You've articulated the feelings I, and I'm sure many many others, have been experiencing over the last three years. The despair, demoralization, alienation, inertia, the frozen grief as you so wisely put, all begin to make sense in this philosophical context. Truth has lost its value in the postmodern mind. It's a plaything, a toy to mean whatever one wants it to mean, changeable at any moment. To see this in action is disturbing on many levels. I have certainly felt myself a stranger in the human tribe, exiled by not participating in its blood ritual.
The desire for catastrophe is tangible. I'm glad you pointed this out. I think it gives a sense of meaning, of togetherness that's been missing so deeply. It's intensely primal. I recall my mother telling me how close everyone felt during wartime, that sense of everyone coming together for a common cause, to defend it, to fight. It gave the tribe something to live for, a reason to exist. I believe the pandemic with its virus, the new enemy, achieved the same thing - but in appearances only. We weren't collectively fighting this enemy for our freedom, although it was sold to us as that with its 'Freedom Pass' and other such deceptions. The tribal connections were exploited in its design.
I long for the carolings of the little thrush, those fleeting moments of unbridled joy, of hope, the call of the ecstatic wild, our true selves. I spend as much time as I can in nature for this very reason.
Intellectual riddles wrapped inscrutably in moral enigmas and supranatural mystery.
Yours is a good essay on intellectual riddles wrapped in moral enigmas and inscrutable supranatural mystery. It is to be praised for offering courage, self-help and hope as collective alternatives to individual cowardice and anomie. Death and grief are not the only options for a civilization coping with dreadful cultural loss, collapsing under government-induced cultural terrorism, and resisting bureaucracy-funded cultural euthanasia.
Well, for one thing, you managed to get some value out of "The Silence," which I was not overly impressed by.
Anyway, I've had that sense of longing for catastrophe since I was a teenager, at least. Maybe earlier. Just a feeling that ninety percent of the adult world is dumb bullshit, it can't end well, so we might as well wrap it up. This in turn fed into the intolerable feeling during the 2010s that nothing was changing and we were locked in a horrid stasis, in defiance of all sense.
And reading about Canada's MAID statistics: There's a gonzo scifi novel by Sherri S. Tepper, "Beauty," in which the main character travels to the 21st century. There she finds a world without joy or beauty, in which all other life on earth has been exterminated and humans live in mechanical hives. She manages to escape, but she meets other refugees who talk about people stuffing themselves down garbage chutes, 'sending themselves to Happyland' (suicide) in order to escape their suffering. Eventually the garbage chutes start overflowing.
Gotta say, Tepper nailed it. Happyland has arrived.
You've articulated the feelings I, and I'm sure many many others, have been experiencing over the last three years. The despair, demoralization, alienation, inertia, the frozen grief as you so wisely put, all begin to make sense in this philosophical context. Truth has lost its value in the postmodern mind. It's a plaything, a toy to mean whatever one wants it to mean, changeable at any moment. To see this in action is disturbing on many levels. I have certainly felt myself a stranger in the human tribe, exiled by not participating in its blood ritual.
The desire for catastrophe is tangible. I'm glad you pointed this out. I think it gives a sense of meaning, of togetherness that's been missing so deeply. It's intensely primal. I recall my mother telling me how close everyone felt during wartime, that sense of everyone coming together for a common cause, to defend it, to fight. It gave the tribe something to live for, a reason to exist. I believe the pandemic with its virus, the new enemy, achieved the same thing - but in appearances only. We weren't collectively fighting this enemy for our freedom, although it was sold to us as that with its 'Freedom Pass' and other such deceptions. The tribal connections were exploited in its design.
I long for the carolings of the little thrush, those fleeting moments of unbridled joy, of hope, the call of the ecstatic wild, our true selves. I spend as much time as I can in nature for this very reason.
A very fine piece indeed. Many thanks .
Intellectual riddles wrapped inscrutably in moral enigmas and supranatural mystery.
Yours is a good essay on intellectual riddles wrapped in moral enigmas and inscrutable supranatural mystery. It is to be praised for offering courage, self-help and hope as collective alternatives to individual cowardice and anomie. Death and grief are not the only options for a civilization coping with dreadful cultural loss, collapsing under government-induced cultural terrorism, and resisting bureaucracy-funded cultural euthanasia.
Read Josef Pieper's "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" and Gertrude Himmelfarb's First Things essay on postmodernism: https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/11/tradition-and-creativity-in-the-writing-of-history.
Well, for one thing, you managed to get some value out of "The Silence," which I was not overly impressed by.
Anyway, I've had that sense of longing for catastrophe since I was a teenager, at least. Maybe earlier. Just a feeling that ninety percent of the adult world is dumb bullshit, it can't end well, so we might as well wrap it up. This in turn fed into the intolerable feeling during the 2010s that nothing was changing and we were locked in a horrid stasis, in defiance of all sense.
And reading about Canada's MAID statistics: There's a gonzo scifi novel by Sherri S. Tepper, "Beauty," in which the main character travels to the 21st century. There she finds a world without joy or beauty, in which all other life on earth has been exterminated and humans live in mechanical hives. She manages to escape, but she meets other refugees who talk about people stuffing themselves down garbage chutes, 'sending themselves to Happyland' (suicide) in order to escape their suffering. Eventually the garbage chutes start overflowing.
Gotta say, Tepper nailed it. Happyland has arrived.