Wilhelm I

It has been a month or two since I have written anything. I have a significant number of goals and an insignificant degree of motivation to pursue them.

Instead of writing about other peoples’ writings I am going to try writing about my own writing. It will be like a specific form of diary or journal.

I have done lots of reading and listening since the last time I wrote. As always, I am continually struck by the malleability of all our ideas.

As a brief example, I, following Kierkegaard, made statements in previous writings which suggest the ancient Greeks lacked the understanding of personal responsibility which we possess today. Since then, I have heard the exact opposite opinion expressed by someone whose thinking I respect just as much as Kierkegaard’s.

This is the only thing that ever happens in my life. First I learn something which rings true to me, which seems to serve at least as a sort of stable foundation to build on ideologically. I begin to build, knowing my construction will be imperfect, knowing that above all I must maintain my sincerity to myself.

What inevitably happens? I learn something else, which also rings true to me, and which contradicts the foundation on which I have begun to build. To avoid losing my candor, my sense of structural integrity, there is no solution but to tear down what I have struggled all this time to build.

This makes it very difficult for me to write something with an ideological basis, because in one year’s time, the foundation has been eroded by the rushing water of new ideas, and the structure is no longer safe or true or sincere. I feel distinctly, while writing something broad and ideological, a lack of candor, borne of skepticism.

This skepticism has haunted my days and nights for as long as I can remember. A constant and pervasive sense that the ground underneath me may give way at any moment, and that it inevitably WILL give way. And so I am left ideologically homeless, and as painful and lonely as that can be, it cannot compare to the despair of prostitution. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

I am certainly not alone in my skepticism, but I am functionally alone in my response to it. In my mind, the most common “solutions” people adopt are: religious devotion, and ideological extremism. Both of these things serve an emotional and spiritual need, neither is acceptable to me. That will not stop me from constantly yearning to accept one or both of them, just as the hopeless shipwrecked survivor cannot help but constantly yearn to be rescued, despite his lack of any real hope that this will come to pass.

You may stop me, grab me by the shoulders and shake me, and tell me: “Wilhelm, you’re unemployed, and you’re just doing what unemployed people do.” But why would you feel compelled to do this? Are you actually trying to help me, or do you only want to deride me for resisting the lifestyle of spiritual desolation thaat you have embraced so wholeheartedly? You may be correct in what you say, I just don’t see your point. That is possibly because you are a person I just invented in my mind.

As often as I’m told that a 40-hour work week would make me happier, I just have a tough time believing that. And in fact, as I study history, I see a pattern in human behavior which never ever ends, and who knows where it truly began. The pattern is just this: you will be told what is best for you, by people who are only capable of knowing what is best for themselves, and they project their desires onto you. Sometimes this is done with benevolent intentions, usually not. Either way, it has never worked.

There is a certain Judeo-Christian axiom that goes like this: “All people are equal before God.”

As spiritually profound as this statement may be, it is immensely difficult to transfer to the real world in an effective or meaningful way. What does it really mean if we say that “all men are created equal”? I’ll tell you what this sentence means: It means whatever the most talented rhetorician in the room would prefer it to mean. The meaning of the statement is NOT inherent to the statement itself, the meaning is constructed during the act of interpretation, and the act of interpretation is subject to interference by ANYONE with the means to interfere. I would direct you to Plato’s cave allegory at this point.

Plato gave us his cave allegory a couple milennia ago, and we’re STILL sitting here and using it to explain our world, and it STILL does a better job than most of the other ideas we’ve managed to cobble together. Whether this fact tells us more about the ancient Greeks or about the modern West, I leave for you to ponder.