- Jim Palmer’s six existential realities that humans try to escape…;
- Short items: Fox News provides the conservative need for the panic of the day, or month; even National Review calls out Trump as shameless; Pete Buttigieg on how Republicans take credit for Democratic projects; and how Christian Nationalists are plain about their intentions to “seize power.”
I briefly noted this piece back on 9/24. Let’s spend a little more time with it today. What does he mean by “trying to escape”? This goes to the core of his metaphysics, which I still haven’t exactly figured out.
Jim Palmer, Deconstructionology, 23 Sep 2026: There Is No Cure for Being Human, subtitled “The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape”
It’s 37 screens long, on my big laptop. Just write a book and be done with it! Let’s see if we can find his six.
Here’s part of his preface:
As Existential Health becomes established as a field of health, there is necessary work to be done defining its concepts, developing its theoretical foundations, examining its applications, and subjecting its claims to serious scrutiny. I have published an academic paper on Existential Health in a peer-reviewed journal, completed Volume One of the Existential Health White Papers, and am currently working on Volume Two, which explores the field across applied domains.
That work is important. But I also don’t want us to overthink or complicate what is ultimately at stake.
At the center of Existential Health is something almost embarrassingly simple: our relationship to being alive.
This is intriguing. Can humans ever understand existence and reality without resorting to childish religious myths? To Palmer’s point, what does it mean to be human, if it means trying to escape being human?
(Oh wait, he does have a book. I saw it before, when it was only available as an ebook. Even as a paperback, it has signs of being self-published. I’ll check it out anyway.)
So, here’s the paragraph where he identifies his “six existential realities”:
I have begun thinking of six in particular as existential givens: meaning, mortality, insatiability, isolation, uncertainty, and suffering. I do not mean that these exhaust the human condition, nor that every philosophical tradition would name them in the same way. They identify a territory every life eventually encounters.
Sections of this long essay expand on these six, with these subheadings:
- Meaning and the Absence of a Final Explanation
- Mortality and the Life We Cannot Keep
- Insatiability and the Problem of Enough
- Isolation and the Distance Between Us
- Uncertainty and the Desire for Ground
- Suffering and What Cannot Be Made Right
And then,
- Our Elaborate Attempts to Escape
- Existential Exposure
- The Historical Moment We Are In
- Capability Is Not Capacity
- A Different Understanding of Health
- There Is No Cure for Being Human
I’ve addressed some of these issues myself, via insights from science and philosophy. Palmer is a lapsed evangelical megachurch pastor. Does he have any insights from science and philosophy? Not that I can tell. Even so, or rather to the point, he is thoughtful enough to see through the shabby rationalizations of the common religions.
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Otherwise today, I have only reports from the current ongoing civilizational crisis.
- Media Matters, Matt Gertz, today 21 Oct 26: French riots are the new Hunter’s laptop which was the new migrant caravan which was the new Ebola, subtitled “On Monday, Fox covered the riots every hour from 5 a.m. to midnight — a total of more than 2 hours of airtime”
- Conservatives need something new to be frightened about every few weeks or months, and Fox is happy to provide.
- Even the high-end conservative magazine is calling him out.
- National Review, via JMG today: National Review: Trump Has No Capacity For Shame”
- Noting a familiar pattern.
- LGBTQNation, today 21 Oct: Pete Buttigieg skewers GOP’s habit of taking credit for Democrats’ projects in one powerful sentence
- “You can always count on your Republican congressman to take credit for something they voted against.”
- They say it out loud.
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday 20 Oct: White Christian Nationalists Will Gather In Texas To Lay Out ‘Battle Plans’ To ‘Seize Power’
