Casting off the robes in public... and putting on a power suit.

It's the ambitious, however pointless their aims, who write history and articulate the aims of society, however vacuous their articulation. 

My revelation from months of reading the cynics, With the modern world hovering above my reading lamp, is that the red queen race of societal ambition, the fight for norms and laws, is both arbitrary and yet inescapable. The cynic inside me may want to shrug off the norms and the fight over them to be more in tune with a liberated human nature, but part of our nature is that we live in a society and the nature of that society is that the powerful, however vile or pointless their pursuits, are the ones who decide what norms and laws to follow. To step aside from the hamster wheel, one would have to find contentment in anonymity, civic powerlessness, and allowing the ambitious, full of confidence despite being as pointless as the rest, to drive the ship.

F*** that. I don't know where we're going, but I'd rather the ship be driven by someone aware of their ignorance than someone unaware of their arrogance. Hence, I re-enter the civic life, emerging from the cynic's cocoon of anonymity as a full-throated stoic ready to kick some ass and become emperor if that's where fate leads.

F*** Putin - he's a pedophile. F*** the Trumps - they're all a scam. F*** climate change - we need to fix it. F*** national debt - we need to balance the books. F*** racism, sexism and xenophobia - we (America) need marriage counseling. F*** the poor scraping to get by when the rich are buying multiple yachts - we need to tax the rich to provide opportunity for the poor. F*** powerlessness - we need to vote and fight voter suppression (including the negative advertisements that are an informal means of discouraging the voter pool). F*** feeling without a voice - we need to speak and write (loving, intelligent and motivational things). 

Why these aims? I don't know. I'm not going to justify equality of opportunity as some necessary aim from some BS arguments about the primacy of justice. These are just things that would make me, and I would argue most people, happy. Solutions like those above made us happy when we were kids without the education or reason to fortify them with fancy words and philosophical arguments. They make us happy about the world we live in, and that is the finest aim I can think of.