No. of Recommendations: 17
Nietzsche worried that, if we fail to vanquish and decisively replace the shadow of values derived from God, we risk our culture slipping into a deep nihilism. The death of God means there is no going back: we either find a new mechanism for value creation ' a 'revaluation of values', as Nietzsche put it ' or we will eventually descend into a world where, recognizing our values are ultimately foundationless and meaningless, we will become apathetic and cynical ' even despairing.
What is remarkable that these thoughts were written well before the popular nihilist movements of the early 20th.
Our new religion is the slave work values (we cheer working hard and making a profit) and consumerism (force-trained through incessant advertising). Many of our waking hours are between these processes in some way (thus, we continue to 'pray' even thinking we overcame this), but this is not enough for us.
Industrialisation and turning men into labor machines (working at Starbucks is the same slave-like process) contributes further to this.
The Soviet Union had an ingenious solution; in killing God (including literally tearing down churches) they recognised consciously the void that had to be filled, and they filled it with.. art. They had an enormous emphasis upon attention to art, and education of art. Spiritually it was highly successful. Their successful removal of God had unavoidable conflict and related to the removal of the former power structure with standards of living incomparable worse, but the killing of God had enormous popular support. Unlike our own cultures (readers here are largely in Europe and USA, but indeed US culture inherited European culture) they really did kill off God, and so had much more of a pressing need for the aesthetic void that was to be left - as Nietzsche had predicted - with only science and industrial development alone. [ I would add that sports attention (in a human developmental sense, not in our capitalist spectator sense) partly helped fill this void also - the affirmation of life - though it was the attention toward art that really balanced the death of God. ]
The current threads about benign politics, a general feeling of spectating rather than participating (ie, powerlessness), and artefacts such as ignoring far larger political questions (such as the systemic failures, the constant violation of international law by the US, the possibly long-term disfunction of the US political system - and how to enforce its change by public action); instead this is replaces by individual-pointing which, like neoliberalism more generally (which ignores systemic errors by instead blaming only the individual), is a highly conscious attention directing process to make us feel powerless to place our attention questions. I know political marketing strategists who discuss these techniques completely openly and proudly. Thinking along these lines is far too dangerous, and thus it becomes out of range of gentlemanly discourse, Assange is victimises for example, as we are indoctrinated to talk about benign political small-talk that is 100% in line with the existing power structure.
With some of these thoughts, I encourage readers here to take more interest in art and in particular, mythology. Try to limit historical reading to more than 1,000 years ago at least one week a year. If one wishes to understand our own cultural ancestry, I found it helpful to study Zoroastrianism because Christianity was largely inherited from that. They are very similar in many ways, both with the good/bad duality - though in under Christianity 'good' means 'unquestioning belief' and 'bad' means 'disobedience', whilst originally under our religious ancestry, 'good' used to mean 'truth' and 'bad' meant 'decipt/falsehood' - so earlier our own religion (Zoroastrianism) ancestry resembled modern science far more closely than how it evolved post 500AD. This is someone handled by fiction, but I believe we desperately need more depth, a search for the profile and beautiful, and more questioning in our repressed aesthetic hunger.
Sorry for type errors, I'm typing in an airport with limited iPhone battery life.. I find airports are great for re-examining one's unconsciously educated (brainwashed) thought processes.
- Manlobbi
