One of the more bizarre aspects of late stage clown world is the directionlessness. Im constantly running into people have no sense of what they want from life. It’s endemic in the young, but a lot of elders are floating hollowly through the final acts as well. The root cause is the spiritual - however defined - poverty of materialism. Human life is finite and the back half is fighting the long defeat. Stuff loses its luster in the twilit years. On a material level, there is wealth in family. But the same materialist system that rejected faith other than in logical falsehoods was also socially atomizing. Fractured generationally by pop culture ephemera and scattered in search of financialized busywork. That puts the responsibility on those who can learn from information to set their own course.
Early version of the Ontological Hierarchy with the pillars of Western civilization and basic deontological relations.
Traditionally, Western civilization was built on three pillars that encompass human being-in-the world. The nations formed around the natural history and culture of the people making them up. The Greco-Roman philosophical and legal heritage laid the Abstract foundation. And Christian faith took care of the big moral and existential meaning of this questions. Ultimate Reality for the philosophically inclined. It didn’t matter if most people CLI when sustainable social reality fits the base code and faith is rightly guided. Obviously humans are going to human, but the system maximized mass fulfillment. Note the paucity of historical socio-pathology.
Enlightenment materialism banished the metaphysical, which was the epistemological domain of faith. But then insisted on faith in changing imaginary claims that were manifestly false and unnatural. The promise was fulfilment in material Progess! Not that that held up, but at least it offered something to aim for for a while and a few good times. When that dried up post-boom(er), the system offered nothing. Fake grievance for the underclasses and free money for the least productive.
The youth epidemic of not knowing what they want to be when they grow up is the poison fruit of a bad tree. Dumped into a socio-cultural morass. [Follow your dreams] + [authoritarian kumbaya] + [no obvious pathways to sustainable lives]. Part of any functional educational system is to teach realistic limits. Not foster “I wanna be an astronaut” and life is rainbows into early adulthood. Something similar applies to anyone older trying to make a change or start over. Planning has never been harder and more essential.
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