By the mid-nineties we tossed the last few shovelfuls upon Truth's grave and looked about the grim reality that Americans possessed everything and yet at the same time had nothing. Science and technology had bequeathed history's bloodiest century. The Soviet Union dissolved. Our aspirations for space travel petered out with the Challenger explosion. Utopias had become as unreachable as the stars. Global-warming alarmists prophesied doom. Reckless presidents dabbled in the Mideast and philandered with interns. Seattle grunge and the Midwest melancholy existential musings of the Smashing Pumpkins echoed postmodernism's postmortem of the enlightenment. From Kurt Vonnegut to Kurt Cobain the message was clear - the truth is that Truth was dead. Truth had been deconstructed, dismembered, and disemboweled - never to be disinterred. Only ignoramuses in the hinterland held on to a bygone absolutism.
Then, some jetliners pierced our existential fog eliminating New York's lofty pillars. We ran about like disoriented farm animals in a hail storm. We needed Truth but we had buried her. Our golden eggs were threatened and the mangled carcass of the goose lay on our dinner table. Then, a strange and unexpected deus ex machina descended upon us; the internet sprinkled its benevolent digital pixy dust upon the corpses of Truth and her children. The grim reality of our world was replaced by a new world, an undiscovered country. Our whirling compasses finally settled on a direction. All the needles pointed back to their operators.
The postmodern world eliminated truth and then gave us the digital tools we needed to create our own truths. We became the standard bearers. We became masters of a new universe that lay quite literally at our fingertips. Search engines and social media fed our preferences. We no longer had to be meaningless pawns in a chaotic universe; rather, we were given Brahman-like power to create one of many universes where our avatars can run amok. Welcome to the pseudomodern world.
The first dozen years of the new millennium had a pleasant veneer. We clicked and voted through our mobile devices controlling reality stars and elevating nobodies to prominent positions. We recognized the great interconnections of all things and if our codes and timing were correct we could tap into power, a power similar to the power wielded by ancient Shamans who sought to control their world through mantras and spells. Like Zeus we could cloud ourselves in the elements of our new universe and sow our wild oats in disguise. We could assume even more power through endless social pantheons by advertising ourselves through various "upvotes" "likes" and "followers." The thrill of power caused a lust for more. Something else happened, all the unpleasant failings and character flaws of the former world no longer needed to haunt us. We filtered, edited, selected and morphed. Like chameleons we could adjust to the demands of our surroundings. Gender, religion, sexuality, education, history and marriage were uprooted from their absolute moorings and placed upon a digital smorgasbord. We could feast without restraints.
Vestiges of objective Truth remained, threatening the autonomy and authority of a billion new gods and goddesses. Once the dust of the twin towers settled we looked skeptically at religion. Christianity closely resembled the Truth that the West had deconstructed. Secularists placed pressure on her from the outside like a horde of elitist Romans while the Judases of subjective spiritualism continued the onslaught from within. Like parasites they feasted upon the Christian worldview, using the sustenance to attack the host. If the parasites were to emerge they would need a new religion, a meta-narrative that would provide meaning, hope, goals, morality and value. The secular vultures left their religious prey, combed their feathers, and embraced a new, secular religion that advocated social justice, diversity, inclusion and permitted a divinity that could be found only within. Universities became temples where a secular priestly caste of professors preached dogma ensconced in a flowery perch of terminology known only to the enlightened. The media functioned as their prophets and the culturally elite regurgitate their platitudes. They walk on two legs like Orwell's pigs, scorning their roots, and we follow blindly choosing the path of least resistance.
But a tension lingered unexamined. We embrace new truths after deconstructing Truth. We embrace new moralities after deconstructing morality. We elevate ourselves to godhood after deconstructing life to blind mechanistic forces of zero value. We vocally give our approval and distaste but our pronouncements have no force because their foundation is nothing but preference. We hurdle about in a moral vacuum driving ourselves mad because we have no firm ground to push off of and nothing to orbit. We have climbed into God's throne and we have found that we do not fit. Our wings melt off as we strive to achieve his brilliance.
And so when there is nothing left to consume we must consume ourselves.The parasite has tried on the costume of its host but a parasite without a host will cannibalize itself. In our goal to become like God we become less that human. Our utopias become hell. Our desire to become like the ancient stars results in black-holes, the gravitational pull of which there is no escape. We can bide our time by pulling and tugging on our fellow man, climbing and clamoring over his shoulders but soon we'll be consumed. The pseudo-secular dam is about to burst and the coming deluge is prophetically reflected in the vacant eyes of the opioid addict who wanders around a land flowing with milk and honey.
Postmodernism removed fences and we embraced the freedom without considering why the fences were there in the first place. We have forgotten that the greatest thing we need protection from is ourselves. Nations rise and fall. Their eventual demise comes not from the outside but from a decay within. We mask the decay with progressive semantics but one day a passerby will walk by the wall and put his hand through it realizing that it is brittle paper mache. He will then urge his friends to walk through the wall and gorge upon the ruins of the gods.
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