Random Reflections: Suicidal Societies, Suicidal Sex Toys, Suicidal Spirits
Gee, who could have seen this coming? The wishy-washy, flip-flopping, finger-in-the-wind, what-will-make-people-like-me-today?, unprincipled, self-emasculated, small-handed sissy Donald Trump, after four days of defending his abandonment of the Kurds, and mocking them as they died, is now threatening sanctions against Turkey, demanding an immediate ceasefire, and declaring that he will not withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
What will his millions of monkeys say now, after defending his asinine, murderous sell-out of yet another ally for the past four days? They will say, of course, “Don’t mess with Trump! Yeah! MAGA!” Because they are even less principled and more self-emasculated and small-handed than their master, the Orange McConnell, the establishment’s court jester.
In the meantime, no one will care that Trump has just served up more control of the globe to Vladimir Putin, and that his current “demands” are merely serving Russia’s interests, since Putin has already gotten the Kurds to sign a deal conceding their semi-autonomous territory in northern Syria back to Assad, in exchange for protection against the Turkish forces that Trump deliberately and knowingly unleashed on them.
Another K-Pop (Korean pop music) star has committed suicide. These young talentless non-entities are created and propped up by a corporate entertainment machine, usually from their mid-teens, when they are yanked out of school and turned into virtual prostitutes — first for the corporate executives who control their career fates and who invariably wish to “meet the girls” for lunch and drinking sessions, and then for the worldwide audience that revels in K-Pop’s generic, commercially-produced, squeaky-clean sex show. K-Pop, perhaps at the pinnacle of the modern entertainment industry, has realized Huxley’s prediction of a society’s perfect moral inversion in Brave New World: infantile sexuality is “cute,” licentiousness is innocent fun, every little girl is encouraged to aspire to the morally upright and charmed life of a walking, talking pleasure toy.
More on the suicide fetish, and its connection to the cynical “mental health” industry, in a future installment.
A student whom I often counsel about her life path, priorities, and the like, recently asked me a question that, while deceptively simple in form, actually captures the essence of a topic that often arises in my conversations with students I know well: “If I’m drunk, isn’t it me?”
My immediate response:
In one way, it is you. It is all your weaknesses and random thoughts and feelings, with no filter, no judgment, no moderation, no rationality to distinguish among those thoughts and feelings and decide which ones are important and beneficial, and which ones are useless and harmful.
In another way, when you are drunk you are not you; on the contrary, you are everyone, because without your judgment and virtue you are no longer really yourself. You are the undifferentiated puddle of urges and fears and impulses that is just human nature minus the rational development which defines adult maturity and independence. And if you are everyone, then you are not you. Hence, the drunken man is, in an important sense, not himself at all. He is undifferentiated man, which is to say dehumanized and collectivized man.
