Perhaps I don’t need to judge others because it only reveals my conditioned likes and dislikes.  But the suggestion is that what I see and judge outwardly, is what I will find inside, if I care to look.  This is merely a hint.  1,200 words

DO YOU FIND THAT YOU SHARE ANY OF THESE BELIEFS?

ONE of the features of modern mentality is a sort of aggressive individualism.  [Psychology says if the child is brought up with a rigorous discipline, a strong super-ego is formed and an ‘aggressive’ personality is the result. A permissive rearing of a child leads to a weak super-ego and a narcistic personality.]

The aggressive individual, instead of being a center of affection and intelligence, has become a pattern of insistent and excessive demands. A vociferous declaration of human rights and personal entitlement.

Such demanding individuals are the natural results of an outlook which makes human growth less important than their ever-growing possessions, both material and intellectual. Once such an outlook is accepted — and it seems to be so – universally, (openly or by implication), one is brought to believe that the quality of a civilization is measurable by the quantity of material or intellectual goods it is able to produce and possess. No wonder that another feature of contemporary thinking is its obsession with efficiency, both physical and mental, based on scientific, and admittedly a very fertile technology.

The breaking of records has become a passion. Science is now entirely utilitarian. Industrial efficiency grows by leaps and bounds, and the individual is increasingly regimented, governed and controlled by the modern superman, the expert. All thinking has become deeply specialized. The individual is now only a cog-wheel in the social engine. His life is atrociously hollow and barren. His inner poverty makes him crave possessions and distractions.  For once a thing is divorced from its legitimate use, it becomes merely a source of entertainment. Literature is now mostly a source of violent emotions, or of verbal sedatives. Stimulation and evasion have become universal; human thought is devoted to amusements and escapes. An ever-growing demand for things accelerates still further, in an industrial development already excessive.  Man is crushed under the burden of his own accumulations, while asking for more and more.

People fight viciously for raw materials and markets, for territories and political power to the point of being threatened with the terrifying prospects of nuclear annihilation. Man seeks in the excess of property and pleasure an intensity of life which may end too quickly, and in nameless horror.

The total mechanization of human existence proceeds rapidly, gaining impetus from its own results. Man becomes increasingly automatic in his actions, increasingly demanding in his distractions, for he cannot find any meaning in his mechanistic existence, ruthlessly conditioned and controlled by all that’s around him. His leaders play bluff with the maximum destruction, and they dream that if we die less than they die, WE WON. Both literature and art reflect the universal anxiety and distress of humanity without life affirming values and without passion, engaged in endless filling of some bottomless buckets.

[Is all that violence inside of me??  Is that why I am feeding at the trough of the apocalypse? I had better stop and take a look.]

Science, incredibly successful, has acquired prestige in the eyes of the masses; the worship of science is now almost idolatrous. All is expected from its constant and rapid progress, and from its adventures in the depths of matter and of life. We all hope that science (the specialist) will resolve our problems and put an end to the conflicts between individuals with themselves, and between man and society. We expect a well-qualified technocracy to bring order even into the universe of human relations.

We are convinced that new institutions, the result of careful investigations, will succeed in controlling behavior by a judicious system of pressures and enticements.  And this will weld people together into a harmonious unity in which everybody will find his happiness. In such an approach to transformation of mankind, primary place is given to ideological constructions, the mental models shown to the crowds for believing and following. These ideologies are all the social myths, and we seek among them the supreme and most satisfactory myth.

Science and ideologies both undergo a process of development which seems to aim towards a perfect individual in a perfect society as the inevitable outcome of a long-term historical process. Thus, perfection becomes a matter for the future, not for the present. We sacrifice the living generation to ‘a definite but distant goal’. The man of today is sacrificed to the coming ‘superman’ of tomorrow.

Along with material progress, the moral development of man is taken to be the result of an historical process. A society devoted to production efficiency confers merit and social distinction. Social morality has been identified with the art of holding on to the top of the social ladder, the rungs of which represent the hierarchy of our conventional distinctions.

In literature, as in life, love appears to be felt as a mutual dependence, a search for each other’s company, a craving for mutual possession, in which the desire to possess and to be possessed merge. The greater the mutual dependence, the stronger the bonds that bind, the more perfect the love is considered to be.

Rational thought, the mother of science, is believed to be the only instrument for finding the ultimate truth, which could be formulated and impressed through education on the minds of the young, if and when it suits the experts.

In the same manner, happiness must be found on the crossroads of historical development, and social (or religious) organization. Man is predestined to be happy, provided he believes, obeys and follows. Naturally, the individual rises in revolt whenever his own little scheme of happiness is threatened, and creates within the bigger world of society, a world of his own. Similar to the ever-expanding universe of the astronomers, are our equivalent hoped-for individual expansions.

Every individual wants to expand, to accumulate more and more, physically and mentally, at the cost of everybody else. He may include within the circle of his egotistic urges a few of his family and friends, but the rest of the world is his legitimate prey. The individual has become the cancerous cell of the social-body which rots and tears because of his blind and lawless urges. The more so when all the cells of the body-social are diseased, when each will prey on all others.

The collective organism grows beyond all sense and measure and crumbles under its own weight, entangled in the enormous complexity of its functions. Such is the picture of the modern world and the ideas that made it. Modern thought is filled with the self-assertive rebellion of the individual, against the society that’s arranged for supplying mass produced and mass-controlled happiness to every man, (provided he fits into the pattern). Man is either taken to be a member of the group, identical with all the other members or entirely separate, where he must fend for himself, separate in his morality, his values, his merits, his uplift, his security, his continuity and his historical development, a development which is endlessly postponed.

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But really, happiness is not the result of accumulations, material or mental, nor can it be found in a resurrected past nor in an idealized future, but only the immediate present can deliver anything to you. Found by a man who has taken sole and total responsibility for himself and his life. Morality has nothing to do with merit, with disciplines suggested by others, with following a pattern of behavior. Morality is merely the way to see reality clearly, without obstructions, it has no value, within itself. No amount of scientific research will establish harmonious relations between our fellow men, and that a truly human world, (self-correcting and therefore stable), will come only when temporal gains will give place to far-reaching values. Truth is something living and indescribable, and not an abstract proposition compressed into a known formula.

Rational thinking is valuable only when it leads to an experience which is beyond thought. Such experience may still be called ‘Thought’, but it is thought of a different quality, fluid and pliable, free from all authorities and traditions, from formulas and habits, from all slavery to words.  Such thought never repeats or imitates itself, it is always creative, eternally renewed, ever fresh.

Intelligence comes into being spontaneously when thinking, the creator of problems, calculating, aiming, striving; has seen that it is unable to resolve the agonizing problems it itself has created. When the mind is fully convinced that all its activities are sterile, it stops because of disinterest, and the moment of perfect effortless silence is suddenly flooded by something that we could call love. When all comparisons, choice, accumulations and intentions are given up as useless, when the mind ceases to draw on the future which was but a projection of the past; man finds his own eternity, which is also the reality of the present in the world around him.

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