Third wave Existentialism [CCafe 9/18]

Sorry for the delay. Some messages only appear now to me. It is clear that life individually has a moral and ethical character, but I believe that with some objective facts, it is possible to create a narrative that “today’s times” are better. I am sure that much of our anthropological and social view of man takes us to the side of melancholy, poverty and a “hard reality.” I do not know how many people the group has here, but if we were in the 19th or 20th century, probably most of us would have died in some war or lack of medical conditions. In the Christian centuries of Europe, human existence was represented by a way of walking. The human being is essentially a walker, a walker. Not someone who has fallen, but who has already fallen, because with the expulsion of paradise and original sin, we are already fallen, but soon after we get up and become hikers. The Christian form of the walker is the pilgrim who is always on his way or on his way to a place of pilgrimage. Much of the conservative literature generally sees man as a fallen man. A denatured one. The individual can no longer be sure to die of a natural death. He is no longer a pilgrim who walks to his grave, most likely will be an individual who will die of unnatural death on the battlefield, and people who die on the battlefields are called in the European languages ​​by the generals of the “fallen” or "fallen "even in the Roman Empire we would see this, the fallen with the thumb down. Most conservatives think of man’s penury and could only result in descriptions in all spheres of pessimism and the import of negativity. A typical ideological context. What they think is a kind of conservation of misery as a conservative spirit of misery, effort, poverty, denial of luxury and well-being has been reversed. Pauperism can be described as synonymous with lack. An ontology that goes beyond economic or political aspects, making lack a kind of “negative essence”, something like a being of scarcity. The human essence would be in this context, its subjectivity. A crooked psyche as a form of human poverty as a historical, social and existential manifestation, seen, for example, in the works of several great intellectuals. In the twentieth century, there would be a proliferation of “pessimistic syndrome” names, such as Luhmann, Adorno, Freud, Lacan, Schmitt, and Herder. A growing conservatism based on the deficit man. Conservative moods in a sense of vagueness in things and in the construction of the deeply poor animal as a human being. In these sayings man would be eternally a fallen, so it is important to remember the episode of the Fall and Original Sin. If man is in the world, we are not in a better place, but because we decay, soon, this transposition would reach the whole constitution of man. Man would never cease to be a fallen sinner. When Adorno, along with Horkheimer, produced the texts on the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” the society of abundance and individualism we know today was not in vogue. The founders of the Frankfurt school saw the terrors of the twentieth century, how to think beyond red, black and gray?

Adorno baptized his work as the "sad science." But a certain pessimism said that economic wealth would never be enough to put an end to the poverty complex. Sad science. Wherever Enlightenment appears as a "sorrowful science," it will, despite its will, foster melancholy numbness. Defense against nihilism is the real ideological war of modernity. If, on some common front, fascism and communism still struggle side by side, it is, on the contrary, against nihilism, attributed in unison to "bourgeois decadence." From this sphere arise great positions of individual resistance in a strangely desperate reality. World War I can still be considered here as a historical-metaphysical event, to some extent, like the military commentary on the Nietzschean sentence "God is dead." The "I" after the war is an inheritance without testament if it throws itself into great expressive positions like aesthetic autonomy in the crushing, military metaphors along with the medicinal, degeneration, hopelessness, freezing of affections, cold affirmation of relations that say not to our dream of life, melancholy, the coldness of the world overcome by the coldness of art. Happiness would be the greatest crime? Gray is the fundamental tonality of a time that, secretly and after a long time, returns to dreaming of an explosion of pastel tones. Dreams as a vital capacity. The ability to launch into a certain fury at the right time, the ability to break with the climate of concern, the break from inability to celebrate, to be happy, the ability to surrender and surrender. To remain sensitive was a supposed utopian posture, keeping the eager for a happiness that will not come, but to which we stand, protects us from the most malicious disturbances. Being optimistic was synonymous with naivety, an untouchable happiness. The contemporary state arose from a tragic difference that since the nineteenth century, the absolutist state and the medieval medieval background do not exist, because this state has many senses, for example, the domain of power by fear and force is monopolized by the state.

