very lazy day because I was so tired from the recent days of
working… didn’t do much today… I did begin a biography of
Herman Hesse… and one of the author’s major points was
about the various crisis that Hesse had in his life…
it has gotten me to thinking…
what is my crisis or point of writing what I do write?
I often speak of meaning or purpose but what is my meaning or purpose?
I guess I don’t know which is why philosophy is often called involuntary
confessions… we confess to the world what we often won’t confess to
ourselves… even in our quiet moments of reflection…
I see my own life as being rather pointless and meaningless…
in trying to give my own life some meaning or purpose, perhaps,
perhaps, I might be able to give some reader an understanding into their
own meaning or purpose…
I have seen or to be more correct, I have lived the modern age
curse of nihilism and despair… and I try to find a cure, to be saved
as it were from our modern age of nihilism………
I see the modern ism’s and ideologies as being nihilistic and as such
we must fight them with all our might…
I see the future of capitalism and nationalism and materialism with
their devaluation and destruction of human beings and their values
and I see the future being grim… we have seen what the result of
what the modern age has done to us and our progeny…
we see it in words like…
“things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,
the blood-dimmed tide is
loosed and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is
drowned; the best lack all conviction,
while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.”
and we see in its “passionate intensity” in our every day lives
in the streets of every day life……
and we see the lack of convictions as it blinds men to
the possibilities in our lives……
to be redeemed or to be saved, we must look beyond the ism’s
and ideologies of our time and we must see what is possible for us…
the centre has failed, it cannot hold because we cannot hold to
the beliefs and mores of our ism’s and ideologies……
that is the centre that has failed… not us, but our ism’s
and ideologies have lost our trust and our confidence…
we cannot hold to the convictions that were once the centerpiece of
modern ism’s and ideologies…
I cannot hold to the view that I will reach heaven if I act within
god’s rules… I have seen the wicked succeed too many times before
to think that somehow some second beginning will offer me some
redemption…
to be saved… to be saved to what end? I will still die… the best I can
hope for is to die with dignity which means I am not drooling at the end…
I try to fight the nihilism of our age by trying to discover how I can be
redeemed. How can I be saved in our modern world in which god is dead
and he died by our hand……… I stand accuse of murder… of killing god……
but I don’t pled guilty… I pled innocent because we needed to kill god
and find our own freedom…… we must have a secular world…
but we must then discover what is the meaning and purpose of
existence……… I cannot find the centre, the meaning and purpose
of all those ism’s and ideologies that litter the land………
I am an orphan… left without meaning or purpose…………
and so I write… trying to find that which connects me to
the centre of who I am… I am alienated from who I am by
the forces that have torn the centre apart… the nihilism of
capitalism and communism and Catholicism and Buddhism
and nationalism and patriotism and all those ism’s and ideologies that have
turned our belief systems into a nihilistic waste land…
where the centre cannot hold……
no man is an island… a wise man wrote that many years ago…
he just didn’t realize how true that was…….our nihilistic ism’s and ideologies
have turned man/human beings into atomistic creatures that go bump in the night…
we lack the centre which give us some basic directions in which we can then
direct our efforts into becoming who we are……
we must replace the old centre with a new center and that new vision is
the vision of values…… we find our centre with a determination to
to find in which we then use to become who we are……
we discover our values and then we act… we have our values determine
our actions… it isn’t about the policy differences but it is about the values
which determine those policy differences…
the values we discover and become, can become our new centre of who
we are… we create new center’s of being by having values as our
new base of operations for what it means to be human……
the centre can hold if the centre is about the values we discover
that is truly us and what we want to become………
become the values, not the ism’s and ideologies…
Kropotkin