A higher state: being just human
Watching Fight Club was rude awakening. Don’t know how many of us really feel that our lives have become stagnant. A part of us wishing we weren’t what we really are. Our identity is everything of our personal collection but we, and we do nothing to wrest it back from “things”. Wearing this identity has taken its toll too. Human element is dissolved in the towering establishments of civilization. Emotions are standardized. You “ought” to do this if you are in pain, join a club if you need laughter therapy. Why Chloe’s last wish of getting laid one last time is inadmissible before group? Who decides what a dying person should ask for? Why should the wish be noble if death itself is so shameless as to come in such hideous forms? Spiritual enlightenment is the name of submission of will at every stage of life, a retreat into wilderness or the individual heroic that braves every adversity and burdens itself with the greater good of humanity? I can be human, only too human, and still be spiritually enlightened. If I am feeling empty, I need to start from scratch. Reacquaint myself with the most primitive emotions to escape this commodification. Discover what binds us together, not necessarily common needs. Tyler Durden proclaims we are the middle children of history. Our every invention is outside us and we are shrinking in stature. Things have evolved but we have regressed and this inferiority is apparent in us striving to create our identity with our wardrobe items. Can we challenge our ancestors in a hand to hand combat, stripped of all our gadgets? Can we survive in a jungle on our own as much as a person from middle ages did? Surrounded by creation, creator is losing that element that sets him apart from creation. Could this have been the inspiration of Asimov’s robot-taking-over-world-and-enslaving-man saga? While imparting more and more of intelligence, our only hope would be to beat the creation on our own turf. This is not to undermine the advancements we have made but what good is it if we feel depleted at the personal level? To what end it is driving us?
Spiritual redemption would not be complete without placing our human heroic above unsubstantiated divine connection. Why do we credit divinity with the conquests that were brought about by our effort? It hardly does any justice to our heroes and certainly no good to the generations of strivers. Do I sense Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (overman) here?
Instead of Christianity now, this stereotype corporate culture, that demands conformity, has thwarted the development of superior individuals. And a consumer mentality where our needs are made, not things we need, is not helping it either. Detestable means to a degenerate end. It has reduced us to less than human, leave alone anything superior. Nietzsche decried the modern notion of “progress” for the reason that there have been scattered and accidental existences of overman in the past. But this culture is stifling our growth, and is certainly not conducive to individual excellence.
In the course of history, there have been heroes that symbolize the higher level of individualism with no supplication to divinity and are worth emulating. Society that insists on conformity and impedes this development deserves to be sent in anarchy. After all, it is through these turbulent times, great personalities are born and not in a stagnant and prosaic ambience like this corporate culture. Probably Operation Mayhem is designed to galvanize people with the aim of anarchical crash of this culture. And an underground fight club in every city is a blunt but potent way to wake us up from slumber.
posted by Osho | 7:47 PM
2 Comments:
I don't know what prompted you to write this. But it seems pretty deep. We are all leading such pre-programmed lives, with a manual entry for every thing. Like the 'Simpsons did it' thing in South Park. And whenever things get out of control, there is a revolution. It has been seen time and again historically.
However, are times really so decadent? Isn't all the staleness actually helping us to live better lives? The Neanderthalers lived miserably, and not very long. We take a lot of things for granted. May be that is why we have prayers to thank god or whatever for everything, some remnant of the old world when it was difficult perhaps?
Have you read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? Can you imagine a life easier than that? Everything designed for stability and standardization leading to a long lasting social order. Even humans, if you can call them that, are conditioned from their birth to revel in whatever they are destined to do and their destiny is by design, not divine. Why can John not reconcile with this seemingly utopian setting which may symbolize the ultimate culmination of our present society? Because we are confusing numbness with comfort, which I myself do sometimes when I’m little drunk. Little eccentricities, randomness, that element of surprise, emotions, instincts that make us human should never be lost otherwise the whole place will be so prosaic and unimaginative. That is what this corporate culture is making us do, trading things we think we need for what certainly makes us who we are. And all for this distorted sense of comfort? Accepted that we should have moved on from being Neanderthal man and we have, but our needs have long been replaced by wants and the character of these wants is such that we are forsaking values that make us human.
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