping its head forward under the weight of their horns and overcoming their fundamental nature to propagate an end to humanity.
However, here Zapa seems to suggest, albeit with ironic framing, that humanity's options are either selfdeception or self-extinction. But perhaps there is another option, if not many. Perhaps rather than the cessation of the species, we can work to resolve our dilemma through the sessation of our dependency on resolutions, the need for solace and purpose.
Perhaps through a slow and patient kind of exposure therapy of our consciousness to our consciousness, we can form an indifference about it, a welcoming embrace of our condition in full form. The sessation of the human species, which Zappa alludes to, suggests an overcoming of the biological imperative of reproduction.
If we could overcome that, could we not also instead overcome our very need for purpose and redemption and still survive and thrive? Perhaps we can find our way not through direction, but through the embrace of aimlessness, through clearing the brush of desire, of purpose, of hubris, of certainty. Every path in the forest is made through clearing, not amassing.
Though it seems Zapva on a philosophical level would likely believe this not to be a probable solution for humankind, perhaps his life suggests otherwise. In Zapa's life, he climbed mountains yet unclimbed and forged ideas yet unthought. He wrote literary works discussing concepts that themselves served as a sort of transcendent sublimation, an overcoming of the very conditions he wrote about while not denying any truth of them.
And this is perhaps the perfect embodiment of both the absurdity and the ability of humankind. As a species, we have and surely will continue to do the same. To reach new peaks and new ideas, to face up to reality, and to slowly but surely transcend and transfigure. But we will only do this so long as we continue individually and collectively.
If we continue forward, we can survive. And if we can survive, we can evolve. And if we can evolve, we can improve and better endure. We can better bear the weight at top our necks. As our necks grow stronger, our sightelines rise and the landscape of the world opens up. If you enjoy exploring ideas like these, facing up to the realities of existence, and grappling with consciousness, I'm excited to share that my upcoming book does just that.
It's called The Terrible Paradox of Self-awareness, and it's coming out March 2026. It is perhaps my darkest and most candid book yet, while also deeply hopeful and redemptive. You can pre-order your copy now by using the link in the description, and sometimes the best, or at least the most fun way to wrestle with the existential topics we read and learn about is discussing them with friends.
Perhaps debating them over a couple drinks at the bar. A few drinks can make for a very fervent discussion about things like free will, consciousness, and truth, but the next day can sometimes suffer. This video sponsor, Ziotics, is made for these very occasions, enjoying a night out with a few drinks while preserving the next morning.
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