as I attempt to understand, to know, I am increasingly
becoming isolated from our “modern” world…
“to know”… is as I am ever becoming more aware of, is an
emotional response, not an intellectual response…
My wife will often comment on things I have said with,
“I know”… and yet, I have far greater knowledge of things,
of idea’s, of ism’s… I am book smart, not that it counts for anything,
but she is emotionally smart…… something I have never been accused of being…
so I lack the basic emotional intelligence or skills that most people have…
so when I fail to understand why people are so invested in such things
as gods or superhero’s… I can’t tell if it is because I lack the emotions
necessary to understand such things or if it is really a thing that people
seem to need superhero’s in the same way people need god?
my own emotional weakness seems to call into question my understanding
of the world…does my failure to understand due to my own weakness or
is it really an issue? I can’t tell… I can only report my findings and move on…
sometimes, just sometimes, I look out at the world from my eyes…
and I know I am looking at the world from my eyes but I don’t see how
I am connected to the world…In the living room I see the couch and I see chairs
and I see the kitchen with its fridge and stove and here in the dinning room, I sit at
the kitchen table with my computer writing… I listen to the music in my ear buds,
Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm….but I am not one with all these things… I am
separated from, isolated from everything I see and touch…I don’t feel
a connection to any of this stuff I can see…and someone who is in touch with
the world, with their feelings and emotions might not be so isolated from
their environment… the religious person, the one who believes in god/superman
might see in all those empty spaces I see, they might see how each of those items,
the couch and TV and fridge and kitchen table are connected. that their
religious feelings might be the reason they can connect these items whereas
I don’t have any sort of religious feeling and so I can’t connect these things…
the world is connected through some third source and that source is what
we might call the religious or god…….
our connection to the world is made via these religious feelings…
we see the our connection to the world via our connection to god…
but what if, what if there is no god…and we cannot connect to the world
as an emotional response? we stand isolated and apart from everything…
that is as good of an answer/description as to what the “modern” world is, isolated
and apart from everything………individual atoms flying through space……
not connected to anything…… we see from this atomization of man that
we are disconnected, alienated from the world we see in a basic and fundamental
way… this atomization, fracturing of man comes from the acceptance of
ism’s and ideologies and myths and superstitions and biases that atomized
and fracture man…….capitalism and communism doesn’t unite mankind into
a united or whole… capitalism and communism atomizes and fractures/alienate
us from each other and from ourselves… I cannot see myself as whole because
the ism’s that surrounds us like the air surrounds us or the water surrounds the fish,
no longer allows us to be whole……. we have been negated, our values and our
very lives have been negated by unseen forces that we cannot control………
just as gravity surrounds and binds us, but we cannot actually see this
force of gravity… we can feel its effects but we cannot see it…
we are surrounded by forces that are unseen and uncontrollable…
the forces of capitalism, the invisible hand of god (market forces) and
communism, the dialectical materialism (also by forces outside of ourselves)
how do I connect to a world that is run by market forces or
the dialectical materialism of communism? The very existence
of these unseen and uncontrolled forces isolates and alienates
me from society and from myself………
I am a modern man… alienated and isolated by forces that I cannot see
or control…… I see the world as isolated and alienated… I am not
connected to the objects in my life and thus isolated from them…
how do I reunite myself with the world? is the path to a reunification
of body and soul, my body and soul, to the world via some desperate
human need for gods/superhero’s? I don’t know…
I suppose that my disconnect, alienation from the world could
come from such a small thing as becoming aware…… I am aware
of my existence and I wonder what that means… is that awareness
enough to cause me to become isolated from or alienated from
both myself and my society or my environment? I simply don’t know…
Kropotkin