The Symphony of Write and Wrong… Excavations while Writing

Questions on the authenticity of religious as well as moral beliefs held for millennia had been gathering steam in European public discourse since the age of enlightenment and scientific inquiry. This paradigm of questioning the order of things was not uncommon among intellectual movements that ignited in large parts of Western Civilization during the 1500s. Names like Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei come to mind. It took close to 3 centuries of scientific inquiry however before intellectual titan of the modern world Fredereich Nietzsche arrived in the picture and gave us the vocabulary to articulate mankind's "new" existence; in a world where we do NOT have answers to eternal truths.?

Calling Nietzsche a thinker of the 20th century seems chronologically inaccurate, seeing as the man himself lived out the entirety of his short, yet monumentally significant life, in the 19th century. A caveat to this fact however is that Nietzsche is widely regarded as the person responsible for bringing about a paradigm shift of human thought that had profound implications on the directions in which social and political frameworks were required to progress in, in order to take civilization through the ravaging events of the early 20th century before complete annihilation (World Wars, economic depression, rise of nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiments.) Such sequences of events demanded a radical rethinking of previously held values about life and morality that we as a society held at large.?

Many list the frightening ideology of the Third Reich (Nazi Germany) as one of the more terrible outcomes of a brilliant person’s ideas if left uninterpreted or ambiguous for too long. But many others who adopted Nietztsche’s ideas became the great influencers of politics in the 20th century; whose ideas would very literally come to shape the world as we see it? today - the highly potent and highly combustible concoction of capitalism, consumerism, individualism, and all the other fun stuff..

Still others, such as the great psychologist Carl Jung, took Nietzsche's efforts to bring all of human civilization into a reality where us human beings have the responsibility of giving meaning to our own existence, to more benevolent directions. Our ability to approach problems in science with a more philosophical lens led to early forefathers of our species’s first advocates for mental health, psychology as an area of study, and in communicating the irrefutable significance of philosophical and spiritual frameworks in tying together pursuits in medicine and health.??

The fear and concern that Nietzsche held for humanity was that not enough people are doing what he strived to do in his life: get to the bottom of their own morality, and take up the task with dire urgency. He feared that leaving this void in mankind’s psyche left by an insufficient spiritual framework to view the world in unattended for too long, would leave mankind free from one dogma (religion) but in control of another. Indeed that is exactly what many today would assert that happened in reality. We adopted consumerism and capitalism as our new religions. Even when we are concerned with spiritual well being, and even as talk about mental health is lighting HR departments everywhere buzzing these days, we can never rid ourselves of the consumerist measuring scale we are all placed in since the day of our birth.?

#fortheloveofthought??