giving meaning to one’s life
This is the last article in my series titled "First devastating societal blow in Late-Modernity". 8,050 words. You can access the full article here.
I want to address, the perception of our present human condition, from a holistic angle. This placing into perspective, of the structural factors that shape the human condition in Late-Modernity, should help us to rediscover the fundamentals of life and this shall form the conclusion of what has by now grown into a very long text.
We are faced with the fact that the mind does not take lightly to be confronted with the inescapable reality of ‘the great convergence’. On one side we observe that humanity is faced with a predicament and on the other we observe that our existing political decision-making bodies are not able to implement the necessary answers to attenuate the effects of this predicament.
The reason Western political decision-making bodies can’t decide to implement valid answers is because they are owned by powerful interests who are constantly privileging their private accumulation of profits over anything else including the fundamentals of life.
Furthermore the other countries do not want to move before the West shows it is serious in its own willingness to act. After all the West is the one that started Modernity. It has had the advantage of a few centuries of history freely plundering the rest of the world to develop its economy while despoiling nature and ignoring the principle of life. The other countries that started industrializing in the late 20th century have thus good reasons to call for the West to start cleaning up its act first.
The most powerful among Western groups of interest are the big capital holders whose interests are being defended publicly by their servants the state bureaucrats, the intellectuals, the media and other professionals. The servants of big capital holders control all the levers of Western propaganda and use them to mud the reality and instill confusion in the minds of the people on this earth. This confusion is what freezes the human species in its answers to the predicament of the convergence of the multiple side-effects of Modernity with the crisis of the governance-world.
This convergence unleashes a raft of interactions among all these factors that lead to tipping points giving way to abrupt disruptions of the natural elements inside the habitat of life. As a consequence the existence, of the living species on earth, is abruptly threatened. This whole process is what I call “the great convergence”.
Being confronted with the reality of “the great convergence” human emotions are easily heating up to unbearable levels but our minds find themselves at a loss for good answers. Highly sensitive individuals are the first to be distraught and some can’t take it any longer. Suicides, and other mind derangement syndromes, inexorably multiply. This was confirmed by the US CDC which ordered “representative panel surveys ... among adults aged ≥18 years across the United States during June 24–30, 2020”. The most significant results from these panels are given in the following graph.
“In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.” Glenn Greenwald
The societal sickness evoked by Greenwald is the natural outcome of societal atomization as I laid out earlier. The individual atom is trapped in loneliness and life suddenly appears meaningless. It all goes back to the disappearance of the grand narratives of our traditional worldviews that leave the individuals ? without meaning ? without sharing of a common perception about reality with others.
This points to the abandonment of the fundamentals that are at work in the nature of life. What can we do ?
Our contextual settings are not going to change as per miracle. We can’t change the fact of humanity’s power decision-making process but we can adapt our individual behavior to the reality ? of the predicament of the “great-convergence” ? of the decision-making process in Late-Modernity.
Adapting our behavior does not mean that we ignore and turn our backs to these realities. It means that we face them with a straight face. Western decision-makers love nothing more than discouraged citizens. We should not give them this pleasure. We have to face reality by getting a better grip on it and in matter of fact the quest for knowledge is the best antidote ever devised not only against discouragement but also on getting a grip on reality.
Eastern decision-makers, and most certainly the Chinese, have another attitude. They view their mission as to procure a higher well-being to their citizens and their citizens trust that the future of their children will be better than their own present. This is the reason for the disconnection between Eastern and Western societal moods that I documented in “A growing disconnect between East and West”.
In our era of Western Late-Modernity two schools of thought dominate the landscape of the mind ? the technophiles ? the collapsenicks. The technophiles religiously believe that technology will save the day and the collapsenicks religiously believe that the end is near. Each of these two schools behave like established religious cults that further divide into ever more specialized sects.
Most citizens do not harbor such hardcore beliefs. They simply go along consuming the goods that marketeers adapt to the tastes of these two big schools of thought. But ever larger throngs of people are growing dissatisfied with this normality and are searching for sense in their lives.
The quest for knowledge I’m personally talking about resides outside the realm of these two dominant schools of thought in Late-Modernity. It is a more direct immersion within the material of reality that attempts to get a grip on the way life goes on unrelentingly evolving ever further.
Such a quest pragmatically rejects ideology and opens the mind to the fundamentals of life.
