we don't go from ignorant childhood to adult individualism, we go from wild child to a disciplined adulthood. we have to make ourselves slaves to our disciplines, and these are cultural, national or racial; all have differing levels of clarity and justifiability; all cannot be true at the same time. I'm not sure I know the question that follows this revelation; I know that Nietzsche ended his investigation shortly after bringing this to a civilisational level;
how are we to live when God is dead?
in bringing the revelation to this level, it becomes (certainly for me) impossible to tackle. he famously prophesied that we must either drift toward nihilism or totalitarianism without God. now it certainly seems that the culture we inhabit has fallen very close to nihilism, as in the middle of the last century we fell sway to totalitarianism and it left such a scar, such a terrible taste in the mouth, that any step towards that direction again has become impossible, and so the slippery slope in the other direction, that heedless crashing towards liberty in itself, which every method of thought, every religion, every ideology, has warned against; has become synonymous with the good.
the limping, tragic figure of the culture we inhabit is open to searing critique from within, and joyfully, and open to existential threats from without, and blindly. if Nietzsche was correct, then it seems we've chosen nihilism on a civilisational level. diagnosis is vulgar, vapid and on the whole unhelpful—it is made of the same spirit as anarchic revolutions which have no solution at the other side.
so instead I can try to focus on just what it means for the individual. I don't know the answer to this question either. how can cultural norms affect an individual? isn't it paradoxical, or at least offensively generic, to be able to investigate an individual by the cultural norms? but clarity of being requires that we do just that, or at least live as though we do. the distinction between people has necessarily become clearer in society as it becomes more diverse. in perhaps its most obvious forms it's the unfeeling nature of perusing foreign news;
I receive BBC Breaking News Twitter notifications. I will read many killed and wounded in explosion in... and my heart will race, but then I'll read Mosul, or eastern China, and I'll almost automatically swipe the notification away. the constant bombardment of news that one is expected to undertake on a daily basis so as to remain up-to-date, is partly to blame—we have only enough minutes in the day to mourn—but if it's twenty-two dead in Manchester, it can affect me for days.
we've been thrust into an uncaring world, goes the cynical and overplayed idea, and brought up by people who barely even know themselves, but then we're taught that to look to the future means destroying the past. I wonder if the ramblings of my millennial peers are just the sensationalism of youth; reactionary views in those who will grow out of them. I'm in two minds, as a conflict within my generation between the alt-right and the communist youth would probably be quite productive.
earnestly, Elliot
