No One is Coming to Save You
to the Gen Z TikToks on Twitter dot com full of existential dread
Accept The Status Quo
Corporations and the U.S. government collect your data knowingly or unknowingly to you. This is of course, is a violation of privacy. To say that you live a “private life” is wholly a lie. You live a semi-private life insofar as your interpersonal life is concerned, but insofar as your browsing history is concerned, anyone at the NSA or perhaps Facebook or Google knows anything and everything about you. All of this is reflected and expounded upon further in south Korean born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s books; most notably, The Transparency Society. Thus though, the status quo has been set; the parameters of the game have been defined. We live in an age, in a society, where privacy is becoming or has become absent entirely; where your phone is constantly listening to you, where your search and watch histories are aggregated and weaponised to target you with advertisements, where you’re told that going to university will ensure you can live a “good life” with a sustainable income, and there may be no changing it; there may be no changing this.
Who possesses the power to stand against the United States government or a multibillion dollar corporation? Someone could say that one man taking a stand is enough to change the entire course of history; perhaps a Jordan B. Peterson type would say such a thing, but I would rather consider it in a differing light. It is not simply one man, but a martyr. I have this saying, “There is no greater hero than the martyr.” Martyrs change and cement themselves in to the annals of history; for better or for worse. Socrates’ death changed the course of philosophy, Julius Caesar’s death changed the course of the Roman Empire, Jesus Christ death changed the course of the Western World, and to bring it to more modern times, MLK’s death changed socio-cultural relations in the U.S. forever. The message being that, unless you willfully seek to be worshipped by sycophants and speak dogmatically to the lowbies, there is no change to be had or seen. Ted Kaczynski made the mistake of martyring himself committing terrorism without having any followers who were willing to carry or the wield the sword, in comparison to Jesus who cultivated a group of people who were willing to pick up and wield the sword, preaching, teaching, and spreading the Christian faith across the Western world. And this all climaxes with the fact that it is a singular person or a minority of people who change the course of history. What the everyday person says or thinks is, for the most part, irrelevant. And this is why you have to accept the status quo, even if you despise it with every ounce of your being, it is simply one of the things you must accept to continue on through life.
Merely from personal thought alone: Do I think the world would be a better place if Elon Musk didn’t exists? Of course, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go and commit murder. Do I think the world would be a better place if Washington D.C. was nuked off the map? Of course, but I wield no such power. And this is why dwelling on the immutable is senseless. The rules of the game have been defined, and you have been thrust in to it, so what do you do with the circumstances you were given in a game you don’t like?
You Do What You Can With What You Were Given And The Choices You Have Made
Everyone in this life is born in to and under differentiating circumstances. These circumstances like the ingredients thrown in to a caldron to birth a human being. Some ingredients are necessities; they lay the foundation to a certain people, while others are complimentary; they make firstly the people unique, then unique you. Thus the caldron is stirred and you born; perhaps Germanic; are you an the autistic Germanic or the Romantic Germanic?
I have never read Martin Heidegger, nor would I say I understand his philosophy, nor I would I also say I have any interest in reading him at the moment, but from what I have gathered in glimpses of his thought through others, I am drawing upon his philosophical concept of Thrownness which is expounded upon in his work Being and Time. Similarly I have drawn upon Alexander Dugin’s Noomakhia.
And it is so that all of us henceforth are born with random chance in each and every one of our lives. Some born to wealth and status, some born to poverty and insignificance, and others born to, perhaps, neutrality or an equal position. But I am not writing this entire blog post to expound on the metaphysics of Being, I am writing this to give reason to people to accept the circumstances by which they were born to and the choices by which they have made.
