Pathos has become the major crippling disease of the soul of western civilization. Particularly in America, our obsessive pursuit of individual excellence - the 'lone ranger' embarking on the rigid and strenuous path of advancement - has led to the slow but certain destruction of real community and family, as the final bell tolls for their imminent demise. And what are the symptoms of this disease?
Having fought so hard to realize our nonspecific quest for individual freedom at any cost, we have inadvertently created a 'virtual' world enabling us to remain unfettered and unscathed by the fleshiness of real personal contact and relations. The real world gone, self-directed and self-enclosed, we safeguard our lunacy, our anonymity, our unspoken weaknesses and our unsightly blemishes. Our longing has created its perfect match; a pathetic, substitute world in which we call unseen strangers 'friends' and collect electronic 'followers' to 'tweet' while we engage in highly cultivated and dissembling displays of 'honesty' and self-disclosure.
And all of this activity is generated with the sole purpose (unbeknownst to us) of giving our lives a sense of importance, of sharing, of community, of the relationality that is genuinely missing from our real world experience. We have achieved the ultimate in self-possessed independence, so much so that we now yearn unconsciously for the 'connection' that we worked so diligently to "free" ourselves of in the first instance.
We share our daily goings-on, our clumsy missteps and our secret intimacies with those who would be watching us - our friends and followers. We are all voyeurs and exhibitionists seeking the thrill of connectivity without the weighty consequences of real life community.
We are pathetic in our desperate outreach, our selfish grasping for attention, for recognition, for acceptance (you have more friends/followers than me!). And yet, at the same time these 'tweets' (or more appropriately - twerps) have the nerve, the gall, to speak about the lack of human communication in life. Imagine, they cannot communicate with others in their world, so they invent a world of co-communicators to complain about the lack of communication.
And all of this is then followed by various dispensations of folk wisdom and other idiocies - proverbs and anecdotes about correct behavior, how to be happy and successful, to how communicate, how to love, and how to get more followers; as well as loftier topics like the good, the right, the true and, of course, the Tao. They welcome one another with good morning wishes and good nights.
Then again, perhaps this betrays a deeper pathos, our discomfort with the natural silence that surrounds us. And so, rather than abide such silence, we prefer to fill it up with any noise just to hide our distress. And while it may provide us with an illusion of meaningful discourse, and the vague comfort of fitting-in, it really does nothing of the kind. In fact, such 'communication' becomes a malicious sham - to keep us from focusing on our own disaffection and loneliness - so that we fail to appreciate the pleasure of silence in recovering ourselves from this culturally-imposed estrangement, and hearkening again to that authentic, faintly, wild voice within.
Finally, all of these friends and followers of ours have very clever names or descriptions of themselves: 'philosopher on the loose,' 'geniusartistic,' 'biomodern magician,' 'intuitioneer,' 'discerner of archetypes,' 'racialicious,' 'americansatori,' 'cardiotonic psychedelia.' Oh! You who believe you are free and free-associating as you please. You are just following the protocols of those manufacturers of post-modern experience who pull the strings and make you dance. All I have to say is good night 'tweets' - sleep tight.
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