A View

From “selfies” to endless self promotion, the ego has never seen a period such as this. Facebook has rocketed the individual to a self-proclaimed celebrity as banal and self serving as any camera hog especially the no talent ones who have profited on the most vacuous of human proclivities to stare at anything. No one is exempt. The “see me now” personality is exhibiting the ego being egged on by the id, the base aspect of our personality that Freud saw in the most direst of human psychological pathologies. Given evolution rather than falling into a psychotic state or living with some neurotic tendency, we merely sit about promoting our selves in the form of posts.

Self-absorption has permeated every nook and cranny of human existence. From the crazed Jihadist spouting praise to god while sawing off a head to the self proclaimed ignoramus explaining creationist theory on the origin of life, each cocksure that their paths are the sacred paths we were all destined to follow or be damned. That astronomers have discovered that even where we exist in the cosmos is vastly larger than previous thought cannot penetrate the skulls of those who revel in knowing all there is to know. In the meantime, the gap between knowing and believing grows larger and larger. How can the cycle of inhumanity be broken if the very condition that bring it about continue to flourish. That people would leave a somewhat civilized world to fill the ranks of armies looking to establish a barbaric and primitive society speaks to a most chilling dimension of the human intellect. While science has taken us beyond the cave, it seems the cave is the place where humans find a sense of belonging. It is not stars that capture the hearts of humans, it is the knowledge of certainty.

This idea that god has cast our fate is a fatal flaw in human destiny. That we can do all that we wish given the authority of some entity that has created us from dust and breathed life into our being is at the heart of all our greatest failures to exist in harmony with this place we find ourselves. That the mind cannot get beyond the reality of our condition, that a vast majority needs to cling to some insane notion that all of what we are and what we see and what we experience can be tied to texts written so long ago that their words do not even reflect what we know to be real is a testament to the fact that we cannot leave our past behind and venture into a dimension defined by reason.

From a twelve step groups that gathers at the end to give allegiance to some concocted being to nearly every state leader uttering a blessing from above, we are doomed because it seems we cannot accept our responsibility to do the right thing. We need to allude to something greater than ourselves for it would appear we are too feeble to act without this grace. The most appalling aspect of this delusion is that charity and hatred can be substituted for one another without a scintilla of rationality. Thus the recovered drunk gives praise, the madman severs a head, a believer can blow up a clinic, a priest can abuse a child, a race can be slaughtered, a greedy bastards can exploit, and on and on – all in the name of a creator who has given life to this madness for its own justification.