A Transvaluation of Values?
In a prior post , I called EM (EuroModernism) a Death Machine
If so, what might be the salve?
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Let’s address this in two simple, but initial, steps.
1.EM dehumanises us, by refusing to credit us our essential human nature (affective, co-operative, mutualist, familial), and instead assumes we are rationalist, competitive, self-seeking, and individualist.
Salve: Rehumanise ourselves.
We need to recognise our human essence , de-emphasize the latter attributions, and reorient life and living in conformity with that essence.
Whence we have to affirm the primacy of affective relations , whilst displacing other relations onto a secondary plane.
2. EM depersonalises life and living.
Salve: Personalise all relations, infusing/affirming them with affective content.
The sullen bleakness/ennui of everyday, adversarial, life in the public sphere then evaporates and it starts to become ‘meaningful’ again.
It’s akin to a black & white film slowly taking on color.
Just following these 2 simple, instantly available, protocols will help , slowly, to first expose, and then transmogrify the Modernist Wasteland into a somewhat more bountiful domain of existence.
Other, follow through, steps will then spontaneously evolve.
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What did I just describe above ?
In effect, the social ontology of simple tribal society where all relations are affective: whence meaningful, non-alienating, and mutually affirming.
The salve is a gradual process of disengagement with EM diktats that impose artificial boundaries/borders and infect all relations with the toxins of doubt , disquiet, distrust.
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Anthropic life is utterly simple, not complex.
E-Modernism, in its manipulative thrusts, diverts our energies from where they serve our human needs to serving the interests of the system.
It infuses a faux intensity and gratuitous complexity into the social ethos booning us an utterly phony sense of chic sophistication and superiority to pre-Modern social mores.
We are, thereby, misled into squandering the many, simple, bounties of life in favor of building castles in the air, jousting windmills like Don Quixote, seeking the unattainable, dreaming of impossible utopias, chasing ephemeral chimeras of imagined Erewhons, and thereby living ever dispiritedly, and bogged down, in states of palpable discontent .
Tropes like the tortured artist, or the angst-ridden existentialist, born in EM salons of wilful anomie, are emblematic of the self-induced, delusional, nature of EM states of being.
It’s a dreadful treadmill: and, like All Modernist Paths, leads nowhere, except to certain disenchantment.
Precious lives are all too often wasted: into fruitless escapades , and unrequiting retreats, that take us further and further away from the sources of our real contentments.
Contra the protestations of the system, life is not about exalted attainments or ineffable achievements.
These are transparently false snares that lure us straight into the maelstrom of endless struggle, strife, and gratuitous , incessant, conflict : with others , and our own inner psyches.
At needless, fruitless, war with each other, and ourselves.
An expense of spirit, in a waste of guilt – and disaffection – to slightly amend the Bard of Avon.
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The staggering richness of life, brief as it is, drains away unnoticed, as we live trapped within robotised routines, walking the walk, running the course, jumping through hoops, ever diverted from all the manifold provenances of our essential well-being.
To repeat: we are communal, familial, mutualist , beings forced to
be privatised, individualised, and , also, set up adversarially against others , similarly located.
Which makes war the normal, inevitable, even permanent, EM condition.
But we are not warriors, at heart: but, in essence, lovers.
Whence we suffer, mired in varied miseries, at home and abroad.
In unremitting, and ever dubious, struggle(s).
Is it worth it?
Think.
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A transvaluation of values helps break the epistemic chains, as an initial, necessary, first step.
Ontic (de)constructions will, ipso facto, follow.
<em>For we humans build real communities, naturally, and instinctively, like ants and bees, if left alone.
No manifestos , nor loud declamations, are needed.
We are organic beings, compelled by force and fraud of EM diktats to live empty, mechanical, mechanistic, lives.
As Orwell well understood, we qua humans. are the normal, natural, antipode to any and all of the fabrications of the EN Machine.
All it takes, as a first step, is, simply, true self-awareness
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A Transvaluation of Values: that’s just the beginning – of a long, and winding , Unravelment.
Ready?
[© R.Kanth 2022]
Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (Novel) , A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse)
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