I.
For all my sentimental weaknesses, I am not a sentimental man. The previous thirty-one years have probably hardened me more than they should. There are all too many parts of life which I watch passively with a stony contempt which all-too-rarely boils over into harsh, passionate hatred. Yet I truly wish that I hated more deeply, more passionately, more often.
I could say that there are many sources to inspire my black-hearted rage, but aside from the occasional musical stupidity, it comes down to one very easy thing. I don’t hate any form of contemporary music, I just hate the culture which produces it. I don’t hate religion, I hate the culture which sanctifies it. I don’t hate political gridlock, I hate the culture which allows for an ideological segment of the population to cause it and then distribute blame equally. We can say that the problems of the world are due to the international system, or to imperialism and racism or to liberalism and progressivism, or to every other ‘ism’ under the stars. But the answer to why we live in a fucked up world is all too simple. There is no system, there is us. As the one sane man among us often says: ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ We define our own culture, we grow it, we accumulate it, we harvest it, and we enact it; and we are lacking in culture to the n’th degree of the earth. Culture, culture, culture, culture, culture. And your culture sucks!
But since I have a sentimental weakness for my own self-pity, I will also state very plainly that I am the exact opposite of every point of view that is most accepted (perhaps most rewarded) in my generation. I am a humanities guy in an era that rewards math and technology, a virtual idol-worshiper of aesthetic order finding himself in cultural scene after scene with a taste for the chaotic. My eyes are firmly rooted in the past - the past is all we can understand, yet the world around me does nothing but debate the future. I'm a borderline economic socialist in a libertarian world, a social liberal in an age when social liberalism is a given and only social conservatives and progressives have any effect on society, and the most aristocratically minded cultural archconservative you'll ever meet in a world awash with cultural permissiveness. I don’t like your music, I don’t like the movies you watch, I don’t like the books you read, I don’t like your political beliefs, I don't like the clothes you wear, or your tattoos, or your body piercings, I think you’re all a disgrace to the privileges which previous generations earned for you through untold millenia of horror and suffering, and tuck in your goddamn shirt!!
Griping about the horror of the world’s culture is is probably the chief subject of this blog, of all the writing I’ll ever do, and the only affirming flame I can show against a species which stops at nothing to kill as many people and braincells (and not necessarily in that order) as it can every day. Your curiosity and passion for the world is lacking, and it makes you a less alive person. I’m here to remind you of that.
In all probability, culture was never any better than it is today. In fact, it was probably worse. But if so, what a terrible place the world is to live. We live in a world that trivializes, prettifies, commodifies and glorifies completely ersatz visions of the world’s most important emotions, and makes us all glad to be shielded from experiencing the real thing. Rock music can make you feel identical feelings of rebellion and individuality to the thousands of people next to you. Movies can convince you that two-dimensional, kitsch love of people more glamorous than any of us will ever be is precisely what we should expect as our birthrights.
What most people experience is not life, their life experiences are the purest form of addiction. The very idea of America, and the very idea of the world it currently dominates, is one enormous anesthetic needle. You are now free, and therefore free to have your identity controlled by the sensory overload you see every day on the internet, on television, on billboards, on magazines, at church, at school, at work, and all those cravings which those advertisements bring upon you. How are any of us supposed to examine our lives critically when every one of us exists in a bubble within which our thoughts are scrupulously controlled - controlled by the Grand Inquisitor and enforced by O’Brien? And because your culture is so weak, you ask me “Who is the Grand Inquisitor? Who is O’Brien?”
The answer, dear reader, is you. We are our own jailers, and every day we turn the key upon ourselves. Like children, we are shielded from all which is good and bad that life has to offer, yet we are our own parents - both pet and master. We make the products upon which we engorge ourselves, we elect the leaders we love to hate, we willingly submit ourselves to the grind of lives we can't stand among people whom we can't stand and people who can't stand us. And the worst part of this system is... it’s still the best the world has ever been!
II.
I have no idea what real love is, and I don’t expect to know that for a long long while yet. But if it’s anything at all like we hear in pop songs from ‘Something’ to ‘Endless Love’, then I long to spend my remaining years in monk-like celibacy. Love as most first-worlders understand it is based upon a lie, and that lie is a fucking pernicious crack pipe - a potentially lethal cocktail of synthetic love and glamorized lust which we flatter ourselves by calling romance. Surely, you reason, it must be love if the reality of this moment is so intense that it obliterates our awareness of every other moment in existence, and surely it’s not lust if you harbor some tender feeling for this thing you’re fucking.
How different is this ‘new romance’ from the concept of romance as humans understood it for thousands of years. We humans once romanticized the great quests of existence: yes, we romanticized war, but we romanticized its adventure, not its horror - we romanticized the way in which it interrupted the unending monotony of our squalorous existence, and justified the sacrifices of a few lucky souls who had the glamour of a memorable death against the endless toil and shit which comprised the pre-modern era’s average life well-lived. We also romanticized great learning, we romanticized magic and myth, and we only romanticized love when it remained unconsummated. These concepts were romantic because they were extraordinary, and took place on a plane which mere mortals like us could never experience. Now we romanticize all those things which every one of us can get our dirty hands on from time to time with a surfeit of effort and a lack of dignity: money, sports, fleeting fame, and most significantly: sex. We no longer romanticize the extraordinary, in fact, we don’t care about the extraordinary at all. We romanticize the things we already do because the things we do are so boring that we have to convince ourselves that we’re still interested in them - and therefore, we romanticize nothing in our lives but our own craven addictions.
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