Reflections on Surviving Today
Everything today is for stupid people. If anything exists today that is not fundamentally aimed at the stupid, then it falls entirely outside the public eye, resides beyond social discourse, has no connection to the quasi-life that the society around you is engaged in. Hence, if anything you like, do, or care about does fall within the public eye, occupy a corner of social discourse, or connect to the activities of those around you, it too is ultimately for stupid people, which is to say that your own life, in that part or to that extent, touches the realm of stupidity. Today we all, inevitably and inescapably, have at least “one foot in the door,” as it were. The best we can do, then — and this is no small feat– is struggle all our lives to prevent the infinite pull of that stupidity vacuum from sucking us all the way in. To achieve this aim, which you cannot know you have achieved while still alive, is to exist among the rarest of the rare. This is the new meaning of “spiritual aristocracy,” a meaning calibrated to those fated to endure a life amid these bitterest dregs of our end-stage democracies.
To accept everything (except the discernment not to accept everything, which must be hated and rejected, of course) is to care about nothing, to believe in nothing, to esteem nothing. Hence, nihilism insists on accepting everything, for the universal bath of nothingness is its purpose.
To identify a man as a savior is to presuppose that the realm he would supposedly save is capable of salvation — which in turn is implicitly to suppose that you yourself are capable of being saved. But even a true savior, were he to appear, would need to work his miracle upon a matter already amenable to salvation, which is to say upon those with the potential to be redeemed. Today’s idol-worshippers, political or otherwise, reveal not only mental weakness but also, more revoltingly, moral presumptuousness. Rather than self-righteously grasping at saviors, they ought to work on making themselves worthy of salvation. For that, in the end, is all anyone may control by his own effort — and it is far from obvious that many today could even do that much.