I used to have a lot more faith in Mankind, because I knew deep inside me that I was a part of it, and therefore what I held to be valuable could be reflected somewhere else, or even in a multitude of points. But, I'm 25, and I've never found any real evidence that this is true.
To say that I don't feel the Human race deserves to have people like me alive at this moment in time sounds pretentious, or vitriolic, or bitter... but it's how I feel. It isn't that I'm so lofty and high-horsed that I look down on everything, or that I am forlorn to the point of rejection. But when I look at all of the different ways the world is slowly descending into anyone's conceptualization of Hell, I start to believe this more and more.
I don't really think the world deserved someone like Nietzsche. I'm not sure he really ended up doing any good. I don't think the world deserved Aristotle, because all we've done up to now is rape his ideas for our own benefit. I don't think the world ever truly deserved music in the grander sense.
Because, right now is where we are at. We may have done great things in the past, and we may still do great things, but as of right now, we don't deserve any of our virtues. The only thing we do deserve is a steadfast surrender to death, or to self-destruction of some kind.
And, to pull this feeling around is going to take so much effort, so much optimism, so much innovation that I honestly don't believe that Humanity has that kind of capacity. It's as if we've reached the penultimate point of evolution, but we can never cross over that gorge because we weren't meant to. We are all caught in a protracted cycle of Roman collapse in the historical sense. We are all meant to relive tragedy, but without the familiar catharsis at the end.
All I can do to keep my sense of self is to disconnect and do what makes me happy. All I can do to make myself happy is to forsake the rest of Humanity, and delve within. Isn't that the antithesis, though, of what I desire in life? I would like to be a part, however small, of that great upending; the distortion and final collapse of selfishness.
It would be such a grand movement, and it would be the changing root that gave birth to incomprehensible greatness. But what it requires to take hold is something that I don't believe the Human brain is capable of. Because, for every Nietzsche, there is an Elizabeth, waiting to take every feeling of love he had for her and twist it, posthumously raping his ideals. For every Aristotle, there is a Plato; a more dialectic, but more degenerate form of purity, waiting to drag something into the depths of the Deimos. For every great musician willing to plumb every depth and cleanse Mankind of its ill-gotten philosophies, there are a hundred faux performers, jesters and emotional thieves and playwrights.
For every ounce of truth that we have constructed over millennia, there are tons and tons of selfishness, of emotional egocentricity, of pure sin. And this isn't the kind of sin that we'd like to attribute to monotheism. This is the real kind; the waiting, brooding snake that is a truth underneath our vaguer thoughts.
We'd rather clutch the wheel and watch those around us plunge into fire, not realizing the entire time that we are also headed there, because we'd rather have the spectacle. We'd rather give up, because the end cannot be pure in a selfish sense; once tainted, everything is scrap and trash. There is nothing worth saving in the existential sense, because we are all born into the falsely Human-defined concept of "sin".
It shows in our political structures and movements, our social hierarchies, our prejudices that last even through a barrage of rationality. It shows in everything we do. We are selfish first and foremost. There is no real purity, because that is our current root. Postmodernism is an ashamed idea that was never conceived to give us this result. We are the children of relativism that is absolute only in the fact that it is absolutely self-centered and greedy.
Like clockwork, I always go back to what someone told me a long time ago... that I was too smart for my own good.
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