The Death Drive of Modern Society

It is well known by now that the powerful run the world. They control the media, and in turn the media teaches us what is and what is not reasonable to expect from existence.

Many things that appear to be common sense, such as a reasonably urgent change in our approach to life on earth in light of the enormously cataclysmic results that are beginning to be visible due to climate change, are presented to us as infeasible. War is presented as inevitable.

Every day we peel the plastic packaging away from the food we eat, thinking “does it have to be like this?” We are well aware of swirling hurricanes of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, and it seems absurd to continue to deliver each item of food to our homes in plastic packaging that will be cavalierly added to the problem, doesn’t it?

Of course it does! Absurdity is a thing that we get used to even though it is not the lighthearted kind. It is grim absurdity, rather, that we are inured to.

The most absurd thing of all, though, is the idea that it would be absurd to ask that any of it change. We have gone to levels of inception at which the idea of recognizing our decay and taking it seriously is the most laughable thing of all.

This is nothing other than a death drive, right? I’m not trippin am I? We are blasting the radio and really leaning into a Thelma and Louise ending aren’t we?

Part 2, or whatever

The efforts we make in our society are determined by those who set the agenda, and since a very long time ago the agenda has been to always be reaching for whatever has not been reached yet.

We are trying to build a platform to reach something that we cannot quite see, but we have convinced ourselves it must be reached — whatever it is — and we set about reaching for it. Eventually we destroy all sorts of things in the building of this platform to stand on that will get us closer to the unknown thing.

We destroy our lives in sacrifice to this platform, we cancel our retirement, we become lonely because it is weird to be so obsessed with such a thing, and we skeeve each other out with our obsessiveness.

On the news every day we see all the incentives to keep going. The ground level is actually pretty chill but who can resist building and trying to reach some theoretical Holy grail-type reward?

We’re super weird actually and it’s hard to say why we don’t just quit all that and worry about enjoying our time here and appreciating each other.

The constant reaching for something “more” is really a wild trip of hallucinatory terror. It comes from some fear of recognizing ourselves.

Ironically, it is probably a fear of seeing that the whole thing has been an escape from ourselves since the beginning. We are men and women running from ourselves and we cannot see that because we can’t bear to: it is precisely the effort not to know how simple we are that keeps our goals so simplistic.

Simplicity is dynamic, but it is unknowable. You can’t chart it perfectly, because the simplicity of existence is like an ocean, it just is. The primary goal of modernity is to escape this fact, and it is haunted

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