In the twentieth century, with the end of World War II, it is characterized by state terrorism. Today we live in an era in which terrorism is best described as anarchic (individual) terrorism, in 1945 the state had to make a confiscation in the lives of citizens because it had the monopoly of declaring war, in this case, the state is itself life of male citizens. That’s a big difference if we look at the state today. The war is practically no more for / among men. The two world wars are made by professional soldiers and by the convocation of the population. The French Revolution of ancient times produced the mass, with the idea that we have no more war professionals, but citizens, armies of citizens who, by voluntary recruitment, are fixed in the “popular armies.” Since then, the death toll has grown absurdly. War regurgitates the new “subject of time”: the front, the people in arms. People would soon call it the “people’s community.” In it, the members of the nations are impelled to participate and to find themselves in an apparently homogeneous unit of struggle. Times seemed to belong to collectivities, the individualistic veil of bourgeois culture divided. In the American Civil War on both sides, a significant number of soldiers were “normal men”, most of them were literate and not in an army proper on the battlefields. In ancient times, Athens, Sparta or in medieval societies there was no convocation, every citizen is already in himself, and by himself warrior. The normal thing was the soldier-citizen. Peace and war were so great that one could not create a group of people who were not soldiers. Despite my criticisms of capitalism, the misery of capitalism is easily denied, it is enough to avoid the difference between the poor and the rich, without looking at the level of poverty today. It is to want to consider nostalgia as a law. In the last four years here in Brazil grew this nationalist feeling that there were “golden times”, a peak of civilization. The president-elect himself recently said that he wanted Brazil to be what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Our educational level has reached such a low level that some people really want an end to democracy and the installation of the Empire era or even a military government. Here we had military governments in the late ‘40s and’ 60s (which took a coup three times). It may not have been an absolute catastrophe, but there were deaths, torture, persecution, concealment of bodies, etc. Which for me is a setback in almost every respect. There is here, and perhaps in the world, a feeling that the past was better, which, like Spengler, spoke of “the decadence of the West.” A feeling I do not share. Today we have here in Brazil an idea that, as some people say, “the traditional family is in decline,” and all this through what they call “cultural Marxism,” almost a Zionist conspiracy that is under way by someone or groups coordinated actions for the decline of civilization, where Gramsci and Marx would have conspired to end the “correct model” of the world. Most are conservative with the preciousness of the past. They say that in the past there were no such things as “gender ideology”, homosexuals, multiculturalism, immigration, bad music, which in the past there was not so much crime, etc.

But if they speak of decline or decay, when we, from the West, have had an apogee? An apex? The facts I mentioned above deal with what? Greek statues? Music and symphonies? With these historical facts, we could already put in check that apogee we are talking about? Iraq, Vietnam, Cold War, World War I, World War I, Russian Revolution, American Revolution, Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Medieval Periods, Plagues, Diseases, Crusades (of Monotheism), Athens and Sparta with Wars, Payments of high taxes. Never before have so many people died as in the past two centuries. So that’s why I said before only the music of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s was something of the past that was better than today. I do not feel any decadence in the West. People are afraid of an Islamization of Europe and of losing a cultural war. Everything that is postmodern could be adjective as strange, meaningless, decadent, negative. It would be as if we entered a period that for some art is no longer art, music is no longer music and man is no longer man. For me, I consider everything better today than before. Imagine spending 10 days traveling on a ship, I spent 4 hours on a plane and my legs barely fit in the chair. Our medicine has advanced a great deal, apart from other social factors. A lack of attention in sociology and history makes us believe that, after 500 years of capitalism, we have the same situation of human effort on Earth as life before capitalism. This, we know comes in the practical life, is electricity, oil, computer, refrigerator, pill, penicillin, genetic engineering and the Internet, even if it is also the atomic bomb, agrochemical. But we should already know that capitalism is not just the advent of the “bourgeois and proletarian.” It is society able to reduce gross human labor (perhaps eliminate, which may be a problem in the future). Only the observation of the average height of individuals in most countries already shows the opposite of what the International Miserabilist preaches. There are more people living better today. Life expectancy has grown for all. It is increasingly clear a negative demography where the population is increasing. This is what today is in Europe in the big cities where they live between 15% and 16% in individual houses-apartments (unique style), the same can be seen with cars. Reproduction, especially in the middle classes, did not exceed 1.3 children per woman (Europe), but it is enough for them to be involved in this demand for generational process. Who would think that living longer would bring more social security problems?

Individual freedom too. The work day has declined and there has been a huge mass of workers who no longer need to develop with brute force. The woman is in the labor market, she is freer. The number of abortions has decreased. Infant mortality fell even in countries at war. A frightening number here in Brazil is the annual homicide rate of 2018 having been greater than the union of warring countries like Syria, Iran and Palestine. Public education has become commonplace everywhere. We must work today with a different ontology. Do not think of weights as the gates of Auschwitz say. Conservatives cannot get rid of the bonds, the balls of irons on their feet, much of the idea of ​​freedom is made by work. Only work is what sets you free. All modernity has done with some kind of work ethic (Nazism, Communism, Liberalism, etc.). The political parties of the right or even the right have always been known as "the party of the weight", a weight that brings imprecision and a flow that is not the way we are going, for things and for the world. Mussolini defined fascism as "a horror of comfortable life, and here I also speak of some liberals (or what is meant by the left here in Brazil). I think we should think of acceleration, levitation. A "new model" of the Affluent Society would only be better observed from the late 1950s. Twentieth-century events could only be interpreted as a moment of evasion of modern "society" from the definitions of the age of poverty and effort. In the words of Marx (emancipation). Technology is emancipating us for good and evil. Therefore, I believe that in the future it will be very difficult to be conservative. Time will not allow this. Only algorithms will be conservative. People do not understand that capitalism has an unstoppable force. If conservatives today care about gender, transgender, immigration, multiculturalism, loss of virility, nationalism, homeland, etc., in the future, this will rise to degrees unreal to them. At least in films I see that the 50s and 60s had a certain "charm", but that does not make me want to or even think that "in my time things were not like that … that was life."

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