We’ve lost the initiative. There’s absolutely no incentive whatsoever to consider anything radical or intellectual anymore. Intellectualism has been homogenized into a deaf mass of barely functioning literates who fight over banal differences online. The little people of our world who are at least curious enough to read words and use them somewhat coherently are either under the spell of these intellectuals or so turned off that everything about intellectualism leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Yeah, it’s a tribulation in itself to be smart and know words, especially when the only recourse for something even resembling a successful life is to assimilate with the homogenized mass and hope to maybe someday be noticed by one of those ephemeral think tanks controlled by large financiers.
Philosophy is basically dead. Art solely exists as a division of marketing for faceless men in business suits, or it is cast aside for its irrelevance, and the people are cut off from its deeper aesthetic metaphysical relevance for a lack of knowing that it even exists because their minds are purely conditioned for materialism.
As for creative ideas and revolutionary theory? “Nice LARP, bud.” “Oh wow, you’re edgy.”
Nothing has defeated people more than their own acceptance of a banal life adrift in a world without meaning. They have chosen to be battered in the face with a simple life stuck in a cube and there is no escapism accept for maybe video games and movies, or if you’re conservative enough you’re probably terrified that even video games and movies will be stripped from you. As for books, can you name ten prominent writers of the 21st century who had half the relevance as a writer from the early 20th century? Do we have any prominent writers left at all? Nobody thinks about new ideas, so nobody writes them, and the cycle of banality feeds itself.
Conservatives can’t create anything new because it is against their very nature to do anything but hold onto tradition with contempt as the world moves ahead of them. Liberals don’t want to create anything new that does not serve a bourgeoisie madhouse of elites assfucking everything into a chaotic vortex with no meaning.
Social media has guaranteed the exact opposite of what was predicted for Internet culture, or as it was called back in the days of my youth, cyberspace. It was anticipated that a new dawn for conversation would emerge, that the intellectual FREE THINKERS would have their ascending moment, but that is not what has happened. What has happened instead is a miserable reflection of the commodified lives that we lead. How is it that the world has moved with such rapid speed into digitization, and yet people are still stuck with such a basic bitch depth of consciousness?
Society has suffered a cruel inability to create something better in the face of all this nihilism. No one even wants to cultivate anything different anymore. Cool is a bad word. Theories are unacceptable. Suicide becomes the most potent word in the vocabulary, not simply because life is bad, but because people are genuinely pathetic.
How do we snap out of this fog? At which point do we rewrite the playbook?