Modern Man's Metaphysical Blindness
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
“I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.”
Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
Lately, my writing has been extremely fixed on the metaphysical purpose of “becoming” and why it is going through an unprecedented transition. In The Absolute State of the American Family, I focus on how the average American with any level of success doesn’t know how to accept that the diminishing returns of the end of the Faustian Man isn’t at all what they prepared for. For anyone who personally knows any successful, American consoomer families, their eyes are fixed constantly on events and exponential increase of success. For even lower-income families, the focus is less on career or investment success, and more so the achievement of vain material acquisition (I knew a lot of lower-class families as a kid who financed giant, surround-sound speakers), or even just obtaining desire-related delights (sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll).
What I would like, and this is a broader goal of mine, is to convince people that there is something greater than they, and that without realizing that greater power, God, has selected them as His own, then man is doomed to a mean-reversion to lawlessness and chaos; the natural state of humanity. I guess more importantly to people individually, they will have no purpose for life other than to suffer indefinitely to seemingly no end.
It seems as though the average person who generally lands somewhere between atheist and apatheist, has no appetite in life for anything other than consumption and to feed the self. Satiating the thirst for a reason doesn’t much plague them. The separation between the modern man and the hundreds of generations preceding him is his arrogance. The miracles and glory of unknowing was an amazement to pre-industrial peoples.
We call the modern era, the Information Age, as if it is supposed to be a self-explanatory wowism, but all it does is ironically reflect modern man’s ability to inebriate himself into a stupor off his own farts. This is the era of societal and cultural decay, weening off of the record amount of malinvestment, both monetary and genetic.
Miraculous events are generally inexplainable. To me, it is the holiness of life; the beauty that cannot be put into words, or seemingly coincidental events that happen so often a mathematician would be boggled. God is built into the very woodwork of life, but man’s modern arrogance, woven and worked from the cloth of egotism, keeps him from becoming a child once more and being more of innocence and curiosity. Modern man is so ashamed of himself, so cold and calculated, he doesn’t know what it is like to say, “I don’t know.” He entrusts and emboldens men, over his own gut, his own spirit, his own mind, his own heart, and casts any wonderment of life out, as any confusion he has can be explained away.
Ironic, too, the arrogance is wrought from his own naivety, but he does not realize that, because he is naïve. A child is naïve, in that they do not know of the horrors and sins of this world, and yet, they can be the most intelligent, as they receive information readily and eagerly. And like most children generally recognize their own low lot in this world, they accept that the adult knows better. However, man’s worship of the progress myth and scientism keeps him from understanding what he does not know. This is where knowledge means nothing, and yet, is everything to man. He is so cooked and fixated on the knowings of this world, but cannot admit when he is mindless, when the unexpected happens, when the miraculous takes place. He thinks he will discover the answer, in this rigid “reality,” and yet years after his answer is discovered, he turns out wrong, or half-right, and is disregarded as an old fool who hasn’t gotten with the times.
This is the folly of man. He seeks, he finds, and dusts off his hands and wraps up the show, then his entire idol comes crashing to the ground not long later. This is where knowledge reaps lesser and lesser reward, in a world where knowledge seems conveniently attainable, and yet ever-changing (more-so, day-by-day).
There is no midwit generation, there is no generation culpable for all the failures, but rather, this is the saeculum of the slowdown, as we embrace the decay, once and for all.
The metaphysically-stunted seem to be a scourge, and it prevents them from being content in the moment. They are fidgety, looking for a fix, or another god to worship. The masks, the coof, the state-mandated meds are all a logical conclusion, a farcical ending, for a culture that has abandoned any sense of worthiness and spiritual destination, for the worship of their own midwit knowledge. We have reached peak douchebag, pencil-necked Californian.
The embracement of a strictly anti-metaphysical life has become too much for most people, but most of them are not able to make their way out of this hell. They are blind, and must be made to see. They must be prepared to beg and plead, to hope, to have faith, and to learn how to love once again. A wonderful person in my church group brought up that young people’s understanding of love is so rotten; they do not know how to love someone. It always seems to be associated with sex and a bizarre worship of the reciprocating individual. It is not seen as a union, anymore, between two loving people, to honor God in the most holy way possible. Wow. Fat chance! It is a way to have sex and to partially fill the infinite hole of emptiness and loneliness!
Modern man doesn’t know what he wants, or who he wants. He simply fills it. Even ol’ Teddy made a good point that ancient man used to be perfectly content sitting around staring at a campfire for eight hours straight, and yet, modernity has made man into a fidgety, empty hole of unending hunger for more. This isn’t just modernity anymore, but hypermodernity. The diminishing returns of a barring on originality has been made, and with a decaying culture that doesn’t evolve anymore, there is no way up. You could get rid of the poz, and maybe it would make things a bit better, but there are too many decaying variables that make the equation lesser and lesser yielding. So, instead of being original, all we do is regurgitate and redo what was done before, especially since it is a safer financial bet for hollywood. Hell, we literally have about a three-quarter century’s worth of art to just steal from and mimic off of, until we are a generation or two away, and all that has been created in this century is spinoffs and remasters, and sequels and prequels of what already has been done.
Isn’t that all he worships, though? Modern man loves his toys, he loves his bread, he loves his circus. If you are just well-meaninged and honest enough, you’ll recognize the turn has been made, and we are lacking in the toys and candy, so the show better be wrapped up a little bit sooner than later. You don’t want the fat man to keep killing himself with sugar food and cigarettes, but you also don’t want to be mean. It’s a rough balance.
In order for modern man to be whole again, he must start pushing away the necessity for always being right, for always searching for an answer, for always seeking material wholeness, and admit to the endless pit of foolery he has been groping around in. God wants you to find Him, but we have become so unhumble, the conflagration of our soul is only more of a recognition of God’s power. It’s only true that those who do not step back and admire that they are powerless, who are destined for emptiness and eternal suffering. Why is it so many of us can’t take a minute to question why those before us, in times before the proliferation of scientism, had such an appreciation for life? They had a knowing that they do not know, and they almost had a safe pride in that. They knew that miracles and mercy were tantamount to God’s mystery, and that as long as they did what was right, they would have a place with God.
That just isn’t enough for modern man. There is no mystery, there is no meaning, there is not point, for him. And if he is to be saved, he will step back from his impudence, and understand that he simply does not know, and that this fickle world is beyond his understanding, and that that is a beautiful remark.
Ironic, yet again, the decay of modernity, is only proof of the fleeting reality of human existence, and that it can only be solved by embracing powerlessness — that life is not about a constant chasing of the ever-slipping away dust in the wind, but appreciation and revelation of the glory of God’s Creation, that we may bask in this tragic, yet amazing thing He has called Life.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.”
John 6:47
“It was Pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.”
St. Augustine