Amerika

Things have not been right in the West for a long time. This is invisible unless we look at the sum total of the facts and add them up to a spirit.

If our time has a spirit, it is worship of the individual, and a sense of opposition to society at large. The goal is to get your pile of money and get out of the game.

Even more, it is clear that our political system does nothing but repeat the same old tropes but with more dangerous toys. The constant fight for equality has worn everyone down to nubs of human beings.

Everyday life has become completely alienated. People hide in their homes because there is no culture and other people represent risk and not much else.

Casual sex has alienated people so much that they cannot maintain marriages. They are aliens to each other, going through motions they see on television and in movies.

Religion has become another venue for herd propaganda. None of the people in charge believe in a world beyond the material anyway. They are just there to socially engineer “moral” behavior.

Similarly, the schools, scientists, media, and social leaders have all jumped on the administrative-managerial state and its desire for social engineering. No smoking while you drink and drive, and eat ze bugs.

Non-issues dominate public discussion. Why talk about setting aside half the land for nature, making our own products, and burning the ghettos so we do not have to commute so much? We have to emote about abortion instead.

Absolutely no one has hope for humanity. Everyone wants a palliative life: make the pain go away, pass the hours, and hope death is painless and unobserved. Anaesthetize me and tell me happy things.

Even more, we have disassociative identity disorder. We have one identity in public where we pretend things are going well and repeat the dogma; we have another in private where we know it is all doomed and plot for escape.

This got bad with the Civil War but became crushing with the first World War, and now in the end of history, is simply dreary, ill-fitting, and utilitarianly ugly like the old Soviet Union.

We killed the kings for paradise. We slaughtered the Whites for Utopia. Now we live in purgatory, always drugging ourselves with the promises of progress, but never seeing any of it really work.

And so we go on, lying to everyone we meet, keeping up our public persona so that we do not become unperson. Our narcissistic society worships individual humans, not any kind of order that can unite them.

Tags: modernity, palliative, Postmodernism