Pessimist Aphorisms of an Industrial Mind

Dialectics: incessant move. Result: eventual depletion. Fulfillment: Self-consciousness? On the contrary, eventual loss of creativity. Progress to: the end of history? On the contrary, toward death. Nothing lasts forever in a world determined by matter. Change in matter is both birth and death of life. Civilization is also made of matter.

The Spirit of our Time: Selfishness? Maybe. Addresses to nations no longer matter. That time is gone; industrial capitalism has eaten it all. The global is the only thing that remains. And the only thing I know about globes is that they are ruled by Caesars. It is only a matter of time. As I said before, everything determined by matter is doomed to die: even freedom. Like Oedipus, we will also take out our eyes. Like Electra, we will also kill our mother(land).

Matter of time is a curious expression. It speaks that matter in the context spoken is time, not matter itself. But time is not matter, is it? Matter is linked through time, because through time matter changes, and changes dialectically (or mechanically, that is irrelevant) so as to reach fulfillment in its current form and pass away. This is not good. This is tragic. Conservatism is the really tragic ideology.

Dialectics is nothing but mechanics integrating life and death. The latter is for physicists, the former is for philosophers. Only through Jesus is this tragedy broken.

The Spirit of our Times is the Decline of the West, because selfishness never stopped being at its core. Existentialism became the prime philosophy, because in modern times, with its pipelines, its underground trains and its smoke pumping into the sky, the death of creativity brought the dominium of that dreadful God called Bore. Its realm’s name: Boredom. Like all of you, I’m also its subject, its slave.

We are slaves; he is the dominus, our master. Is it the Modern Age the dominium of Bore? Is it the spiritual God and Master? The mind, like sleeping, in torpor, looks desperately for Fun, that minor deity. Fun takes us out of Boredom… of the realm of Bore… for a while. Do we go to Fun-dom? As with all minor deities, when Fun ceases to be present, Bore reclaims its dominium. No rest. Seeking fun and thrill without rest: that is the Spirit of our Times.

But the higher mind asks for more. Bore, that dreadful tyrant, like Caesar, must be killed. Is this possible in our times? From Boredom we can escape for a while; but is there a guillotine for this sovereign? Venus is gone, and we are left alone with Eros. Like a servant without his domina, he is the kindred of Fun. Ask yourself these questions, and you’ll realize how tragic our times look like.

Does the realm of Bore looks more dreadful the more conscious of it we are? Is it self-consciousness what makes Boredom so difficult a rule to bear? The need to erase the image of this yoke from our mind; the most desperate quest of the citizen of Cosmopolis. But boredom is not an idea; it is not abstraction, speaking beyond the content of the word.

I see a bridge. It’s massive; it’s the product of modern labor: the alienated product of hundreds of 19^th century workers, all now dead. It bridges all ghettos, it reaches Cosmopolis. It is the Brooklyn Bridge. Like him, like this massive structure whose weigh was so heavy for the hands and backs of those workers, my body is as heavy to my mind. My mind looks at it, relates to it, as a responsibility. Are all High Minds looking for the universal while their bodies force them to remain a thing-for-other, a particular? Who was right on this? Plato or Nietzsche? If my body is the realm for my pain and my mind is the realm for my boredom; between the Philosopher King and the Übermensch, I’m not sure who will give me the answer to this concern. Is there a synthesis between both? That would be a question worth answering.

Is my mind the dominium and realm of Bore, and Bore is its master, its sovereign? Where is Reason left? It seems now gone, like a bad dream. If Reason was the Goddess to which the West looked for a guide, it turned out to be all a lie, a false deity, a charlatan. Bore is more real, more powerful than Reason. That’s why Reason is invoked today to protect nothing else but those two minor shallow deities: Fun and Eros.

Goddess Reason was nothing but a madman’s dream: Robespierre’s dream. That Goddess never conquered anything in humanity, but the outer worldliness for humanity. That Goddess is claimed by those that call themselves liberals, in their idealist quest for that other Goddess, so much praised but so much unknown, Lady Justice: a Goddess that takes biased forms everywhere, deformed. Those liberals that desperately look for her, only find her partially, and those above, in their skyscrapers, are the ones that monopolize her. Hence, she only defends the product of the God Money, profit. Jesus is not their God. Justice is like a gendarme, with her sword driven by Money. The poor veteran, he who is asking for money in the train, Justice does not work for him. And she never will. For him only the God of Faith, Hope and Charity works; Jesus is his only God.

Goddess Justice and her sister Reason; both servants of this sovereign God of worldliness Money. Money allied with Fun and Eros to fight the inner tyrants Bore and Hunger. No my friends, Reason is a charlatan, and Justice is unknown! Bore and Hunger are the true masters of this world!