Another Jaunt Into Philosophy

Quickly and off topic: It's NaNoWriMo! This is my account! You are totally free to creepily, randomly buddy me.

Now, philosophy.

I'm going to let you in on a big, cosmic secret that the rest of the universe has woefully deprived humanity of, like we're the tremendously awkward kid in second grade whom they giggled at when our back was turned. Prepare yourself for this one.

Materialism is oblivion.

I'm not talking the end of the world fireworks show, which can be anything between Earth collapsing in on itself or masochistic, exceedingly grumpy horsemen romping through the burning ruin of civilization, depending upon what belief and degree of logic you subscribe to. This is so much worse, and significantly less dramatic.

This is an oblivion that comes upon you quietly, and it festers, and it decays. We call this rot rot the American dream, and it feeds and thrives upon the mind. The little bastard will drill through your creativity, will devour ingenuity like a serpent will a mouse.

Trust me, you won't feel a thing.

This is how it works.

You spend the formative years of your unfortunate life learning the mechanics of the world. You're not born with materialism; no one is. It's not even a smudge on your tiny baby brain. It is here, in the years of the purest form of discovery you will ever know--and gradually forget--that it begins to creep upon you. Next to "no," this is the earliest concept your loving parents or siblings will force down your throat: "mine."

You will come to love this word like you will never love another human being.

Mine is rational self-interest, desires, greed. Mine will become gluttonous as the mind atrophies.

You will spend your adult life accumulating things and debt, until at last, somewhere in the future, an older you with more wrinkles and a metastasis-inclined pancreas will own a house, a car, retirement money. Everything you've ever wanted will be yours.

You will become acutely, uncomfortably aware that now, you don't know what to do with yourself. The mind stutters and goes still.

You'll die, eventually, leaving behind a proud legacy of stuff that will not matter some three or three hundred years from now, that your kids will shovel out to the nearest Goodwill, on the double. It's no coincidence that "stuff" is synonymous with "shit."

If you're lucky, there might be a heaven, and St. Peter won't fancy you too unscrupulous to turn you away. Kurt Vonnegut, in his God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, calls it rightly: This heaven we've imagined of eternal peace will be soul-crushingly boring. After all, you were perfectly content to waste life. Why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?

Don't feel bad. It happens to the best of us.

Mine causes this. Materialism, capitalism, the entire logical fallacy of a system climaxes in an incredible disappointment: the death of creativity.

But why?

The first thing rational self-interest, an inevitable byproduct of materialism, accomplishes is the destruction of your empathy for others. This is a crucial component of humanity, the conscience, our instinctual and initial driving force. Rational self-interest corners it in a dark alley, shoves it in an unmarked car, and speeds away.

When you lose your conscience, you absolutely lose the ability to see the world beyond yourself. This is how fantastic lawyers are made. This is where business happens. When your goal is your own comfort, interaction with the people around you, particularly at an intellectual level, ceases. The singular goal of more, more, more stifles the conflict necessary for innovation. Mine lords over the individual, until they can't notice that they've stopped thinking, imagining, dreaming.

This is the oblivion we are swiftly, happily approaching. The end of ideas. If the writers of the 1920s, old Ernie and the rest, were the Last Generation, then we are surely the Lost. Mired in greed, killing ourselves as slowly and accidentally as carbon monoxide poisoning.

If nothing changes soon, then are are as good as dead.