Death Worship

Nature puts limits on every species. Most, if they grow too fast, will eat themselves out of food and die off. Others become too powerful and end up becoming prey for other species. Still others self-destruct simply by dominating their environment so much that they fail to adapt to it, at which point they drift into irrelevance and cannot react to changes in their environment.

Humanity has a built-in limiter: all of our civilizations destroy themselves once they get too powerful. Up until now, this has kept us from tearing up the planet, but with technology (notably the internal combustion engine) we beat the odds, it seemed. Now we realize that we are not safe from our own suicidal pathology, but instead, will just experience a harder fail as our societies disintegrate.

In our case, this pathology begins when we become individualistic, or prioritize ourselves over the larger order. We can have only one: either our goal and measurement of the world is the self, or it is an order larger than the self, but the two cannot coexist because one must be the highest priority objective.

This creates a form of death worship. When the goal is the self alone, the world ends with our personal deaths; nothing matters more than the time span of our lives, and how we can use things as a means to the end of the glorification of our selves, desires, and quests for power. Like planets collapsed into black holes we become insatiable voids, consuming all around us as a means of having presence.

The lack of ability to connect to the world as anything more than a means to the end of ourselves reduces it to material value alone; the transcendent does not glorify us, nor even does the divine. Even logic, language, and facts are bent to their utility in making us feel better, a form of selective filtering or "cherry picking" that is fundamentally hostile to truth.

People talk about "nihilism," but what they are seeing is not a belief in nothing, but a belief in the self to the exclusion of all else. Since that self is not mirrored in the external world, this belief is unstable, and collapses inward into greed, resentment, and an urge to destroy. The people in its grips exhibit materialism and solipsism more than a rejection of belief itself; they choose hollow, shallow belief instead.

This causes them to be endlessly self-pitying because they have no source of meaning in their lives. Meaning connects the experience of life with the inner core of the individual, causing them to understand life as a good and sensible process outside of the individual, and making them feel at home in their existence. Without this, people become bitter and indulge in victimhood as they might over-consume alcohol.

We in the West right now worship death. We go to jobs we hate, pay taxes to support people we know are useless, live in cities blighted by over-development and vandalism, vote for politicians we distrust, and buy ripoff products designed for morons. This makes us even more self-pitying and self-hating.

It is no wonder the West has decided to abolish itself. People have no hope. Politicians promise more individualism; people cannot stop themselves for voting for it. This means that nothing will ever change while we are stranded in this system, and that every year things will get worse and worse until finally we wake up in the third world ruin of a formerly great empire.

Our only way out is to say "yes" to life. To accept our unequal rules and that we have no rights, only paired duty and privileges. To recognize that there is an order higher than the individual, if only logic and nature, by which we live or if we deny it, by which we die. To aspire to challenge, struggle, creation, and the only real hope in this world, which is that we will make things right by our own hands.

There is no "plan," and no metaphysical order which will right things on its own. No system can fix this. It must be done within our hearts as we reject this ego-obsessed death worship, and turn our focus from the individual toward the order larger than the individual. Until we do this, everything will be darkness as we trudge through twilight on a path to suicide.