2006-02-14 - 7:31 p.m.
it has occurred to me that the escapism that defines our society is akin to suicide, in spirit as well as in practice.
sometimes it is useful to percieve your culture from the outside, or at least to wonder why these things that other generations would have declared anathama have become commonplace for us. by "things", i mean escapist activity or artificial joy that allows us to "check out" of existence. there are, of course, plenty of activities that fall into that category - you could play solitaire on a computer screen, obsessively track sports, drink medicatively, watch television every night... it's not really the actual activity that worries me. it's the reasoning behind the activity. it's that, as a culture, we would prefer not to wake up. we spend our days doing the 8 hour a day, 40 hour a week job, and spend the rest of our time trying to forget that we are alive.
i read a statistic the other day that said that about 30f people have been at work while "under the influence"... that's incredible. that's 3 in 10 of your co-workers (or 2 of nine other co-workers, if you are the third). what is it about my generation that simply cannot deal? or simply won't? is it the sheer banality of our convenient world or is it the horror of the mess we are in? what is it?
so i should bring all of this back to suicide - and the connection is really fairly simple. though our sentimental age scoffs at the idea, suicide has been, for centuries, if not millennia, considered the unforgivable sin; and the reason for this is that suicide represents a fundamental rejection of the primary good (this is a bit thomist, but bear with me). existence is a primary good. it is good before and above all else. even when we are speaking about God, this applies: He could not be omnipotent, holy, wise, just, etc. if He did not exist. (that is perhaps why He called himself "I AM") likewise, each of us, before we were given any other grace, we were given existence... and God saw it, and He said it was good. it is, as hamlet discovered, better to be than not to be...
therefore, rejection of this primary good is a rejection not only of a particular person, as it would be in the case of murder. it is a rejection of all people, of all nature, of all experience. it is the ultimate insult to creation, worse than any other abomination because it declares that the individual simply cannot be bothered and would prefer to simply opt out of existence.
the problem with our culture is that we've made the cosmic insult, but we are too cowardly to take it to its logical conclusion. we opt out of existence in every way we can, just short of killing ourselves. so we have a society built upon nietzschean malaise that is too lazy to do anything about it, meanwhile we all just hope that our days pass quickly so we can move into oblivion.
