No society can endure and prosper without a strong cultural base. A young country is naturally unstable. And a country that breaks with its origins, or stonewalls them, trying to erase its past, is heading toward collapse. Cultural destruction necessarily implies mass moral degradation. There is nothing more devastating to a society than an attempt to “rewrite the history”.
Category: Notes
Modern Man Thinks He Is Important
Modern man has this distinction: he thinks he is important. And he runs to a psychologist when he unconsciously suspects that he is not. The depression he suffers at forty begins in childhood and extends into youth, when he grows up bombarded with lies, feeding in his mind a false vision of himself. He smiles because life offers him wonderful prospects; “future” is always an auspicious word; he starts to believe. And with the years, he has to face severe frustrations. Is it life’s fault? Obviously not: life has nothing to do with the animal’s presumption! Life is the victim of an epidemic falsification, a frightening incomprehension, and an unprecedented demeaning. A young person is trained, like a dog, to give certain answers to “what will he do with his life,” socially admirable answers, and learns to see the world in a mediocre light, valuing that which has no value. He begins by making mistakes about himself and ends up making mistakes about life.
The Midlife Crisis
Many psychologists put too much emphasis on the nostalgic aspects of the so-called “midlife crisis”. I do not deny their importance, but I believe they are only the banal manifestation of a problem that may be much deeper. Midlife usually denotes facing failure, seeing what was once called a “dream” buried. In other cases, in cases of “success,” it characterizes the period when the uselessness of one’s achievements, the stupidity of daily life, and the lack of spirit to move forward are exposed. All of this is due to frustration with the present, not a desire to relive the past. At twenty, life is interesting because it is promising, because it is full of “perspectives” that time takes care to eclipse. The individual then finds himself immersed in a vacuum. Ultimately, middle-age does nothing but highlight the meaninglessness of existence. But it also makes him open his eyes and reason, and if there is something we can call “maturity,” it usually requires what clinical psychology calls “depression”. The depressed person testifies his mental sanity.
Blessing or Weakness?
It can be admitted without much difficulty that a dog is capable of thinking. However, a dog certainly does not believe. I say this and I notice a human differential. A differential that I cannot summarize as a blessing or weakness: belief elevates the human being above all other animals to the same extent that it makes him susceptible to error and evil. If I have great esteem for skeptics, I realize that they lack something. Sometimes it seems necessary to embrace a weakness to transcend the mediocrity of the concrete…