Neo-barbarism is being born before our eyes

(Continued from last Saturday)

The crisis of Western European logocentrism episteme begins with the Nietzschean discovery of the broken subject and the pluralism of truth, which depends on the perspective of interpretation. Truth has become relative and dependent on the process of interpretation, which at the same time has become the basis for doubting the deeper reason for existence. Meaning is neither given nor pre-given. Man is left to himself to create it, but this infinite freedom has fundamentally destroyed the idea of ​​meaning, destroyed moral responsibility in a world in which all values ​​are equalized in some kind of nihilistic denial of every spiritual foothold as false. Myths of the New Age (Umberto Galimberti, IK Zoran Stojanović, Novi Sad, 1998) are material things, superficiality and the satisfaction of bodily desires, technology becomes the essence of man, false ideas possess us through advertising, mass means of communication impose themselves as values, with the help of manipulation mechanisms that are psychological and therefore deeply rooted in our souls. Therefore, being in the world without understanding is a sure path to ruin, the loss of everything that makes a person human.

In a world where the media, the power of technology, and the shadowy production of virtual reality, permissiveness, disorientation, and alienation are characteristic phenomena of contemporary civilization (Pol Virilio, FMK Books - Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade 2012). Sisyphus is increasingly emerging as a hero of our time, without the creative agent that inspired Prometheus, becoming a symbol of the futility of life, according to which life has not only lost its meaning in some aspects, but life as a whole has been called into question. In the dystopian visions that we have been exposed to since the end of the twentieth century in the European way of thinking, ideas about the end of history, the death of God, and ultimately the death of man, hopelessness, passivity, regression, the relativism of all values ​​in a world in which technology and media, and the entertainment industry, determine/impose meaning, myths of our time, signify the power of technology, media, visuality, physicality, sensual pleasure as idols of our fallen time. And yet there is nothing more tragic in human life than forgetting, losing memory, tradition, history, the past, everything in which we should be rooted, but not to live from the past but from what is to come. We live in the age of post-meaning. Man is alienated from the world, other people and himself, having lost faith in some higher reason for existence. The collapse of trust in meaning is reflected in the psychological balance, so the appearance of melancholy and depressive mood is inevitable, because there is no regulator of the spiritual type that would subjectively or objectively regulate the purpose of personal life, the meaning of social relations, or point to the meaning of political-historical processes. Every possible philosophy of meaning as a trust in the meaningfulness of the world and its mental cause that determines its inner harmony, is being undermined by the cruel scenes of violence in the twentieth and even more obviously on the threshold of the twenty-first century by wars and examples of inhumane treatment of enormous proportions that threaten to endanger humanity. The individual is increasingly part of the mass, unable to offer resistance based on free - critical thinking, nor to oppose meaning to the omnipresent meaninglessness on an individual level. Powerless to question his existence in the world as part of a massed crowd, to (make) sense of his own existence on a solid concept of universal values, he has become part of the media spectacle, a sensation that fills the media space in biased actions, in a kind of virtual and false representation. The media place information emptied of the moral component. Super-information in a hyper-media civilization, and the speed of changing media messages to which we are exposed in a contaminated space leads to saturation, illusions that have become seductive simulacrums, in a world of populism, consumerism, materialism, deprivation of meaning and feeling, alienation in a world in which there is no longer anything valuable to really stand for. We live in an age of multiplication of material goods, surrounded not by other people, but by objects, and we ourselves become objects (Zan Bordijar, Consumer Society, Drama books, Belgrade, 2019).

If there is nothing above man, is there man? Who is man? An object? A thing? Absent in a time in which objectivity prevails, it becomes a sovereign power over man, ruled by consumption and the spirit of consumerism. As soon as man devotes himself to the material, there is no man, his free spirit, no rebirth. All the spiritual values ​​on which European culture has rested for centuries are adapted to the aesthetic taste of the average, it panders to the lowest inclinations and instincts of human nature. Man is reduced to a biological existence, his moral dignity is destroyed, the sanctity of the human personality is degraded to the level of an animal way of being. Culture as the world of man, which acts to refine our spiritual qualities, is annihilated before the invasion homo barbarusa, so the neo-barbarism that is being born before our eyes is essentially dangerous for all the ranges of classical art, on which the spirituality of the human being can be educated. In the anthropological sense, freedom is no longer the free discovery of the deeper meaning of the personality that dedicates itself to higher tasks and creativity. All our knowledge and beliefs have become porous and unstable, subject to skepticism, but not as an intellectual reexamination, but rather replaced by superficial content from media centers, in which the physical satisfaction of the body is postulated as the main criterion. Reduced to corporeality without spirit, man has lost human attributes, remaining without the meaning of his own existence. Meaning is a category of spirit, to lose the soul means to lose the meaning as in the parable of Job in the Old Testament. In the age of fluid identity, in which freedom of choice is practically unlimited, man moves without a face, without essence, without individuality, without meaning, lonely and dissatisfied, abusing his own freedom, as a means of destroying his own personality (Robert Muzil, A Man Without Traits, Laguna, Belgrade, 2021).This brings us to the need for a new revival of the idea of ​​humanism, but also for a re-examination of what the absence of humanity, nobility, compassion, and normal feelings means. This also implies an effort to ensure that man is free for his humanity, to humanity, human, humane, which has always been historically established according to some exposition of man, history, the world, the foundations of the world, being as a whole, is established so that it is not essentially called into question. (In his letter on humanism, Martin Heidegger has explained how humanitas homo humanisa is determined with regard to some already established exposition of man, history, the world, the basis of the world, that is, being as a whole.) Otherwise, we come to a situation where this deepest gap between essence and existence, which we live directly, grows into the total hopelessness of our civilization, an absurd consciousness that tries to resist the non-logic of the world by getting used to paradoxes (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, New Book, 2018). We can also defend ourselves with laughter that develops into ironic observation, sarcastic comment or indifference, since the world is meaningless and futile, and the awakening of cynical consciousness remains as the last line of defense of the increasingly humiliated individual.

(Continued next Saturday)