Hunting The Muse

Christmas Day Thoughts

I read a lot of stuff that really made me think today. It's Christmas Day, perhaps not the most appropriate time for thinking, but I got a couple of really good books. One is The Tipping Point, which Peter has been bugging me to read for months now, because evidently all the things I talk about and believe are right in line with the philosophies in this book. After reading it I don't exactly feel transformed, but I do feel validated, and comforted, and a bit more crystalline in my beliefs, due to seeing them distilled down into printed form. But it really got me thinking about a couple of basic things that just really need to change.

One part that struck me is the section about smokers. The basic point wasn't that teens smoke because it's cool, or because it will make them cool. It's because they are cool. That's of course a gross simplification, but when they studied the trendsetters that smoke, they just had different personality traits - more intense, more dramatic, sexier, etc.

So it brings up a question in me. And it's not an original question, many others ask it too, but it's this. Why do these "cool" acts have to be destructive? What is it about these cool kids that are drawn to destructive behaviors?

Well, I have theories. I think there's a dynamic in culture that reinforces itself, and that everyone would realize they hate if they took a look at it. Basically, this dynamic, this force, is one that thinks it is fun to destroy itself. It's all over the place, and hides itself behind such terms as irony, satire, post-modernism, self-referentiality, and cynicism. All these techniques of thought and act are ways to distance oneself from emotional essence.

Modern-day irony and satire in particular are perversions of what they used to be. I'm not a literary scholar but I know that real satire always used to come from conviction. It would be conviction and advocacy disguised as humor, usually to protect itself from a government.

These days, satire is used as a term to describe anything critical that has a humorous edge to it. It is often indistinguishable from tea-party gossip. Jay Leno's monologues are routinely described as satirical. But the essence of these so-called satires, the conviction that was once the source and seed of real satire, is absent. Instead of satirists that speak from conviction, we have armies of people that reconstruct the form of satire just for the entertainment value, without stopping to fill the emptiness inside. The social value of satire was the conviction, it was what earned the form. Now it's all too common for the form to exist without its essence.

A few months ago, a kid left home and start driving through the United States planting pipe bombs. It was eventually discovered that he was trying to make them in the shape of a big smiley face. This is a kid that experienced enough rage to plant bombs, and yet beyond that was even more afflicted with a force to make fun of it. And on some level, our culture recognizes his choice as funny. But what it really is is an emotional conspiracy to turn away from itself. It is rage, rage that is potent enough to kill, but that even beyond that wants and needs to disguise itself as something that can be recognized as cool, hip, witty, satirical, ironic, cynical, post-modern, meta. It is rage that needs to exist and yet still isn't allowed to fully exist as true essence. This kid felt rage, but was so unable to process it that he had to attempt to make it appealing to himself by layering a demented commentary on top of it. By stylizing it, he was able to convince himself it wasn't truly rage. He was able to weaken the link between actions he took and the essence behind it. He was disconnected.

It's the stylishness of negativity. It's the judgment that positivity is naive and emotional essence is square. It attempts to prove that positivity is naive by using the circular proof of "look how shitty things are!" Positivity knows it's circular reasoning but doesn't know how to break the circle without negativity accusing positivity of being even more naive. Negativity stays in its circle, denies emotional purity in favor of layers of corruption, and gets louder and louder, finding new forms while denying essence. Form without essence folds in on itself and becomes self-destructive.

But there's a weakness to these forms of negativity that is going to become more apparent as time goes on. And that's that they're chickenshit.

Modern satire. Sniping. Cynicism. Some forms of Irony. It's all related to rage. Rage is GOOD when it can be accessed and expressed and understood and transformed. But the thing is, in these cases, it's gutless rage. It's chickenshit. These forms, the people practicing these forms, they are all tiny little people making noise, squabbling together, all working as hard as they can to distract their audience from the absence of essence in their forms, while distracting themselves from their rage. And that will be noticed as they burn themselves out. It's already being noticed.

The secret is that while these behaviors are reactionary, they are not reacting from a place of essence. It's really just laziness. When one needs to rebel and become more individual in action, there are two ways to rebel. One way is to react more against one's environment - to find a way to contrast one's behavior from what everyone else is doing, to extrapolate an external trend and do something that is either opposite, or when that is impossible, something that is simply grotesque. And when it takes form just from being reactionary, it folds in on itself and becomes self-destructive.

But the other way to show individuality is to further actualize the Self. And this is much harder.

But it is where essence can be discovered, manufactured, grown. And this is really what it comes down to: the weakening of essence in man, the weakening of integrity. Without essence, form crumples. And there are people being cynical, ironic, and satirical everywhere, and far too many of them are doing it because they're lazy and chickenshit, and people will notice as they crumple.

People don't like being told they are lazy and chickenshit. And when they realize they're being wimps, they'll wake up and realize that growing a little bit of integrity can be stylish again. They'll realize that conviction and compassion have a place in entertainment and the popular arts again. Our society will finally shake itself out of our junior-high-adolescent stage of thinking self-destructive habits are witty and cool, and move forward with a new outlook that seeks a measured balance of possibility, reassurance, and reality; an outlook that has a measured acceptance of the potential of life. Posted by Curt at December 25, 2002 03:08 AM