And I woke up pondering a statistic I saw the other day, that the AVERAGE American is on their smart phones about 3 hours a day, and THEN watches about another 3 hours of TV. Consider that most jobs involve sitting in front of a computer, and you have people who have completely lost touch with reality. They live in a dream world, where they are addicting to stimuli.
This article was on InfoWars today: https://www.infowars.com/when-did-halloween-become-so-sick-twisted-and-gory/ I looked up the Sabrina video. In the comments on YouTube one commenter said “‘ She annoyed me so I killed her’, LMAO. That gets me every time”.
The change, obviously, has been the violence and popularity of our horror movies, where motifs of human sacrifice and cannibalism and dark cults have become staples.
Cultural atavism/regression, in other words. These are not harmless images, and not harmless stories. They have an effect. They are seeds, planted in the unconscious of millions of people around the world, creating a longing for that precious violence which comes to seem necessary for health and flourishing.
This is the world we are building/moving into unconsciously.
I was looking at T-Shirts the other day. Here is one of the Top Sellers: https://www.redbubble.com/people/stevenrhodes/works/29220924-lets-summon-demons?cat_context=u-tees&grid_pos=7&p=long-t-shirt&rbs=e2d273fc-a8f4-4755-9bc0-c005717d34cb&ref=shop_grid
“Let’s Summon Demons”. Hilarious. I’ve seen many demons. There is nothing funny about them. They are a distortion of everything good, like a reflecting pond in an earthquake.
All of these things have causes, antecedents. And much of it MUST be related to the materialism taught in schools, and the socialism also taught in schools. Playing with things like Ouija boards is, I read, something kids are into, or were a few years ago. They are looking for SOMETHING, some sign that their lives are not pointless, even if it means going the wrong direction.
We have lost the ability to talk in public honestly and soberly about the things that matter. Where are our leaders doing this? Trump does this, to the best of his ability. He is not a deep man, but he is in my view an honest man, and one capable of acting instantly on reasonable–really average, which makes him exceptional in this fallen age–moral instincts. He is capable of saying “hey, this guy is a serial rapist torturer and murderer. We should kill him.”. So he kills him.
Patently, our media lacks the same average, BASIC, rudimentary moral compass. It is appalling and baffling, even for a cynic like me. Seemingly there is nothing left there, no residual sense of right and wrong, no lingering conscience. It is unbelievable.
The more I grow, the more silly my plans to change the world seem. I won’t give up, but I am losing that sense of urgency. Most people are not ready to listen to me. Most people don’t want to hear what I have to say, that you can grow as a person through long term, extended, and difficult effort, which you can undertake even when you are not suffering from immediate mental illness.
Most people want to live in a fantasy land, in video games, in music, in media. They have superficial relationships where terrible pain can be felt and never expressed. I was watching an SNL video the other day, with Chris Farley and David Spade. Do you think Chris Farley ever felt like he could confide his inner pain with David Spade? Spade has always struck me as a guy who looks around him in every direction prior to answering any question. His first question is always how any decision he makes, anything he says, will be perceived by the people he things of as cool. He is detached, ugly.
And if I might make the SNL cast an example, as much fun as they seem to have, do you think they were ever REALLY able to rely on one another? No: it was all show. They were in show business. Creating illusions was and is their job.
And we valorize, idealize, the “image players”, if I might translate directly the German for actor. And so many act their ways through life, and go home to misery which in tens of thousands of cases every year just in America winds up in their death.
I am losing my taste for participating in this system, in this silliness, this fraud, this vain illusion. It has long seemed to me at some point I would need to take my metaphor of living in a cave more literally. I’m obviously not going FULL literal–I sleep on a thin mattress on the floor, but I still like having a mattress and HVAC–but I may slowly stop going out as much, and start focusing more on my meditation.
I have a metaphor I will make my Bon Mot in my next post.