All Episodes
Previous Next
April 2, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:50
I am Jack's Spiritual Void

The zoomers need to start asking the hard questions. My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sargon_of_Akkad

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Generations seem to be a product of the turn of the twentieth century.
Nobody talks about generations in historical terms.
What generation was William the Conqueror, or Richard the Lionheart, or Sir Francis Drake?
It seems nonsensical to apply it.
In historical terms we usually speak of eras.
In modern terms, a generation describes all of the people born in a roughly twenty to twenty five year time span, and it is assumed that these people will have had a similar set of life experiences, at least similar enough for them to have developed a kind of shared consciousness about what the world ought to be like.
There's probably some connection between technological development, mass media, and nationalism that is the spur to a generational consciousness, and much of it seems retroactive.
Until the latter half of the 20th century, it seems to me that people didn't really think of themselves as generations.
They thought in civilizational terms.
If Google's Engram viewer is anything to go by, the obsession with generations in general was fairly low until the start of the 1980s, and it skyrocketed at the end of the Cold War.
Generally, though, the generations of the 20th century go like this.
The lost generation, born at around the end of the 19th century until the turn of the 20th.
The greatest generation, born after 1901 until 1927, then the silent generation, born in the interwar period and through World War II, then the baby boomers, born directly after World War II.
Next came Generation X, my generation, who were born up until 1980.
Following us are the Millennials, who were born up until 1996.
Then the Zoomers, who were born up until 2012, and now Generation Alpha, who is still being born.
I have no idea who gets to set these naming conventions, by the way.
It seems that both the baby boomers and the millennials are similar in that they are both strongly self-conscious generations, both heavily concerned with social justice, their own personal wealth, and are intoxicated by their own civilizational missions.
The boomers, of course, were a product of the Cold War.
They were the materialistic muck generation who created the sterile spiritual void in which we live today.
They were intrinsically liberal, but had the benefit of having had traditional conservative parents to raise them.
They were not yet living in the end of history.
They still had a great civilizational enemy to defeat.
Their war was one of proving that their civilization was better than the alternative through the mechanisms of freedom and culture.
And on the 9th of November 1989, they won it.
I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and so I don't really remember it.
My parents, however, did, and understood the significance it held in world politics.
Generation X became adults in the post-Soviet Union era, one that was heralded by liberal philosophers like Francis Fukuyama as being the nearest mankind had yet come to living in the end of history.
And for the people growing up in the Liberal West, a place had been carved out for us which did look a lot like what Fukuyama and others had theorized.
However, there was a consequence to this victory that wasn't predicted by the liberal theorists.
The boomers enjoyed the catharsis of their spiritual and ideological conquest.
Generation X didn't.
We came after that, and were told to enjoy the fruits of the victory.
However, it turned out that the fruits of the victory were not as sweet as first supposed, and after a time, it became evident that, in the struggle to defeat the communists on materialistic terms, we had sacrificed something important in the process.
I posted this meme on Twitter which encapsulated the issue.
It's a commentary from what I assume is a Zuma on the spiritual crisis of Generation X, and wondering how we could have been so miserable when materially we had it so good.
The image itself is a still from the 1999 movie Fight Club, which still resonates today because it speaks to a particular vacuum in our lives, which is encapsulated in this quote put into the mouth of Tyler Durden, the film's anti-hero.
I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who ever lived.
I see all this potential and I see squandering.
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has users chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
We are the middle children of history, man.
No purpose or place.
We have no great war, no great depression.
Our great war is a spiritual war.
Our great depression is our lives.
We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't, and we're slowly learning that fact, and we're very, very pissed off.
It is not enough to simply have things.
One must have an overarching why, which explains why we are doing what we are doing.
To be a cog in a multinational machine whose sole purpose was to merely produce consumer goods and services was, at the bottom of it, a soulless and deadening thing to experience.
It didn't matter how much money one had, how beautiful an apartment in which one lived, it was still a cage, and no matter how beautifully gilded the cage is, it still serves its purpose, which is to keep you trapped inside of it.
This is why the Matrix also took hold in the Generation X mind.
