Non-Being and Destructiveness

"To be or not to be; that is the question.", said Hamlet. But he could also have said "To create or destroy; that is the question." They amount to the same thing, because being, or  individuation, is a creative act that every person has to perform for himself - or not. The simplest choice is often simply not to be - to abdicate responsibility for our most important responsibility, simply because this is what our society demands.

In a previous posting I said our society was evil, and people thought I was using unnecessarily harsh language. But any society that destroys its members and itself, and probably other societies too, is evil - the worst kind of evil.

At this point, I may be getting a lot of blank looks that say "What the hell are you talking about, crazy?" This is because the idea of a self has been forgotten - one of the basic ideas that formed the modern world. The post-modern world has waged war on this idea, along with other modern ideas - and it has won, without even much of a fight. We are returning a high-tech version of the medieval world. To see what this will be like, we only have to look at China, who is far ahead of us this way.

You may respond by noting how successful the Chinese economy has been. True, and if that is the only criteria: to be a rich totalitarian state, that is the way to go. We are pretty far along that road ourselves. There is only one catch: the loss of the self - and, as it turns out, the loss of the earth itself. It amounts to the same thing.