what if everyone is secretly plotting your success?
The Bodhisattva Wager
In 1657, a French mathematician wanted to prove the existence of God.
He argued that God had to be infinitely incomprehensible; there was no sense in trying to use human logic to prove the infinite.
Instead, he reframed the question from “does God exist?” to “is it a good bet to believe in God?”
This revolutionary method was laid down by Blaise Pascal, and came to be known as Pascal’s Wager1.
But that’s old hat. You don’t come here to read regurgitated wikipedia articles. You come here to read the sharp prophecy-cosplay of a shitlib zillenial teetering on the edge of madness.
Today, 369 years after Pascal’s Wager, the Shitpost-Philosopher Cuck Fuzi has a new wager to posit.
The groundbreaking, patent-pending Cuck Fuzi’s Wager2 is also called…
Bodhisattvic Reverse Solipsism
Welcome back to the Cyber Cultivator Collective—the aspiring gambling addict’s one-stop-shop for groundbreaking theological revelation. I’m your host, Cuck Fuzi.
Together, we will Fill this table. We will Fill it up with Thick, Creamy, White Values. To some, the title will make sense immediately. For those not yet in the know, the first step is to speedrun some requisite knowledge…
To Save All Sentient Beings
Mahayana Buddhism’s crowning accomplishment: envisioning a category of demigod-esque beings called “Bodhisattvas”
These are enlightened beings such as Avalokiteshvara3 who compassionately delay entering Nirvana in order to help ferry beings out of samsara.
Bodhisattvas could just F off from samsara4, but hang around to offer aid to us strugglers. They max out their compassion stat and stay til the end of the party to help clean up the mess and hold your hair back as you vomit the Peach Schnapps of your chungus life into the toilet bowl of the cosmos.
Bodhisattvas are the first element in Cuck Fuzi’s Wager. Next, we need to understand solipsism…
Hello, is Anybody There?
Solipsism5 is the philosophical theory that only my own mind and consciousness exist.
In theory, I cannot be sure if you, the girl reading this, are actually conscious. You could have no inner world, a bot reacting on instinct to the various stimuli of your life. A true NPC, you and everyone else in this chungus world.
Solipsism is a cringe ideology that leads to self-centered, nihilistic, antisocial conclusions.
But what about the reverse: what if everyone else exists, and I don’t? What if I’m the NPC, and they’re all perfectly lucid??
Now apply the Bodhisattva concept to this Reverse Solipsism, and we get Bodhisattvic Reverse Solipsism (BRS). The fundamental posit is:
Everyone except for me is a fully liberated bodhisattva.
This is an unprovable statement. However, like Pascal argued, adopting this belief regardless of its Truth Value may turn out to be a good bet.
Let’s go through each option and find out together…
The Know-it-all
This is where most of yall are at; the case where BRS is not true, AND you don’t believe it.
In this case, you receive Finite Gain. Namely, the satisfaction of being right. Probably nothing about your life changes. You just continue with your current beliefs in your current life, and everyone around you is similarly trapped within samsara.
The Forsaken One
If BRS is true and you don’t believe it, you miss out a little bit.
Contrast with Pascal’s Wager: the case where God exists, but you don’t believe in God. The punishment in that case is an eternity in hell, or infinite loss:
However, even if BRS is true, nonbelievers do not risk an eternity in hell.
They risk a couple more spins on the great wheel of samsara.
If everyone except you is a bodhisattva quietly plotting your liberation, even disbelief would not put an end to their efforts. They would continue acting to free you from ignorance and stuck patterns behind the scenes whether you believe it or not.
Buddhism does have hell realms where hungry ghosts chew on your nutsack like it’s a peach-flavored motorcycle tire for 12,000 years, but it does not have eternal damnation. Even if you commit tax fraud and have to spend a few lifetimes in the hell realms, you’ll eventually find yourself in a more fortunate rebirth.
You’ll have to suffer longer than you would’ve if you did believe BSR, but not for eternity.
This case is a very finite loss; at the end of the day, if everyone except for you is a powerful bodhisattva ally conspiring toward your happiness, it’s hard to lose by much.
Straight to the Top
This is literally Schizophrenia: The Good Ending. Your paranoid delusion that everyone is out to save you turns out to be actually true. Like a reverse Truman Show6.
Your time in samsara is swiftly coming to a close.
