The odd feeling of exploring people's personal sites on the net, their diaries, their pictures, their thoughts and dreams and souls, all bared to
the online world like some kind of crazy stripper dancing before the great and the knowledgeable. Is it truly a good thing for everybody to be
able to read everybody else's stuff, even if they want them to? The world has become too small, and people do not realize by plotting their
thoughts on the graph of the net they belittle themselves, make themselves thinner, and not thinner in the small physical sense, but in the
metaphysical, the mind, the soul, they stretch themselves, so that we can now see through, like a huge piece of skin stretched across a
tennis court. And so we look inside, and they stand there, blinking in the headlights, like rabbits caught in the front of the great juggernaught
of public life. Some will be chosen to ride center stage, others trampled beneath their feet in a desperate struggle to be somebody, be
something, because our society has robbed us of that, by making the only thing that we struggle for recognition on the wider stage. This will
not come, cannot possibly come for all of us. And the problem is that we all want it. And we can't just have a little, we must have it all.
Super-star or super-nothing. Self defeating.
Why is it that we have been taught that we must be better than everybody? Is this a male thing, strictly center on the masculine persona? Or
does it spread, like the virus of consumerism, across all creeds and sexes and classes? We notice that all little boys want to be footballers,
and all little girls models or actresses, all careers that are consumer by fame and self-importance. The old ideals of modesty and compassion
are dying out, even as we see the growth of charities, or the guilt business, as Western society realizes how it has raped the world, and tries
to half-heartedly pay for its mistakes and its follies and its crimes. Charity exists to quell the tiny voice in all the consumers' heads, that for
every Gap jean they buy, a child is being killed; for every fridge, a tree is slain; every car, a fish falls to the bottom of the sea, rotten. All
Western compassion, all its charity, is hypocritical.
The root of the problem is that the West has lost its direction. Or rather, the individual members of the society have lost it. They blunder from
job to job, from club to club, from woman to man, without purpose of destiny. The death of ideology has left the West without a path, or even
a set of different paths, to find its way along. Pragmatism rules, the market and fickle public opinion are the policy makers, the business the
boss. It is amusing to see the people of this country, Britain, support the offloading of public services, to move merit goods from the
government to unelected corporations, which don't even have to bow to consumer choice as they are franchised. The folly of the modern
world. We must find a new ideology, one that works, one which allows discussion and destruction of itself. A dynamic ideology. Twisting,
changing, almost, dare I use the term, natural. One which can evolve as the world does. And hopefully shape it in its evolutions well.
What that ideology may be I have no idea. I just hope somebody thinks of one quick because I don't think the human race, or at least the
West, is going to survive without it. |
