En route towards the pyre…
We are the Generation Zero grafted sensibilities to features of the world that we cannot be sure would yield to our attempts of definition, but nevertheless we have adopted them on a whim! It’s an imposed construct tailored to our financial/physical/intellectual needs — invented by Google, Meta, services like Netflix, Prime, Disney+ and everyone else we allow to use cookies without wondering what it entails. Our identity is defined by the constant accumulation of different needs within us — modelling behaviours and creating urges, all with one goal: to maximise profits. We are fuel for the corporations — we are not walking to the pyre anymore, we became one!
A few words on a time that never came
Nowadays, people strive toward fulfilment, and curiously enough, these feelings are mostly on an ambitious level, created and fueled, fitting people into roles and suits they don’t feel comfortable in — yeah! They pinch and squeeze from every side and make us consume our success only to be sucker-punched at the end? For some time now, always and everywhere we have been accompanied by that strange sensation of emptiness lurking up ahead. It crops up in our consciousness as we give in to the overpowering feeling of fulfilment causing risk-taking as we balance on the edge reaching for new emotions. This seemingly internal process that pushes us towards perdition is in fact a pure manipulation of forces faced by every human being on this planet — waging a battle of which he often is unaware.
Looking at life in recent years, one would like to exclaim: this is where I am wrestling my shadow, though it is always a step ahead! Everyday life and repetitiveness as an all-encompassing emptiness? Filled with the hustle and bustle of life and yet terrifyingly barren, cold and dark. We live under the pillory of uniformity, where everyone thinks they have to match someone or something — hence it’s reinforced feeling. Added to this is the awareness of loss. Well, that’s a fundamentally false belief, but painfully perceptible.
On our return to normality, barely a day after we found the world at the moment of solstice, in the confusion of the violence of the density of time. We are like the wolf that bit off its paw to free itself from the trap. Apparently free, but incomplete. Emerging from the darkness directly under the piercing rays of the light, we feel everyday life with redoubled strength of all the added values — it seems stunning, marked by love, winged by dreams that have been longing for their moment. But it is also a world that has verged on madness, a reality suspended on the threshold of extinction — with its ever-recurring spectre deeply rooted in our mass culture. This is why the question of identity is so important. Since, in essence, the problem of emptiness is an attempt at identification — I, that is, who?
It can be seen very clearly amongst children, who today need even more acceptance and understanding. For if so many of us (adults) couldn’t find ourselves in a time that never existed, how will they cope in a time that hasn’t come yet? But a world pushed into oblivion may be brought to the present, by calling things and people by their names, this seemingly elusive time, through the voices of those rescued from getfulness, has the power to reveal the empty place left by a life annihilated through fear and uncertainty. As we now understand more, we can uncover this void and write it over again.
Yet the ease with which we can pass over any diagnosis or solution is misleading in fact, for revealing the gap will not lead to its cicatrization. The absence keeps staring at us ominously from the nearby abyss. In this breath, the horror of recent years lies dormant. But there is also a glimmer of hope, a crack open to the possibility of re-evaluating old truths. All hope lies within our children for their journey through time has changed them, making anew as it were, more malleable. It is as if someone gave us a second chance. The question is, have we taken full advantage of it?
I am afraid of the answer. I see that we are still looking for ways to survive, but on this wandering, should we look for new ways at the cost of renouncing ourselves, rejecting who we are, crossing out our memories, uprooting ourselves? How is the core of one’s humanity linked to the tradition that has shaped them? What is the essence of this tradition, it’s living, profound current? And how does the experience of falling — occurring often at crucial moments — fit into this?
Was it an impulse of harebrained reason or a calculation of many years? Now, after almost 3 months of struggle, it no longer matters. Time (again) stopped on the 24th of February and stands by watching us with a mocking smile, as we struggle to put the pendulum back in motion.
There is a proverb about misfortunes that come in pairs… So what if it is? It makes it even worse, especially when we realise who are the architects of these misfortunes. Is the death of defenceless people, children, women, and old people murdered in Bucha a watershed moment for us (the civilized West)? Do the bombs falling on schools, hospitals, kindergartens and theatres have enough power to shake us and become a breakthrough in our perception of ourselves and the world? I will answer for you — No! Those who suffered the horrors of war are like convicts marching towards the scene of execution — anaesthetised and sunken in themselves. Their time stands still or goes back to the moment before the catastrophe. Where the vision of humanity corresponded to the image of man and his roots that held him firmly upright…
A super-unreality
Looking at the war from afar, having in mind the experience of isolation and restrictions, allowing impairment to perceptions of reality I see two different planes. The first is what it is: painfully bloody and crying out for the intervention of thoughtful Logos. Evil shows itself here in all its glory, priding itself on how it has grown, and to what extent it has infected people. The second one is a product of cunning reason acting only for itself (and everything that happens by its will is connected with loss and sacrifices) creating a tangible space contained in the words and deeds of those who brought the first reality into existence. At a glance, the analogy I would like to use here may seem quite inadequate, but it is only an illusion since the mechanism of negation and the lack of logic are the common denominator here. The creators of the second “plane” are like and operate on the same principle as, the “anti/never generation”, where denial and contempt for the rest is the axis of action and the fuel for hatred leading to violence. The narrative of fascists in Ukraine is based on the same founding lie as the narrative of a vaccine designed either to eliminate weaker individuals or to control those who have received it. The initial falsehood is much like a drug taken in ever-increasing doses — it engulfs, absorbs and changes reality, at some point becoming its building block. Thus, everything that comes into being afterwards is contaminated and falls under the notion of super-unreality. Unfortunately, the more unreal this second reality becomes, the more people depart the world. Rape becomes a virtue, robbery a reward, murder is considered a heroic act and accepting a vaccination is synonymous with naivety and susceptibility to the dictates of unspecified forces ruling the world. In this way, dictators, demagogues or those for whom profit has become the prime value introduce a new man into the world. This creates a division between vulnerable and non-vulnerable men. As Milton rightly pointed out, this is the shortest route to upheaval.
