Death of Culture & Society
It’s quiet here in the early dawn and no one’s around. Just the way I like it. I’m sitting on a bench, sipping black coffee on an old dock looking out over the ancient lake. I watch with an incredible sense of serenity as the fog dies out with the rising sun. There’s a peculiar stillness here this morning.
The sky grows lighter and lighter. A subtle breeze makes small ripples on the water. The fish jump and splash and the birds chirp and flutter and everything seems joyous and harmonious. The great hum of life.
Behind me, the world is not so joyous and harmonious.
Behind me is a society teetering on the edge of all-out madness; a society of half-asleep people completely entangled in a web of false narratives and social fictions. A semiconscious society of disenfranchised people at war with each other over manufactured illusions and irrational beliefs — people completely alienated from each other, from themselves, from the TRUTH.
Every realm of society is permeated with falsity and falsification,’ as the great Henry Miller reminded us so many years ago. He’s still right. Probably more today than ever.
As the morning unfolds the commotion begins much like the day before. Alarm clocks fire off. The TV’s flick-on and the news prompts us as to what we should be afraid of today. Antagonizing headlines heave us into a partisan frenzy before we even step foot in the shower. No one cares too much about the TRUTH because our minds are already made up.
This is the modern world.
The water splashes the face. The coffee is brewed. The social media is checked and updated and the emails are read over breakfast. Tired and heavily medicated souls make their way onto the billboard-littered highway to inch along in bumper-to-bumper traffic to a job they despise.
The kids are dropped off at their prison-like education camps where they are segregated by age and forced to submit to an outdated national curriculum concocted up by some inept bureaucratic process. And it’s here, where the inherent curiosities of little unique individuals are smashed out, and their little minds are molded and standardized and taught the ‘virtue’ of conformity and obedience.
They become much like ourselves — well-adjusted disciples of the status quo. A society of well-fed, inwardly starving folks who’ve become dissimulated by this thing we call ‘culture.
I sit here in complete solitude as the freshly born sun seeps into my eyes. The morning chill dissipates along with the warmth of my coffee. A cardinal sings on the wood railing of the old dock. I breathe in the pure air of a new day.
I read somewhere recently that more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. And yet, here I am, alive, and it’s good to be alive. I think. But so many of us take it for granted — this miracle of breath, this accidental thing we call LIFE.
Sitting here I can’t help but look up at the skies and ask — what the hell is happening to us as a species?
Prayers haven’t worked out all too well. Most of the big cities are uninhabitable. Our communities have all but disintegrated as the pockets of our overlords have fattened. The vast array of self-help books that fly off the shelves daily haven’t helped us. Money and an abundance of toys and possessions haven’t made us happy. The filters on our posing faces can’t keep out the truth.
Everyone is afraid of everyone else. This once beautiful land is now a land of dread. Something is ending. We are at the precipice of something none of us understand.
How did we get here?
How did we arrive at a point where unbridled consumerism, endless war, vast surveillance, conformity, obesity, illiteracy, loneliness, victimhood, bitterness, infinite division, mindless entertainment, and an insatiable appetite for OUTRAGE came to be the defining characteristics of civilization?
Looking around you can’t help but feel this grave, disquieting anxiety slithering all through our culture. A recent article revealed that a third of adults right now are walking around in a concussion-like daze due to stress and lack of sleep.
More than three in five people are feeling lonelier than ever before. Suicide is one of the most persistent causes of death among young people. Obesity, depression, and anxiety rule our days. Chronic disease is rampant along with various kinds of addictions. 44% of older millennials already have a chronic health condition. Nearly 70 percent of humans are taking at least one prescribed medication and half are taking more than one.
As Richard Yates wrote in his brilliantly intense mid-20th century novel, Revolutionary Road, ‘You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.’ Indeed, we are.
Look at us.
Woven nicely into the fabric of a sick society, plagued with an aching sense of emptiness and self-entitlement, passions snuffed out by the nine-to-five or no work at all, no time for voyages and adventure, too timid and afraid to live creatively and authentically — just good folks splashing around in the shallows as the pills are gulped down and the lights slowly dim.
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