Boozy Rant #12 (A Sober Installment): The Unnamed and The Dash for Happiness.
In the modern age of positive super-injunction, the space for the ever so needed truth of self examination and critique grows ever so small. What was, at its best, an opportunity for reflection has become lame and caricatured by reflection that displace that strength and harshness of the truths awaiting that journey to the other. The renewals that only invoke the worst of narcissistic responses such as,"I have to take care of number one" or which the perversion of the wisdom of self-care to mean "Love yourself" in the most egocentric of consequences. Then again, what should I care if idioms and wisdom come to an end. They are after all a conservation of the conservative in our societies, a halting measure against progress and change.
But terms such as conservative should be taken to mean something always in the contemporary, never to be associated with the past or the future. My point being that the "Cult of Happiness" (and I use this term with the greatest viciousness) that has been a force of motives in individual people, the developing and the first worlds is to be understood to be a conservative belief. Don't get me wrong, the near total obliteration of organised religion is a welcome calamity. We could all do without those institutions and their unwarranted claim to moral authority but I do feel there has been a price to pay here, and do I dare say, a moral one at that.
Let me begin with a thesis here and that is "The opening of the assumed post-ideological space might be a return a premative zero point".
What do I mean by this lengthy instance of mental masturbation?
I will refer to a book by Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History And The Last Man" in which he made the claim that, with the events surrounding the end of the cold war, the world had realized the post-ideological and political via the triumph of the free market and Neoliberal thrust. In general the idea is very Hegelian in some senses, similar to the understanding by Right Hegelians, viewing history as a series of overlapping events leading from one age of history to the next eventually coming to an end. The first part of the idea of historical dialects is something I share with him the view of total history as a series of overlapping ages.
But that is all the similar there is. It was, like his philosophical predecessors eg. Johann Philipp Gabler, a blunder to assume what was not empirical evident. They and even Hegel himself, assumed an end of history in the face of an unresolved problem of the union of the Germanic peoples post Napoleonic times and what Napoleon conquests meant in the years preceding the monumental historical change. Secondly in the face of ever growing pockets of antagonisms in far of lands as empires scrambled and expanded.
In all the examples of the ideological cheese in the crust of Right Hegelianism, there was a rush to pronounce a close of history. An assumption that jumped the gun philosophically to make a case for a time of the post political and ideological. One doesn't need to look further than recent history to see and, maybe, divine that history might never closes; that the existence of the social fabric is a void of suffering and new instances of antagonisms are at a rise always.
It was with the recent failure of reckoning with the lessons of history that we had not just a repeated collapse of actual free market mechanisms but also a non-fulfillment of market promises which resulted in the abortion of the political conscious of the pedestrian filled in by a vacuous optimism which begin in the 80s, through and to the 90s and 2000s. It was in the 90s that we had this become a convention with the rising popularity of the model celebrity and self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. There was an gratuitous obsession with "the happy life" and "fulfillment" which saw the everyday person retreat to the hollow shell of preservation that is "looking out for number one", to find a shadow of enlightenment.
The evacuation of the public mind into the self and person is, in my opinion a collapse of conscious and a defeat of the mind. And maybe even worse, a regression, just a victim of some trauma would regress to some former state of poor or zero consideration; the apolitical.
It is a knee jerk reaction against true self reflection which does not belies the dangers of a uncommitted public and what is in-store for a generation that is lax and actively ignorant of a great world than the immediate survive of "the one". It is the illusion of a bubble and stiff-necked belief in static realities, at least subconsciously. It is quite alarming, though, that in the supposed quest for enlightenment and maturation our person, there is a defeat of qualitative character and hard truths.
There is nothing wrong with seeking out pleasure in any form that it might come but it is concerning that we are now willing partners in a culture of compulsive fulfillment or happiness without some caveat for measure, without a pause about the stuff of the world, about the poor, the rich, the future, the past and legacy. We are a recluse child in the belief of made up worlds designed in mind for the passing of the world.
Not only is the concern for the social but also the priming of the individual toward a search for happiness which, Harvard psychologist Susan David, voice her concerns about as the effect have been seen to create and foster anxious people and depressed people as all suffering becomes exacerbated by the tyranny of optimism which strangles authentic human experience by sanctioning natural feelings of pain and the ability to identify and indict the sources of our sorrows.
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very insightful piece mate
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