Not only is everyone conspiring to help you, but you’re right there ready and willing to accept that help. You’re a parched, thirsty ahh horse. They’re leading you to the water and baby, DADDY needs his DWINKY!
But in this case, drinking doesn’t mean just accumulating more piss to sling. No sir, it means the complete and utter annihalation of every ounce of suffering in your being at lightspeed.
The Usefulest Fiction
The kicker: what if you believe BRS but it’s untrue?
Would this be a helpful delusion or a harmful one? If you assumed the bus driver, the cashier, and your mid-50s coworker with that weird mole were all secretly plotting for your triumph and flourishing?
Would you approach every person with openness and charitability and curiosity? Would this be interpreted as naïveté by bad actors looking to take advantage of you?
Even if so, is the hot pan on the stove not the truest teacher, even if it hurts when you touch it? Perhaps it is a good teacher because it hurts when you touch it!
Under this delusion, when people inadvertently harm you, the pain is transformed from a transgression to a potential lesson. If your first instinct is to ask “what can I learn from this conflict?” as opposed to something like “how can I get back at them?” then you’re moving toward growth and away from a flavor of revenge that only tastes good for 2 days (and begets more vengeance).
Ultimately, this rests on the intuition of the girl reading this, and I’m very curious to hear your thoughts. For me, the upside of openness and curiosity far outweighs the potential downside of getting burned (which becomes an opportunity to open towards the burn and learn from it rather than reacting reflexively without reflection).
What do you think?
A Good Bet
A wise friend once told me, “the ghetto is probably filled with bodhisattvas”. But why stop there? Why not have every place at every time be filled with bodhisattvas? Why not have all of existence except you be teeming with the mfs? We can’t know either way, but we can literally control the way we view it.
Maybe on the other side of this cute little delusion is a way of meeting the world with an open heart and radical acceptance. Maybe things don’t have to be scary and make us feel small. Maybe the burns on our hand were just This teaching us how to navigate with poise. You don’t keep touching hot pans; why do you then keep getting burned in relationships with people who don’t treat you with respect?
On the flip side, does every painful thing need to be turned into a lesson? Perhaps pain is just pain sometimes, which, ironically, is a lesson unto itself that can only be taught by pain.
The question is, are you ready and able to learn?
Plus Ultra
In my secret heart, Bodhisattvic Reverse Solipsism goes even further beyond.
This is just a Game Theory, but if the conventional self is impermanent and arising due to causes and conditions, then a bodhisattva necessarily takes a more robust form. I believe the ontology of a bodhisattva is a Single Moment. Not a humanesque body or bodies, but an aether-permeating mycelium carpeted across the bounds of A Moment.
A flash of compassion or insight, light of Buddha Nature shining through the mud of conditioning. However, all moments past and future are imagined, existing only in the mind.
There is just one moment; that moment is a bodhisattva; that moment is this moment; thus, all of existence itself is a bodhisattva ferrying you out of samsara right now.
Not each person, but each moment is one configured perfectly for your specific constitution. Double dogg dare you to look for it (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)
This idea is similar in relentlessly whimsypilled flavor to my favorite Pop Frank quote:
A Harrowing Turn of Events…
Quick housekeeping: It has been brought to my attention that no less than three (3) of the top 100 “writers” on Substacks Philosophy Bestsellers list are AI-generated, pandering “Stoic” slop blogs (not to mention the hundreds of the same on the site in general), which means I have a new crusade: mogging every last one of them.
I will not sleep until this task is complete. I cannot keep up with their outpouring of generic quotable garbage, but with your help we can win. Every paid sub to Cuckfucius is a vote for original, artisanal, human-grown ideas, and more importantly, a vote against the milquetoast samey Noise of the Machine.
P.S. If you enjoyed this read, you might enjoy this overview of the spiritual path:
Or if this topic is of particular interest and you’re looking for more high-quality voices, I made this list for that exact purpose:
Pascal’s Wager makes for a great Wikipedia rabbithole. We’ll not go in depth on it in this article but it’s worth a read.
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also known as Guanyin in Chinese
the cycle of death and rebirth
I brought you the wikipedia article for solipsism bb, so you don’t have to click so many buttons <3
thank you Jordan Call for this tip!!
Alright, this is the type of stuff that is gonna get me to fill your alms bowl.
I can smell the synapses burning from here 😅
I love this perspective