The Metaphysics Underlying The Sunset of the West

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

-Proverbs 16:25

 

The heart is deceitful above all things…

-Jeremiah 17:9

 

When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.

– Lin Yutang, Chinese philosopher

 

Upon the recommendation of a blog commenter, I recently read “The Crisis of Modernity”  by Italian professor and philosopher, Augusto Del Noce (1910 – 1989).  The book was published in 2014 and is a brilliant compilation of twentieth-century essays and speeches by Del Noce.  His philosophical insights are profound and his conclusions and societal predictions, especially regarding Scientism and the Technocracy, are eerily similar to those of English author and theologian C.S. Lewis  – see my previous posts entitled “The Abolition of Man Amid the Consequences of Reality”,  and “Gnostic Parasitism in the Post-Modern Simulacrum”, and “A Postmortem on Postmodernism”.

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SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

Image result for spirits in the material world

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

The Police – Spirits in the Material World

As I was driving home from work last week, an almost forty-year-old song began emanating from my radio. I’ve always appreciated the music of The Police, but was never a huge fan. Spirits in the Material World was a relatively minor hit from their 1981 Ghost in the Machine multi-platinum album. I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times over the last four decades, but the lyrics struck me as particularly apropos at the end of a week where lunatic left-wing politicians staged a battle royale of ineptitude, invective, and idiotic solutions, in front of a perplexed public in a Vegas casino. Sting wrote the lyrics to this song in 1981 at the outset of the Reagan presidency. It is less than 3 minutes in length, but says much about humanity and the world we inhabit.

The interpretation of Sting’s (Gordon Sumner) lyrics depends upon your position in the generational kaleidoscope of history. As a boomer, Sting came of age during the 1960s and 70s. He was thirty years old in 1981 as the Second Turning (Awakening) was winding down and Reagan’s Morning in America was about to launch the Third Turning (Unraveling) in 1984.

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MAD WORLD

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad world, mad world

Image result for the primal scream

The haunting Gary Jules version of the Tears for Fears’ Mad World speaks to me in these tumultuous mad times. It must speak to many others, as the music video has been viewed over 132 million times. The melancholy video is shot from the top of an urban school building in a decaying decrepit bleak neighborhood with school children creating various figures on the concrete pavement below. The camera pans slowly to Gary Jules singing on the rooftop and captures the concrete jungle of non-descript architecture, identical office towers, gray cookie cutter apartment complexes, and a world devoid of joy and vibrancy.

The song was influenced by Arthur Janov’s theories in his book The Primal Scream. The chorus above about his “dreams of dying were the best he ever had” is representative of letting go of this mad world and being free of the monotony and release from the insanity of this world. Our ego fools us into thinking the madness of this world is actually normal. Day after day we live lives of quiet desperation. Despite all evidence our world is spinning out of control and the madness of the crowds is visible in financial markets, housing markets, politics, social justice, and social media, the level of normalcy bias among the populace has reached astounding levels, as we desperately try to convince ourselves everything will be alright. But it won’t.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

Bertrand Russell

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman

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QUOTES OF THE DAY – MATERIALISM EDITION

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

Bertrand Russell

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited


YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

From Hardscrabble Farmer:

You build a society that is at once both obsessed with material goods and the means with which to acquire them. You then make it next to impossible for vast numbers of them to ever achieve those ends, carefully construct, enforce and repeat a narrative that tells them the reason for their failure to attain those goals is the fault of a group of people who are readily identifiable and who already express a desire to avoid them, thus reinforcing the narrative. You simultaneously militarize the law enforcement while celebrating criminality via media/video games/music. Add generous amounts of mind altering drugs both legal and illicit, bump the population to ungovernable levels made up of multiple hostile ethnic tribal groups, ratchet up external anxieties over fabricated boogieman type threats, force the majority of the population into close confines, indoctrinate their children with mindless drivel and falsehoods, make them dependent upon nutritionally empty and chemically altered foodstuffs…

What could possibly go wrong?

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”

Philip Slater

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

Bertrand Russell

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.”

Francis Bacon

“Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.”

John Ruskin

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

 

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
John Lennon

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”
Bertrand Russell

“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
Henry David Thoreau, Familiar Letters

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
Ellen Goodman