Neo begins his life in the same place which Edward Norton's character occupies in Fight Club.
He's an office drone, a replaceable cog in a machine, the purpose of which he has no investment in at all.
He is not doing it for any reason other than to be keeping himself economically afloat.
It's no wonder that when presented with an escape from this life, into a life of suffering and adventure by Morpheus, he is inevitably drawn to take it.
Better a short and dangerous life as a hero than a long and safe life as a domestic animal.
What is being expressed here is that mankind's needs are not purely material.
While we all have the understandable desire for material abundance, we also have a desire for self-actualization, what Nietzsche called the will to power, a drive to make for ourselves an order which we can call our own.
Being trapped in a material world which is also devoid of spiritual gratification leads us inevitably to a dilemma.
We must either break out of the system which refuses to recognise our individual agency, the fact that we are characters in a story, or kill the part of ourselves which demands such recognition.
Generation X fantasized about the former and dreamed of embracing a Nietzschean master morality in which they set new values, but we did not find the bravery to act.
And the millennials decided to go in the opposite direction and embrace the latter slave morality, killing off their own sense of pride and self-worth, abasing themselves into the undifferentiated sludge of equality.
The millennial worldview is entirely consumed with systems of power which are completely inescapable from the perspective of the individual.
They do not have heroes in the sense that the boomers did, nor do they have anti-heroes, in the sense that Generation X had.
Personal agency is not sufficient to overcome the world in which they are trapped, and perhaps this is simply a rational response to the circumstances in which they were raised.
Millennials in general looked to the power structures around them and attacked them with the last weapon that they possessed, their own weakness.
Their response to their lot was to collectivise and use this collective power to reshape the systems to make them conformable to their position of powerlessness.
The millennial struggle is to overcome struggle itself.
It is to have nothing with which to struggle against.
In consequence, the millennial psyche is a pathetic, dilapidated thing, shorn of self-respect, congenitally degenerate, muling, helpless, and afraid.
They embrace anything that could be considered to be oppressed against anything which considers itself to be free with the viciousness of the slave turning upon the master.
To have pride in oneself is seen with suspicion as it implies an inherent good in differentiation.
And the consequence of this was to simply confirm the power of the ruling principle of materialism over themselves.
They reject the spiritual because it is spiritual and embrace the material because it is material.
Millennials see themselves merely as lumps of feeling flesh in an accidental universe, and therefore reality should be made conformable to satiate their intrinsic desires, and the code of the slave dictates that it is immoral if it does not.
The job of the therapist is to make the millennial accepting of the cage in which they have been trapped, not to escape it.
The cage is ultimately powerful, and the millennial ultimately inferior, and therefore they must accept that they were in fact made to live in a cage, and the only moral thing left to do is ensure that the cage is made to properly house them.
This is their great civilizational quest.
They are the children of the end of history.
The telos of progress is to deliberately produce people such as them, and they will never wonder why, if they really were made to live in a cage, that they must go to therapy every week to make the experience of existence itself bearable.
And so we come to Generation Z, the Zoomers.
What of you?
You stand on the nexus of a convergence of generations that preceded you.
You can see our faults and our virtues.
Do you want to join the obsequious millennials in their eternal cages and embrace Canadian healthcare?
Or are you going to set values for yourselves and undergo the tremendous labour of rejecting the slide into the undifferentiated mass of humanity?
I think there's something that Generation X and the Zoomers have in common.
We have already been through what you are going through.
We also had a domineering generation above us, imposing its values and rules, to which we were forced to grudgingly accept.
We are both the successors to powerful and vocal generations which were irredeemably infused with leftism.
I think we wanted the thing that you also want.
We were just not strong enough or self conscious enough to achieve it.
The problem of Generation X was a lack of civilizational purpose.
We didn't know what we ought to be doing, and we were lucky enough not to have internet porn on demand and a feminism obsessed generation above us to destroy our ability to form relationships.
So we were disincentivized from stepping off the tracks because of the West's relative economic prosperity.
For us, it merely remained a fantasy.
You, the Zoomers, do not have that luxury.
So you need to think about the kind of people you want to be and the kind of world in which you want to live.
▲
Export Selection