Imagine you had to relive your life over and over and over and over and over again for the rest of eternity. Every heartache, every heartbreak, every funeral, every mountain you had to climb, every drunk text you have sent, every experience that gave you a hint of anxiety, everything. Would you dread the thought of it, or would you embrace it? This isn’t the Nietzschean Amor Fati I am getting at, this is the idea that the circumstances you were born in to and the choices you have made have all culminated into creating who you are and the circumstances you find yourself in now. There is no one to blame but yourself, because you were the one who made the choice. Sure, perhaps you could blame taxes for your lack of an abundance of currency; no one wants to pay anywhere upwards of twenty-four (24) percent taxes on their income, but it is an extrinsic inevitability; something which is wholly out of your hands. This doesn’t mean there isn’t anything you can’t do to mitigate your tax liabilities either; only you are going to save yourself; you can lead a horse to water, but you can not make it drink, only the horse possesses the ability to drink the water. And I am expressing these as a vent to every dimwitted TikTok that is posted to Twitter where a member of Gen Z is discharging their antipathy towards the status quo they were lied in to embracing.
Save Yourself
And this is it, isn’t it? No one else is going to come and save you, you have to save yourself. And this is the division between the Masters and the Slaves; the Winners and the Losers; the Aristocrats (even the Bourgeois) and the Plebeians. The Slaves, the Losers, the Plebs are waiting for that someone to come and save them, and they’ll pay credence and loyalty to anyone who will give lip-service to their blight. And there’s nothing entirely wrong with this. Perhaps your soul or spirit are tethered to the lower caste, can you change that? Arguably, maybe? Likely not, but if you can’t then why are you worrying about it? And there’s the problem right there: none of these people are willfully seeking an answer or alternative to the plague which infests their being. They complain day in and day out in this Sisyphian loop or this hamster wheel of existential dread wondering why the circumstances to their situation do not or have not changed. The answer is simple, because you have not changed, you are unwilling to change, you willfully do not seek change, and the parasite which infects you is not killing you to the extent that it has driven you to the existential cliff to seek change; you do not possess a hint of the Will to Self-Determination. You let Nature take it’s course and have it’s way with you. To some extent you have to. No one can will a hurricane to avoid ruining the coast, but surely someone can do what they can to protect their property from utter annihilation. And that’s the difference between these two differing people. The Master does what he can; he studies Life and Nature and plays their games on par to the level which he can being a mere mortal. Slaves however, drudge their way through life following the instruction manual and tutorial not knowing nor seeking any alternative.
If you wonder why your life is so shit, aside from the extrinsic factors which you could not have chosen, it is because you made the choices which led to the dire straits you find yourself in now. Or rather, philosophically put I suppose, the Nature of your Being led you to making such decisions, and it is this very Nature and the beliefs embodied within it that you are determined to suffer. So seek to give yourself a better life with the cards in your possession, or accept Fate and shut the fuck up.
Determination
I would be lying if I did not note my adoration and want to nurture and protect my generation and the people who are blinded to the circumstances which they have been plunged in to. I bring a sort of, “I can fix her,” mentality to my people whilst understanding who they are and what they are. I suppose that is the characteristic of a good leader. It is what makes Donald Trump so admirable and beloved by the American people. He is a bourgeois man of the plebeian people. I suppose that makes him rather Aristocratic in some sense; a modern day Julius Caesar. He may dress in a suit and tie, but he is not adverse to walking amongst and interacting with those beneath him on the caste system or social hierarchy on their level.
God is in all of us. You possess within you the light to change your circumstances (to an extent). Someone who possesses the soul of a Slave will never be truly an Aristocrat. It is why the Merchants who aspire to Aristocracy are wholly Bourgeois (Alexander Hamilton). They wield no true honour, no true respect, yield not to a Prince nor a King. Rather they are materialistic, haughty, disgraceful, and dishonourable. But that does not mean that there is not a greener pasture awaiting for you somewhere else; a pasture which you will slot in to finely. But it is indicative of you to pick up and seek that green pasture.
Life is difficult. Life is suffering. It is the things you don’t want to do which you (probably) should be doing, but you must find that Will to Self-Determination in you to do those things, and take that action, else you come face to face at the edge of the existential cliff and lest find yourself cast in to a Hell of your own making. But hey, some people need to walk through Hell and make their ascension to Heaven to triumph. Who’s to say crying and venting on TikTok about your existential pangs isn’t all a moment a pain for a lifetime of glory?