Insightful Observations

Dholl's The Mask

“Certainly human life, like all inferior merchandise, is embellished from the outside with a false lustre: suffering always hides itself away; on the other hand, everyone displays whatever pomp or splendour he can afford, and the less content he is in himself, the more he desires to appear fortunate in the opinion of others: to such lengths does folly go, and to gain the good opinion of others is a priority in everyone’s endeavour, although the utter futility of this is expressed in the fact that in almost all languages vanity, vanitas, originally means “emptiness” and “nothingness”.”

-Arthur Schopenhauer

In this article, I would like to finish my series on man’s moral codes and ways of living life that he has considered “normal” throughout the different epochs of history. Let me thus jump straightly into the 20th and 21st centuries A.D. and talk about the life of a postmodern man.

Generally, with the rise of mass communication, the Internet and social plurality came a shattering of unified and coherent meaning of mankind’s progress. Instead of shared aim and meaning of nations, we get shopping, consuming and apparent relativity of everything.

After the atrocities of the first half of twentieth century, thanks to the 2 blood-baths called world wars, came the age of deceit and game-theory calculations between the world’s dominating nations. J.R. Oppenheimer, having proclaimed “Now I am become death”, has given the humanity a toy it shouldn’t have received. It was only a very thin foil of reasonableness in the minds of world’s leading executive politicians that saved men from exercising their secret longing for their own destruction by using this plaything of the world’s most powerful ones, the hydrogen bomb.

Fast forward to the first decade of 21st century, the world has become unified under the broadly accepted philosophy of freedom and globalization, at least in the west. Knowledge has become the most valued asset and post-nationalistic citizens have built their identities around commercialization and abstraction of everything. One is what one consumes, what he wears, drives, eats and drinks. He puts his identity at the mercy of developers and marketers of his favorite brands, hoping to maintain coherence and meaning of his identity in this way. In a similar manner, the meaning of world is put at mercy of ones and zeros, the information being thrown at this poor man from every corner of his environment. The reality is what they say and show on the Internet and the truth is the opinion backed with the strongest advertising. The sooner you can expose a man to your brand, the more future profits you get, let’s give the children in elementary schools textbooks and other tools for learning with our brand logos on them then!

We have started drifting slowly, but surely, towards a technological nihilism where the authentic life experience has been replaced by information and the world by abstract representations mainly created to promote products of the most cunning of advertisers. With this, a despair of man has come. Through digitalization and communication at the speed of light, he has seemingly the whole world at hand, yet he suffers from emptiness. Because of his natural laziness, he doesn’t care to experience hardship in order to gain the real deal outside, he values the virtual one more. Manual labor has been replaced by machines to increase the convenience and productiveness of man’s endeavors, to increase the welfare of businessmen and abundance of consumer goods. Cybersex on the Internet has been put over the real thing, documentaries and pictures over traveling and seeing the beauty oneself, social websites over genuine social relationships etc.

Moreover, everything has become commercialized and can be bought on the market. Even people have to market and sell  themselves to live the “normal” life. Job applications as selling of one’s idealized personality and portfolio of skills, dating as selling one’s potential of being a mate and/or a parent and so on. To be able to do this successfully, this man hides the inner despair and fulfillment with pretending to be happy, as Dholl masterfully depicts in his painting that can be seen in the introduction of this essay. Happiness is contagious they say, it should make me more attractive then. Indeed, for acting and marketing have become the must-have life skills.

This man thus stops living and starts acting, he stops talking essentially and starts to chatter, he overloads himself with information and distraction to run away from the pain of his unconsciousness and the necessity to make important decisions and take action. The Kierkegaardian sickness unto death gets replaced by a panamerican smile and parroting of prepared PR monologues to others, for the highest aim is to sell this product called his personality on all the possible markets, such as interest groups, labor market, social groups, schools etc. He aims to drive the demand for it to sky-heights, in other words, to do this new “in” activity that he has read about on the Internet called networking.

The world without the veils of idealism and advertisement is indeed harsh and not pretty at all, yet this is exactly what gives one the intense experience of a sublime beauty and happiness, say when one senses a genuine creation of nature or when one accomplishes a hard task that he has set for himself. To not appreciate these authentic experiences that bring hardship and pleasure at the same time is to not live. Most of the world’s unhappiness and apathy stem from not appreciating life anymore, for not holding dear the original great works of humanity and nature. Everything has been turned into information and made instantly available, yet the requirements and limitations of man’s body and mind have remained almost exactly the same for centuries now.

To finish this elaboration, let me quote Meister Kierkegaard who depicts the contemporary situation very precisely, I think:

“Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.”

I therefore proclaim that it is imperative for us to remember that faster, more extensive, more abundant and more innovative doesn’t always equal better for man’s condition.