The "End of History," Crisis, Catastrophe, and World Civilisation

I

Does the following dictum still hold true: the absence of life with the inhibition of the individual spirit? Moreover, the absence of freedom with an undue preoccupation with abstract worlds of non=existent, speculative quantities at the expense of one's immediate concerns of life and death. The surrender of liberty as in fact the surrender of ones personal responsibility, duty and accountability at the hands of tyrants! For a dying world, of course, having already exhausted the well of its own creative potentiality.

Perhaps there is no alleviating the symptoms of the disease until the host (global civilisation) eventually destroys itself.

Nietzsche is prescient, for all his points of divergence or interpretation a reader/student might rightly have:

For believe me! -- the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you, seekers of knowledge! Soon the Age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, who would have thought, quite the opposite, now seems to be the case! The present Age, despite its mythology of progress, is one whereby the people are more content, quote, "to live hidden in [those] forests like [the] shy [all-too-human] deer!" Not to mention, furthermore, this condition being mandated by those soulless public administrators emboldened by the vox populi forewarned by the likes of Huxley; each of whom possess about as much zeal, zest and vision for life as the most common ilk of insurance or used-car salesmen given free reign to hold our public offices.

As Antoine de Rivarol once remarked

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes Titus or Marcus Aurelius; the people is often Nero, (but) ... never Marcus Aurelius.

Accordingly: a post=modern political class and entrenched bureacracy which thinks merely in terms of shortterm election cycles; not the fine web of time, future generations connected to the origin of the primordial past, marked by the passing of great stars. The demos, under the aegis of the peoples popular will, who think only in terms of their next meal. Not moral absolutes and clear lines of denarcation between truth and falsehood.

One might find oneself repeatedly inquire therefore: In an increasingly absurd and meaningless regimented social world surrounded by the vestiges of empty ruins, where possibly lies the blunt, sincere Byronic honesty of saner epochs in the course of human history. The contemporary worldview, being wholly content with its endless expressions of life as comfort found only through security, with a lackadaisical attitude of C'est la vie, in anticipation of an end seldom met with either ardor, courage, detachment, or dignity?

As Italian veteran Prince Junio Valerio Borghese once pertinently remarked,

[Those people of our current century] who put self-interest above duty, duplicity above loyalty; who consider wealth to be the basis of civilization and resignation, cowardice, and egoism to be virtues, but heroism, ardor, and courage to be shortcomings; who substitute permissiveness for order, and give more weight to undifferentiated democratic numbers than to the aristocracy of values; all who support quantity against quality, matter against spirit

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II

Inorance of ones temporality, of time, will always rob the spirit of its absolute freedom, which is only found through the majesty, the power, of the present moment, of death. Perhaps when one dare's to either confront or acknowledge its ever-present reality. pro omni tempore et aeternitate.

REFERENCES:

Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, introduction to Men Among the Ruins