Society is characterised by a violent paradox of opposing desires.
On the one hand, we long for calm, peace and prosperity. Everything must be alright in the end, the show must go on. We all want the milk-and-cookie serenity of our youth, where the greatest tragedy was the hara-kiri of a scoop of ice-cream from a cone on a sticky summer afternoon. Our lives should flow like fresh cream from the bottle, smooth, pure, soft and pleasant. We read books bastardizing buddhist teachings, emphasising only the easy, self-indulgent aspects so as to most appeal to our delicate sentiments, we learn how to love ourselves more (as if that were possible), we surround ourselves with pictures of baby animals with grammatically incorrect (but soooo cute!) captions. The aim is to be shallow and ripple-free.
Conversely, we dream of destruction and doom and despair. We yearn for mindless violence (albeit contained in the appropriate media receptacles -shooting civilians and hookers is fine, so long as it's done in the virtual sphere). The top grossing films are often those which we ought find morally repugnant. And what's the evening news without a violation of human dignity and decency in the close-ups of victims of the latest natural disaster, school shooting, gruesome serial killing? Get in there with your cameras at the funerals, zoom in on the mother cradling the hand that once was attached to a child! We bought the big flatscreen TV for a reason, to possess the full spectrum of human experience within a controlled environment, of course, sorrow, joy, regret, anguish, available and interchangable, and most importantly, able to be turned off, at the push of a button.
We want them both, and we have them both, for the most part. We can truly gratify our bacchanalian love for the twisted, the dark, the evil, in a safe and manageable ream of virtual reality, and we can live out the sweet, good life in 'actual' life. We are so blessed. It seems, too, that we pay so little for this pleasure. So our own emotional range is underexercised, we're a little desensitised, perhaps. A little uneasy around actual people, at times. But real, felt, inner emotion is worthless. It's messy, unpredictable, irrational. It only disturbs both our longing for peace, and our enjoyment of senseless chaos.
Will the two soon combine? Will we one day be vanilla-sweet automatons, roaming the streets armed with shotguns, calm in the eye of the storm, shooting pedestrians and slow-moving grandmothers for kicks with a smile, but saving the puppies and kittens? (You've got to save the kittys!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Spatzlemaus, I think you underestimate the complexity of the human experience.
ReplyDeleteThe choice between calm, peace, prosperity and destruction, doom, despair is a false dichotomy. The palette with which one paints their moral reaction the world contains colours of many different hues, not just black and white.
Are people drawn to the image of a woman cradling the dismembered hand of her child because they derive some kind of perverse pleasure from it, or because they empathise with her?
Does her suffering, at least on an abstract level, not belong to all of us because we too have children, parents, hands? And are there only two or three possible reactions, or are there thousands - each similar but subtly different, like people?
The two desires you refer to in your opening paragraph don't compete with each other, they fuel each other. One contextualises the other.
People are nostalgic for the serenity and simplicity of youth because, as adults, we know life can be stressful, chaotic - painful.
So I don't think the two can combine. Each is a marker at opposite ends of the spectrum of one's life experience, reference points that give broader meaning to singular events.
Society is indeed characterised by these opposing desires, but the paradox is orderly and harmonious. It doesn't undermine our morality, it defines it.