by Brett Stevens on July 20, 2012

For all of its strengths, modern society suffers from a systemic depression and self-hatred.

This exists because, in order to have equality of humans, you have replaced any goal with the non-goal of having equality of humans. For this reason, we don’t strive for anything — we strive for ourselves.

However, as the cliche has it, you don’t discover yourself by navel-gazing. You discover yourself by going Jack London or Hunter S. Thompson and getting out there, pitting yourself against reality and figuring out what you’re made of. You don’t get to know yourself until you must use yourself.

We have confused symptom and effect with cause. We see a problem, and we command that it be otherwise, as we would do in a shop or when manipulating a lover. But we cannot access the underlying structure, which is what we’d need to know our goals.

As a result we drift around like drunk robots, without any real agenda, but with a list of obligations. Must go to work; must buy certain things, including life insurance, and fix things that stopped working; must obey laws, pay taxes, go to Christmas parties.

If you’re thinking that this is a formula for ambiguity and half-hearted participation, you are correct: people float through life in a perpetual dual state of being in the process of doing things, but resisting themselves the whole time.

This constant neurotic internal conflict destroys any presence of mind or persistence of notice of details, which further adds to the misery by making every job a cursory job. From your sandwich to your government, it’s a heap of hacks built on hacks.

Worse is that as you navigate life people seem devoted to inefficiency. They move slowly, forget to notice when the traffic lights have changed, bungle simple tasks. You see people driving who appear lost but really it is not that they are not aware of where their destination is, but they’re unsure of what their destination should be.

And pressures are piled on top of this. Social pressures, to be doing something cool enough to blog about, or eating something nifty enough to post on Instagram. Political pressures to look like a decent citizen active in a series of meaningless activities devoted to the hopeless. Existential pressures, feeling life slipping away, without any notion of having come to appreciate it in the first place.

Floating through life, people stay safe in their own minds by never really committing to anything. In this brave new world, we are all suburban housewives, criticizing a world we have never experienced from the safety and boredom of our bourgeois homes.

As we do so, we entreacle the few remaining people with any purpose. That includes the politically active, but also well-meaning types like your priest or the lady who runs the local animal shelter. All are bogged down in the floating slowness of the herd.

What this does is build up frustration among those who have abilities, and those who do not have abilities notice this, and pile on the delays as a kind of Pyrrhic resentment. We all suffer. Rage builds. From that comes self-hatred, and the cycle restarts.

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