There’s a YouTube video sitting in my subscription feed. A video with the disconcerting title of: “Our Moral and Cultural CRISIS of Purpose Will Be America’s End.”
O dear.
As much as I like Tim Pool, and as much as my wry, post-regime, immigrant, cynicism relishes placing things in a harsh light; I can’t help but find the title comical.
I’ve read Nietzsche as all Goths must.
His warnings about the rise of nihilism as religious doctrines crumble before empiricism and disenchantment, proved to be pretty accurate.
But he really wasn’t the first.
Every generation thinks that its successors are going to descend into anarchic hedonism. I think it’s a biological thing.
Organisms like homeostasis. Homeostasis means your heart beats. That’s kinda important to being alive which is basically the whole business of being an organism.
Organisms that can think, remember, and dream extend homeostasis beyond the autonomic nervous system and all the way out into metaphysic. As an organism ages it becomes more sensitive to change. There was a balance in youth, a balance inevitably disturbed by age. New ideas, customs, and new information, are the metaphysical equivelant of arythmia: not very fun, and certainly alarming.
But this philosophical bric-a-brac isn’t the point. Really, I just wanted to have a laugh at the notion of PURPOSE. It’s a profoundly American thing. When it’s capitalized that way.
Sort of like business, success, or entrepreneur. It’s big-tent revival bullshit.
I’ll tell you you who had a lot of purpose…the Reich. Those were some motivated motherfuckers.
If you’re tired of the constant Hitler comparisons that plague our media…Then I’ll give you a brief list of other folks who led The Purpose Driven Life.
- The Crusaders
- Isis
- Uncle Joe From the Old Country (Stalin)
- The Inquisition
- Jim Jones
- Kamikazes
- Football Hooligans
- Henry Kissinger
- McNamara
- Lucifer
Now, I’m sure that Mr. Pool isn’t just emptily pontificating about purpose for purposes sake. I haven’t watched the video because I have to go to bed and I’m just amusing myself by blogging my way through a glass of red wine. But I suspect that it’s a lament of the abdication of the sort of enlightenment principles and sense of life’s specialness that seems to have been enthused into the American ethos.
This is a valid concern. One that I think is ill-served by painting it in apocalyptic terms. So, here I am pontificating via a chuckle at the old, “kids these days.”
So, while some might find the fact that I’m going to listen to the Cure and jerk off nihilistic – nihilistic in exactly the sort of blase way that millenials are just so XYZ. I say hey….at least I’m not invading Poland.
Purpose you see is best when you let it find you.
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