by Doug Vance on April 25, 2010

You’re on a highway in a lifelong traffic jam coasting along with your pals on the way to Happytown. As the party city appears to at times draw nearer in the distance, your inner map also recalls the location of a rumored Truthville off some side road over yonder around these parts.

Your journey along with the rest of the crowd is a long one, but along the way you and your pals find diversions to ease the routine. You keep a CD in the player pumping out a beat over the speakers. The guy in the back seat is watching some flick or maybe a ball game on the car DVD player.

The chick beside you has her face fixed before the visor mirror with a lipstick dabbing around her mouth and a tissue ready to mop up mishap smudges. The other guy in the back is passed out snoring with a string of drool hanging down the side of his face. The bag of crunchy snacky cheezes in his lap is about to dump over.

Up ahead past the wall of traveling cars before you, someone has pulled off along the roadside. The car looks to have been sitting there for some time. The driver’s door was left wide open and the uncaring driver is missing. The car’s other occupants remain within, but they are pale and stiff and gathering flies because they are now dead husks.

You spot the driver off in the distance making his way up the shunned path to Truthville. The path is thick with the overgrowth of briars and cratered with muddy potholes. Unlike the highway to Happytown, this way is a harder one, but the driver, with his back to you nonetheless trudges along, steadily tearing through the spiny briars and striding over the potholes in the long neglected path.

For some reason, undaunted, he carries on in the direction of Truthville somewhere just over the hills, but everyone else (miles and miles of them in their plastic wheeled coffins) joy rides at a crawl pace to the promised Happytown straight ahead. It occurs to you that you are about to pass a crossroad and leave it behind. Very briefly, the traveler to Truthville glances over his shoulder and fixes you in his gaze, then turns back again to the task ahead.

Vijay Prozak is leader of the website with the hilarious name anus.com (American Nihilist Underground Society), despite the name the website promotes abstruse thought as well as underground metal music. The website is probably more famous for its promotion of underground metal bands and its unique-styled band reviews. Prozak and his website has earned a level of notoriety, disdain as well as respect among most (if not all) of the metal music communities on the website. It has existed in one form or other for the last 20 years, a currently unsurpassed achievement. For many people, metal serves as a starting point into something deeper: that is a starting point for exploring philosophy as well as hidden meanings and patterns within society and the universe. Not everyone pursues this line of thought whenever they become interested in metal music; unfortunately, those that don’t are happy to drink beer, smoke pot and party — they never aspire to great things in life. Those that do look for deeper meaning will find Prozak’s website thought provoking and (most likely) controversial. So here we go…. esoteriic

The conclusion is particularly impressive. I’ve been pondering the reference to Promethean Spirit made at the end:

Liberalism in its purest form is praise for the highest individual above both the crowd and any moribund social mechanisms the crowd have put into place. This is why both liberals and conservatives cheer any story where the exceptional person rises above convention and does something that benefits all others.

Breaking through or going around calcified bureaucracy or corrupt institutions to allow greatness the means to have a place to grow once more is similar to the myth of Prometheus; the titan stealing fire-knowledge from the gods and giving that power potential to mankind.

Some will get it wrong and in so doing bring themselves to ruin. All the rest will recoil in horror and protest. But, some few may take the fire-knowing and bring lasting benefit into existence. The important part is to cast this die of chance to begin with so that the future is not claimed by a state of gradual, certain socialized decay manifesting in institutional civilization atrophy and dogma.

Tags: interview, liberalism, realism

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