Zeitgeist in our age....

Zeitgeist: the defining spirit or mood of a particular period
of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time…

one might reflect on this…what is the defining spirit or mood of our time…

we can hold that the defining spirit or mood of the enlightenment was
a a holding to rationalism as defined by the enlightenment motto:

Sapere aude: dare to know… or even more loosely, “dare to be wise”

but the fact is that in the enlightenment was a two track system, we have
the elites who were the intellectuals of the age, Voltaire for example
and then we have the 99% of the everyone else… the vast majority of
the western world did not care about or noted the enlightenment…
it was a small, elitist affair that didn’t impact 99% of the people in Europe…

the truth is that within the intellectual history of Europe or anywhere else
for that matter, it only engages the 1% of people… and we might call
the 19th century, “The age of reason” but once again, its impact was really
felt in that small percentage of people who actually cared about that sort of thing…
the vast majority of people didn’t give a shit about the “The age of Reason”…
they were too busy living, suffering and dying to notice “The age of Reason”…

so one has to be careful when declaring an age, “the age of …”
because quite often, that age only impacts a very small number of people…

so, we once again ask, what is the “Zeitgeist of our age?”

I would say, fear…we are a very fearful world today… it has driven
events for decades… from 9/11 to the election of IQ45, are all fear driven
events…and one might even be able to take that fear back to Raygun…
he began the the politics of fear that has so driven America over the last
40 years…the entire GOP platform is a fear driven platform…fear of
the “illegal alien” who is taking our jobs, not true… the fear of
the “deep state” which remains unidentified, fears of vaccines,
fear of losing our “freedoms” which in itself causes us to lose freedoms…
fear of the “media” even fear of “freedom of speech and religion”
to be a conservative is to in fear of, well, everything…

and this fear has lead people away, far away from rational thought, logic,
the use of intelligence… the use of one’s gut over one thinking…
I wonder which recent president did that?

this fear, is basically allowing instincts to take over…
and that use of instincts over thought has lead us to
shy away from seeking answers to the problems of our times,
to reduce finding answers to the vexing problems of our time,
to denying that there even is a long list of problems…
or making non problems into key social issues that demands
our immediate attention… and denying those issues that do
demands our immediate attention, climate change for example…

we should engage with such issues as climate change, but the
conservatives focus on such dramatic issues as Dr. Suess…
or the sexual orientation of the telly tubbies…
they are societal crisis indeed worthy of our immediate attention…

we need to focus on issues that matter, not social distractions
meant to confuse and disorder the masses…

so the Zeitgeist of our age is really a refusal to work out the questions
that matter in favor of questions that shouldn’t even be in our minds…

one’s sexual orientation isn’t a question for society, it is an individual question
that involves one’s own answer whereas climate change requires, demands
everyone participation…and the question that is ignored by many because
of their collective fear… of something…perhaps it is a question of control…
conservatives might fear the large questions because it is large and something
that isn’t in their control… but the individual question of sexual orientation is
something that conservative can try to control… via laws and restrictions…

the conservatives try to hold on to the social questions as the profound
questions because those questions can be controlled by the state and with laws…

but how does one control such issues as climate change? laws and the state
are not big enough to control climate change… it requires a wide ranging
intervention from several sources… outside of one’s control…

so in the end the Zeitgeist of our age is the fear of the loss of control…
but we humans, we cannot control everything, in fact, if we are held
hostage by our instincts, we are not even in control of ourselves…

but that is the nature of today… avoid any attempt to manage/control
oneself… and try to control social issues that allow us to escape our own
personal issues… as UR has stated before, he has never admitted making
a mistake… in fact, he refuses to admit ever making a mistake…

and how sad for UR… he cannot ever grow as a human being until
he admits his mistakes…and then tries to improve himself…
which is another popular issue of our age, failure to admit one’s
failure… which then leads to a new understanding of what it means
to be human…which is a possibility for growth in us…

to admit failure is a another step toward becoming human…
and away from being animal… where most people exist…

Kropotkin