Almost everybody (in the West especially) has painted himself into a corner by accepting a raft of basic assumptions about the world that are so nihilistic that they actually want to destroy themselves, their society - and everybody else in the world.
Literally.
Indeed, Modern Man positively insists that everybody in the world must believe exactly as himself or else be annihilated; despite that his beliefs are visibly, with a crazed acceleration, destroying everything and on the cusp of creating the By Far greatest cataclysm the world has ever seen (simply because there are now far more people in a far more interconnected world than ever before).
All these crazed, despairing, self-loathing, other-hating people!
And what they want more than anything else is not an escape from the self-imposed end of everything that they personally value most; but instead that the whole world be compelled to share in their existential collapse!
They seethe with resentment and hatred against anybody or any place that does not enthusiastically agree with their futile anti-system - a system of pure negation that explicitly denies any purpose or meaning in the universe, in life, in mankind, in anything...
So insane is this, that although they claim to live only for pleasure and to avoid misery (i.e. some variant of the utilitarianism that forms the only 'moral' basis of the entire bureaucratic-media world of institutions, corporations, government and all the social functions); they nonetheless agree-with an ideology (and demand policies) that purposively and visibly is destroying pleasure and inflicting suffering - including on themselves! Now and more to come!
...Hedonists who insist on the elimination of pleasure; terrified of pain yet co-creating a world of mega-agony.
All that is on the surface; and it is almost ubiquitous - therefore its cause must be deep and widespread.
Its cause is metaphysical - which means at the level of people's primary assumptions concerning the nature of reality.
It is these metaphysical assumptions that have driven the world into its current frenzy of self-hating, other-hating suicide - such that the main object of hatred is anyone, anyplace, any era, that dissents from the orgy of self-loathing nihilism.
One thing people will Absolutely Not give-up is their metaphysical assumptions; such that reality necessarily has no meaning or purpose, there is no God, no soul, that death terminates existence, that everything happening is an accident of determinism and randomness.
And even many of those who reject these above assumptions, nonetheless absolutely Insist on painting themselves into a corner with incoherent, self-contradicting assumptions about the nature of God, Evil and human freedom.
And these religious people have much the same character as the nihilists - in that they rage against those who reject their immiserating, paralysing, futile, life-dissolving, future-denying doctrines.
The one thing that nearly-everyone is way too demotivated, sophisticated, skeptical and other-obedient to accept; is that Jesus Christ came to bring us everlasting resurrected life in Heaven; and that to make this choice requires only that we personally do what is necessary to follow him on the path he made for us.
That is what the world conspires to reject; at every possible level.
9 comments:
Two things puzzle me about the human mind. First, there is no real "ancestral" memory for which I see any evidence. Rather, everything tends to "roll up" with the grandparents (or even with the parents). A great-grandparent might as well be a space alien; we never learn. I stopped writing my blog because from the perspective of writing about human affairs, all I could see were the same mistakes and the same misbegotten solutions, over and over.
Second, we are such incredibly individualistic creatures, literally 7.5 billion different universes all walking around on one planet.
I haven't thought this since the Cold War: we really could blow each other to smithereens or poison each other with a bio-engineered virus. Humanity ends up in feral, half-mad packs wandering the ruins of civilization, slowly going extinct.
@A-G - Some people have ancestral memory - JRR Tolkien for example. Wordsworth another.
I don't see the same mistakes through history - but extremely different ones.
An we are individualistic Now (esp in the West) - but this was not the case through history. What about the ancient Egyptians? Or even the medievals in Europe? Individualism is a modern era thing.
Certainly your scenario is what some powerful people are engineering, and a majority of the masses seem to agree with the plans to achieve civilizational collapse - and simply don't think about the predictable outcomes of the main policies of the global totalitarians.
Yes. I've mentioned before it's as if modern man has erected an iron dome over himself.
Agree completely on Tolkein. I'm not a lettered man so I'll take your word on Wordsworth.
Here's something interesting from personal experience: you can find your typical Anglo-American working class and explain the development of the common law of England to him and he'll be nodding along in agreement from the beginning; he feels it in his bones. But immigrant law students from China or the Middle East in first year Torts, Contracts and Property are utterly baffled by the concept. The notion that Law precedes the Sovereign Ruler is utterly alien to them.
I have been reading Spengler's Decline of the West, and in a section I read tonight he spoke of a coming nihilistic age that would being around the year 2000 on mass, and the beginnings of which would start around 1800. I haven't made my mind up on his theories overall, but I found this interesting.
About a decade ago I was starting to explore returning to church after a period of atheism, and I began visiting churches. I remember noticing from my visits, and discussing with a friend, how it felt like in the vast majority of churches the people didn't REALLY believe. Something felt performative, necessary out of an internal urge, or something else I can't exactly put my finger on, but not coming from a genuine belief.
A lot of what I see today, of which I think also applies to secular institutions and life, is a type of disembodiment between the person and the soul. All of the desires for certainty, patters of thinking and behavior, extreme emotions, scorn, desires etc., and basically, things that have been categorized by science, are online in the individual and sorta thrashing about, but people feel cut off from the soul (or one might say source, God, spirit, etc.). Without this connection they are trying to act out something that might resemble how things would be if that connection with the soul was in tact, but it comes out in a perverted form. But yet people feel like they live in a world that has long since discredited the existence of God, and so they feel they are left with very little choice.
I pray that more can find their way back to a real communion with God.
@AG - Getting rid of our Common Law - which indeed dates from Anglo Saxon times, before the Normans - was probably one of the main objectives of joining the EU - which rapidly swamped the system with new (and much more rigorously enforced) Roman Law.
But now that the ruling and professional classes are Godless and corrupt, Common Law would make no significant difference; since no system is Good of itself, and evil motivation from Men ensures that any residual Good would be subverted/ destroyed/ inverted in its application.
@SS1 - Spengler is full of interesting insights!
You might enjoy a social overview about Nihilism, but from an Eastern Orthodox Christian perspective, by the young Eugene Rose, shortly before he became the monk Seraphim Rose:
https://www.oodegr.com/english/filosofia/nihilism_root_modern_age.htm
I can (perhaps only somewhat) understand an eternity from now, but what about eternity before the present? At some point I must have been created. Was I always?
@Evan - That is an example of what can be known only by each, for himself.
Once you have truly clarified the question, in your thinking, with motivation to know the truth of it; then you will know the answer.
And not before; because if you don't know it for yourself and by experience, then it is just more stuff somebody else is telling you.
The widespread Nihilism reminds me of the Nuclear War prophesied in 2 Peter 3:6-7:
"Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men".
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