For every upheaval has its mad prophets, and at any given time there will be some Cassandra crying Woe to you, O House of Priam! Unfortunately, what we see on our TV screens is not a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, although, as the Commander of the 36th Infantry Brigade defending the Azovstal plant Serhiy Volynskyi wrote: “I ended up in some hellish reality show where we are fighting for our lives and the whole world is watching this interesting play”. Alas, he was wrong. Hardly half of the world, or even less. And indeed those who are watching sometimes say with a smile on their lips: „it is all propaganda and a staged performance.” People becoming increasingly passive and even sceptical, not from a lack of information, but on account of its widespread availability. From morning to evening we are inundated with a constant stream of news coverage by many sources, divisible into different types of ‘truth’: amplified, distorted, transformed and newly produced. Some of us resist by using various filters, read and feel with our hearts, others take everything in with their eyes, and a few give up, accepting the straightforward messages from the transmitters of “ super-unreality”. In a free world, in a realm of choice, super-unreality occupies a special place, an easy option and always within reach, with its door perpetually open — it is the shortest route to the pyre , where the image of who we were, who we are and who we could be is burned.
All wars begin with one man’s head and result in the suffering of millions, that is what my grandmother used to say, and she was right. She lived through both of the worst conflicts in the history of mankind. When the Great War began, she was already a married woman. By the time Hitler rolled his armoured divisions through Poland, she had already given birth to four children, one of whom was taken away by the Spanish flu, and the other three were in their teens or had already grown up. So you can’t deny her “expert” qualities, as they say nowadays — all you have to do is to have seen or heard something to become an expert. So, it seems to me that despite her terrible experience of both conflicts, she would still be terrified by the vision of war in Ukraine. As this war that is taking place far away has already taken place in our homes — it oozes out of our screens to our hearts and minds. It is on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. It lives with us, sleeps with us, wakes up with us and then we take it to work, to social meetings, to sports halls — it has attached itself to us as if it were some kind of implant that we can never get rid of.
Transplanted identity, a prison without bars!
We are the Generation Zero grafted sensibilities to features of the world that we cannot be sure would yield to our attempts of definition, but nevertheless, we have adopted them on a whim! It’s an imposed construct tailored to our financial/physical/intellectual needs — invented by Google, Meta, services like Netflix, Prime, Disney+ and everyone else we allow to use cookies without wondering what it entails. Our identity is defined by the constant accumulation of different needs within us — modelling behaviours and creating urges, all with one goal: to maximise profits. We are fuel for the corporations — we are not walking to the pyre anymore, we became one! Thus — wanting to exist, we cease to exist much like a blaze devouring itself, the more we struggle, the less we are. Thinking of it this way, I feel like Napoleon languishing for years on Saint Helena. I am seemingly free and yet it is only a prison without bars where everything that is mine turns out to be the same presumptive lie that so effectively distorts reality. The impulsive need to possess, the multiplication of wealth, excessive consumption, political sympathies, musical tastes, understanding of art, rationing of access to knowledge, acceptable patterns of social behaviour, the acceptance or condemnation of violence, which is also subject to strict rationing on both a moral and a physical level, all these are not me! And yet… It is me, who accepts the dictates of reality, same one who undergoes an identity transplant in an attempt to persist with hope that one day someone else, some better person will put out the fire! The problem is that others have always been burnt at the stake, fueled by ourselves. It is therefore an eternal paradox, where the victim devours the savior in the hope of becoming rescued.
Today’s man is a victim of cognitive distortions imposed on him from his earliest years, which result in a biased and falsified perception of reality and often creates anti-patterns — as an inducement for urge to leave the identity trap. In other words, our minds are being bombarded with a continuous flow of information thought to be true, when in fact they are not. An example of this is propaganda, or so-called factoids. These are at the very least inaccurate and usually aim to provoke negative thoughts and feelings. As a result, a person who often perceives the world on the basis of cognitive distortions (without realizing it) may have a very negative image of this world, of other people, and even of himself. The inability to distinguish truth from falsehood leads to mood disorders (depression) or apprehension issues. A peak in these public morbidities was observed after the Wuhan outbreak, and is now being felt by people over-exposed to the torrent of “news” related to the war in Ukraine. This is a constantly recurring pattern and it will intensify in the coming years. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to confront this acrimony, all the more so since there are countless pressure groups, individuals and organisations at regional or global level with particular interests in this area. An alternative reality — the putative lie has become the building block of a new world where truth dies before it is even spoken.
