The only thing that our government can do efficiently anymore is convince people to use their more banal and basic emotions to work against their own interests. Because condescension and hatred and empty, blind bigotry are so easily cultivated in society. Sexual cues; behavioral cues based on persecution and anger; feelings of worthlessness or unattained glory directed outward and projected into their conception of others; twisted plants that have grown from a nebulous childhood trauma that everyone in America knows, a strange feeling of never being able to get what you want; when progress is made, the realization that there is no real progress worth dying for in this country, because the self is put before everything else; the ubiquitous spread of strains of religion that focus on how we are all corrupt in our cores and can only get anything positive if we admit to our own impotence, admit that we are nothing without incorporeal, otherworldly salvation that we never see in this life; all of these things are ruination to the Human soul.
I do not even care all that much whether or not religion is true. Look at what it's gotten us: absolute emptiness. And, somehow, that emptiness is glorified all the more because it really is empty. We live our lives as cattle in herd, surrendering to every hormonal and instinctual whim without real thought, without real development of our emotional state. People seem to think that those first biological inklings that enter the brain are all there is: the desire for nubile sexual attractiveness, of pageantry, of accumulation and domination. All of the things that the religions that are strangling America denounce... they are all what defines us because we ignore their effects. We think as consumers, and more than that, we think as complex systems of stimuli and reward centers. We pick and choose what we believe, regardless of what is provably true; verifiable truth itself is regarded as emptiness. It is a huge polar shift in reality, because to respect critical truth is seen as respecting decadence, rejecting 'nobility'. Nobleness and moral excellence are only seen as conceit and projecting a domineering psyche, even when real 'moral excellence' would mean just the opposite. Our views of good and evil are reversed somehow, and because of this, we see the short-sighted as being the good, we see selfishness as being grand. I say, 'we', because I would like to think that I'm speaking as a part of society... but I have no part in those kinds of behaviors. The small moral inconsistencies that everyone deals with on a daily basis are not part of the greater picture, but because people never learn to think on that larger scale, they make it all a part of the instinctual, knee-jerk thought processes.
It's the time-honored story of every archetypal civilization, boasting its glory and holding its own kingdom higher than that of the rest of the world. Everyone knows how the story always ends, to impose its moral lesson: It crumbles. It self-destructs. But because we are our own Manifest Destiny, because we are the greatest, they will never acknowledge that end coming. Which is ironic, because they would scream at the screen if it were in a movie. They would laugh and look down their noses at it if they weren't too uneducated and too ignorant and too stupefied to understand that it's happening to them. And even if they did understand it, I still believe that they would accept it anyway, because they would take that temporary, amplified pleasure, rather than the guilt they would deserve if anyone ever came to terms with the consequences of living a hubristic, arrogant life; the real irony is that they are nothing but slaves themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment