Of Pygmies and Gods

Dispatches from the Age of the Diminished

Liberalism’s Great Trick. – It is right to criticize, wrong to raise a hand: and thus make old gossips of us all.

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Hanging. – That most romantic of suicides: let my body dangle from the heavens and be consumed by the stars —instrumental at last, to strike the chord I never could in life.

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A Matter of Timing. – Was it not Camus who sought to reduce philosophy to a single overwhelming problem—that of suicide? Whether life is worth a damned thing? In his pronouncement, I sense a certain displeased tone, like that of a teacher scolding his students for misunderstanding the question, or for failing to give it its proper respect—a tone of indignation and disbelief—almost absurd in itself: shame on you, impudent one, for having so long ignored “my” question...

And yet here he might have paused, come to a more solemn stop, and asked himself a more fundamental question: why has this problem only now been posed? Why had it not arisen sooner?

I might guess that, for the great majority, the normal sensation of life is not desperation but rather befuddlement: a common confusion brought on by the infinite complexity of each passing moment, which can only be described as life itself. It is the ongoing struggle with the how of each moment that shields us from the why—one is simply too overwhelmed by the gathering of one’s daily bread to be dragged into an existential worry.

Whether this is entirely the case, I cannot say with certainty. Indeed, the why of life is the first and last of mysteries—somehow always sought, and yet paradoxically answered only in the unanswered seeking. All rather mundane in the end, and strangely shallow.

But this superficial posing by Camus brings me back to a subtler point: the philosophy of timing—of why particular questions arise when they do. And perhaps the answering of this why is of greater value than the answering of any given question. It is this why of the why that turns all philosophy into psychology.

In this case, perhaps we can forgive the old high school teacher his secondary spirit.

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As yet, there are no words. – The seeing of a body that has wholly disfigured itself under the knife—the scarifying of flesh, the shaving and shattering of bone—this done for no god but the scrolling stranger one hopes to deceive. Usually, the eye revolts against such sights: a beauty uglier than ugliness itself.

Yet beyond the superficial reactions of jealousy, pity, and embarrassment, such acts of self-harm elicit emotions that are largely unspeakable, and thus largely unknowable. We lack the metaphors. For humanity, in its aberrance, has begun to escape the logic of nature on which language is based.

It has gone further than postmodernity—postmodernity being only a theoretical awareness of our limitations, of our knowledge and the illusions on which it was based, yet still a remaining within that ruined temple for fear of what dwelt without. Actions are now escaping beyond even this—beyond the sayable, and thus beyond the theoretical.

It is a beyond to which we are all being cast, lost to reason because we have not the logic because we have not the words.

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On Stupidity Then and Stupidity Now. – An ancient idiocy: to be overcome by silence, to live as a dull, clumsy block of wood, or as a stone upon which a kingdom might be founded. Modern idiocy: to be invaded by thoughts not one’s own, to religiously spout unexamined drivel—pawns in a game of capital where all are losers. Stupidity was once the stupid exception; now, it is the rule.

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Please Tell Me. – What are brains now but hotels, only for the hosting of thoughts rather than the thinking of them.

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On the Cruelty of the Dialectician. – A reversal of a fact is always, first and foremost, an acceptance of that fact. The board has been placed; it matters not what one does with their pieces: you are already entangled in the enemy’s game. Thus, Marx misunderstood and became capitalism greatest pawn: enhancing its materialism, giving it a righteous enemy and thereby propelling it with all the zeal of an ideology—to be believed and defended to the last. That greatest irony: the great dialectician already lost to a thesis he could never overcome. So, the Greeks were wise to murder Socrates, for why let this man set the rules for the game?

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Age of Pygmies. – We live in rather minatory time: that men think they are women, so what? Men once thought they were gods.

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Lost the War and the Battle. – Germany, for half a century, rampaged across the continent, spilling every drop of martial blood the old continent of Europe could muster until all that was left on every side were the cowards, pessimists and pacifists. In this, one might say Germany won what it never admitted it sought: the utter demoralization of its enemies. There was always an old terror in the Teuton—a memory of the Thirty Years’ War, when its lands became a kingdom of corpses. It lies in the very centre of the map, encircled and anxious, a paranoia non-parallel. Desperate measures had to be taken. Now, a war in Western Europe seems impossible. Indeed, ridiculous and amazing. But then that is because we are the offspring and inheritors of the cowardly survivors of those old cataclysms. It is thus Europe can feel its present rape and cultural destruction and lift not a finger to save itself. Germany did not bet on that.

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That we all deserve. – It is one of capitalism’s great deceptions to make us believe that we deserve everything, when the reality is that we deserve nothing, for in our capitalistic desires we now never serve ourselves.