Zeitgeist

I think one of the important roles of culture is that of creating a larger sense of self, of being able to see something which will endure when one is gone, which is vastly less subject to the ravages of at least immediate time.

As thinkers have both been commenting, and helping, in turn, to ensure, we live not just in the contingent world which has always been the human condition, but a world as well where our assumptions about tomorrow are necessarily guesswork.  Who, other than greedy psychopaths, really WANT self driving cars?  Robots to do our work, leaving us free–for what, exactly?  Sex, sex, and more sex?  I have never had the sense any of these Silicon Valley moguls was seeking to create the space for Americans to write great novels, or paint the next Sistine Chapel.  The very manic energy with which we pursue our work precludes nearly all forms of greatness outside of formal scientific, and perhaps business, innovation.

It is an insane ludetic system, where everyone is looking at everyone else, trying to “win”, without asking basic questions about the nature of, and value of, the game itself.

I feel strongly it will one day bear fruit, that it will have been worth it, but for right now I feel myself plugged into our Zeitgeist, and all I feel in unpleasant electrical current, that flows through me, that feels unstoppable, unquenchable, like mad horses racing to the horizon for no reason other than a mania for movement.  They can’t stand still.  There is no peace.  LSD and meditation serve to further the “success” of the mania, rather than calming and enlightening and quieting. You microdose to beat the bastards before they beat you.  There is nothing larger.

I finished “Stranger Things”, and will comment that it could quite easily be seen as a splitting of the American psyche.  The demonic lives in a parallel dark world which continues to prey on this world, which is a threat to this world, but which cannot be seen.

When did we last engage in rational dialogue?  When could we last meet together as unapologetic American patriots who disagreed on means, but not ends?  When could we last love one another, while disagreeing strenuously on the nature and role of government? It was not later than the early 1980’s, I don’t think, although the whole process has been so gradualistic that it is hard to place an exact moment on the continuum of sliding clearly separating one moment from another.

I see people blame Newt Gingrich.  This is likely not entirely wrong, but it seems to me all he did was point out and crystallize a large gap which had been evolving and growing for a long time. He made publicly real what had been latent but still real, for a very long time.

I have to say that finding peace of mind while remaining fully conscious is a miracle of sorts.  But miracles do happen.  This is the value of the notion and history of saints.