Very good stuff here that I find spot on. Unless I’m mistaken you have the complexity of self martyrdom for career purposes really down. That worries me a lot. I see it as population crowding tied to instantaneous mass communication knowing that while their could be, no one is really listening. Even if they are listening they won’t hear because they’re too busy looking for a pyre to throw themselves on in the hope that someone will pull them off before they burn too much. Now there’s a story with self-actualization dollar signs all over it. Jesus, what are we doing to ourselves and we’re just getting warmed up.
I too had some trouble with the hyper-rational thing blaming me (?) for being too rational? One thing Homo sapiens are not is too rational. I could really deal with rational as the foundation for things so there is my problem, I guess. As it went on I began to see the trajectory turning back on ourselves for creating the ability to build completely virtual worlds but the only thing we could think to do with them is blow the shit out of millions of faceless spear carriers. And in the process learning to be faceless spear carriers but only seeing everyone else as faceless and potential dead. Hence the 4chan and alt-shit and, as you identified, endless rehash of Berlin 1934 without knowing anything about the surrealist birthed Art Deco that bled into that. There were people there too. They didn’t know the shit was going to literally come down on them and their families either. They thought that you just need to play along and it will be all right. It can’t be that bad, can it?
You may know that many years ago there was a comic strip called Pogo that many of us grew up with. One day it famously declared “We have met the enemy, and he is us . . .”. We are dealing not with just small cycles but big ones and even bigger ones behind that. And the irony and surreal nature of human attempts to drag ourselves up out of the blood and mud has produced great art and bad art, too, now for generations. We do get farther up each time, though. If we can just use our greatest tools to build enough realities to confuse the monsters maybe we can make it out. But we really need some diverse and seriously new realities. Maybe you could start to build them?
