The Eternal Prototyper

A Modified Pascal’s Wager

By Darren Landrum

Something occurred to me on the way home from university today.

I was remembering back to a fellow I knew once upon a time who was a pretty depressing character. He was one of those “the government is involved in the New World Order” types, convinced that we were all going to die at the hands of our own government in an all-out chemical weapons attack on our own soil. He wasn’t the easiest person in the world to be around.

I see a lot of the same thing everywhere, though. There’s all of this pessimism, and it’s always about something that’s going to happen. The axis of rotation of the Earth is going to shift in 2012. Terrorists have an antimatter bomb and are going to set it off in Yellowstone to trigger the supervolcano. The entire infrastructure of the Internet is going to be destroyed on January 19, 2038 (feel free to look that one up).

I would like to place a Pascal’s Wager on all of that.

Pascal’s Wager basically comes down to these three bullet points:

1) If you live life as if there is no God, and it turns out there isn’t, you’re fine.

2) If you live life as if there is a God, and it turns out there isn’t, nothing is lost.

3) If you live life as if there is no God, and it turns out there is, you’re screwed.

Now it seems to me that if God exists, He’ll be able to see through anybody just trying to hedge their bets, so I see little point to this exercise as presented by Pascal. Embedded within it, though, is an interesting logical process that just maybe can be used to help us be a little happier.

Consider the world around us. The Iraq War is dragging on, Afghanistan is still unstable, we have climate change and all sorts of strange weather creeping up on us (we can argue the cause another time), we have a guy setting fire to his underwear on an international flight who boarded the plane sweating nervously with no luggage with his father calling the State Department and warning them about his son going unstable and still he almost managed to pull it off but finally being thwarted not by the people we pay to catch this kind of thing but by other people on the plane giving him the beatdown… The list goes on and on.

So with this immediate, imminent, and unavoidable destruction of the world about to happen to everyone, even Rosario Dawson, how the hell could we possibly consider being optimistic and getting on with our lives?

Let’s consider this, which I call the Modified Pascal’s Wager:

1) If you’re a pessimist who just gives in and continues being miserable, and then a huge world disaster does indeed strike and destroy civilization as we know it, it’s what you expected anyway.

2) If you’re an optimist and you continue trying to live your life, and then civilization suddenly comes to a screeching halt, well, there probably wasn’t much you could do about it.

3) However, if you’re a miserable bastard who gives up on life, and then somehow the world continues to happen and civilization doesn’t end, you’ve just wasted the best years of your life spending all of your energy being a miserable bastard.

The choice seems quite clear to me.

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