by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Jul. 30, 2023) —
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Orson Welles, The Third Man
I have recently realised that I am an iconoclast, but only in regard to the icons of others. Just like everybody else. Not much of a realisation, but rather a rehash of the question “what are the things we can all agree upon?”
That’s a question that hasn’t been answered satisfactorily thus far, at least not to my satisfaction. I believe we should start by asking: “what were we built for?” Men to gather resources and hunt medium-sized animals. Women to bear children. Can we agree on that, at least as an original principle? And both are meant to die no later than age 25, when our bodies start to inevitably decay (but that’s already contentious).
Sometime between the invention of the washing machine and the popularisation of the Internet, we might have achieved a healthy balance between natural and manufactured life.
Then, we got hooked up into the ‘matrix’. We got fat, slow, and complacent. Lethargic. We outsourced our science, dumbed down our philosophy, and forgot our religion. Like Chronos, we started to have too much to live for, to the point where we now contemplate consuming our offspring to sustain our existence.
Much of our lives are spent being too old for what we are doing. My great-grandfather used to catch bulls by the horns with his bare hands, while dressed like a gentleman. In contrast, I sit in the air conditioning, sipping coffee in my pajamas. This can’t work out in the long term.
To me, that’s the greatest and most inextricable paradox between evolution and creation. We cannot be built as the most perfect machines we know to exist only to devolve into lesser machines. It flies in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. But, that’s what we appear to be doing.
Our arts are regressing, our philosophy is regressing, and so is our ability to have honest conversations
This is quite evident: our arts are regressing, our philosophy is regressing, and so is our ability to have honest conversations. It appears that mankind has reached its peak. Yet, we continue to expand our footprint in some way or another.
Is it possible that the best version of ourselves is the one that sits behind a computer all day, not spending enough time teaching children, nor building for the long term, but binge-watching Netflix? Maybe it is. The survival of the fittest doesn’t necessarily mean the survival of the best. What if the best version of myself is also the most misfit?
What if the best version of myself is also the most misfit?
Our civilisation had a difficult puberty. Perhaps it is still having it. Or it is going straight from puberty into menopause, which makes sense when you look at our declining birth rates.
There’s No Need To Be a Hero
You spend your life with next to no purpose but an inner desire, hoping for a tragedy to occur so you can play the hero. Which would allow you, in an unprecedented way, to take revenge on things that might have never happened. It was always you battling your internal Rumpelstiltskin, who keeps ordering you to prepare the tastiest rabbit stew in the world. But when you fail, you face only mild consequences.
In the midst of all this, Günther Grass calls (from beyond) to warn you about presenting yourself as the moral reserve of the community when you are an immoral and lying homunculus. You will resign to this type of life because it is the ‘lesser of evils.’ But the problem is that the ‘lesser of evils’ sometimes grows… and it can grow a lot.
Your life hinges on the small changes you make in your behaviour to adapt to a morally bankrupt world. You are living in the world of The Lives of Others. Our lives taking place in the East Berlin of the 80s.
“The Sorrows of a Young Conformist” is a thin book, easy to read
As someone who opens a can of sardines and is surprised to find sardines inside, one feels a sad embarrassment for their lack of moral fiber, and makes sure to remember that they suffer from acute imbecility, not chronic. A mix of Sisyphus with a dung beetle. A conformist.
A mix of Sisyphus with a dung beetle
The problem is that people stopped confessing in the church to go confess at the pharmacy. “Take a Valium and three Ambiens and go in peace my son,” the new-age priests say. But what is controversial is that some progressive scholars want them to add a “this penance was sponsored by: Pfizer” at the end.
It’s the same playbook: the guy comes with his head down, talking quietly, and asks the pharmacist for his black box meds carrying the guilt of a pious, lapsed Catholic…
“Either we all profit or morality shall be restored,” they think. And then you hear in the distance the music of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, puzzled to see that it is the adults who follow him these days.
Read the rest here.