Amerika

Why does our society excel, above all else, in making trash?

Mounds of it in landfills. Used book stores clogged with failed ideas, old editions of Wikipedia that need citations. Mountains of rusting cars in lots, discarded equipment from UN missions in third world nations, piles of smashed circuit boards. People who are lonely and angry, moving from one Big Idea to the next, finding nothing they can hold on to and blaming themselves, restarting the cycle.

So much trash. Surely some waste must come about; but why this abundance?

We lack a central principle, an idea that is “eternal” because it applies in any situations, since our logic centers itself on the individual and works outward from there. Prozak’s law: You either try to know yourself in order to know the world, or try to know the world in order to know yourself. The former brings discipline, clarity and the eternal; the latter, an endless search for that external source of The Word that delivers you from evil.

As a result, our world from a symbolic point of view is like one of those rotating display cages they use for postcards: pretty visions of the world go by as it spins, each one seeming unique, and yet we cannot find anything that ties them together except we’d like to visit and escape our everyday world… which is bloated in trash.