Opinions are like assholes: everybody’s got one, and all of them stink.
— Anonymous
All teaching that reveals the truth is chimerical to the blind.
—Leo Tolstoy, My Religion
The bottom of our cave today is the ubiquitous computer screen before which we all sit enthralled. Bombarded by opinions from all sides, we even delight in adding to the bombardment by compulsively putting up posts trumpeting (and especially apt word for it today) our own cherished opinions. Nowhere is there genuine dialogue with one another. Nowhere does careful and caring discussion of matters of common concern take place. Mindless memes and name-calling fill our screens, kill our time, and anesthetize our minds. We are inundated by a plethora of poorly written and mostly vacuous memes, posts, and articles from sources both known and unknown. And when not occupied with sniffing others’ opinions and offering our own for sniffing in turn, we busy ourselves taking endless selfies.
Incapable on our own of seeing the truth, we take the constantly ongoing interplay of illusions on our shared screens to be the reflection of reality itself. The very embodiment of Nietzsche’s “Last Man” in the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we look around ourselves, and we blink. Anyone who does not do the same appears to us as mad, someone whom decency requires to self-submit to an asylum.
We sit on benches amidst natural and human-crafted beauty to which we are blind, because all of our attention is focused on the screens of our I-phones.* We voluntarily isolate ourselves from one another and the whole world in order to stay “connected” online.
In reactive horror of our current situation, requiring social distancing in face of the coronavirus pandemic, all too often all too many of us just glue ourselves all the more tightly to our digitized screens. Or else we go out to protest in the streets in defense of our right to live by our own so-beloved opinions, regardless of how dangerous such behavior is to us and, far more importantly, to others. Such total social irresponsibility is called for to protect our Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, no matter how willfully ignorant, hateful, racist, and even genocidal that speech may be. After all, to speak with Lyndon Baines Johnson, this is Amurrica, where we all have the cherished right to our own opinions, no matter how stupid those opinions may be.** That’s what freedom is all about, isn’t it?
The answer to that question is: “No, not in the least.”
* * *
Following Nietzsche, we need to distinguish between the profundity of a deep pool, and the profundity of the mirror. The latter is no real depth at all, but merely the appearance of it. Were we to cast ourselves into a deep pool, they worst that could happen to us is that we would die by drowning. However, there are worse things than dying.
After all, only one who is truly alive can truly die. Lacking true life, all one can do is expire, like a car running out of gas.
* * *
In Greek mythology, Narcissus became so enamored of his own image reflected in a pool of water that he fell into the pool and drowned. Only in so dying did Narcissus come truly to life — the unending life of myth itself. In effect, he thereby escaped the fascination of his image in his very succumbing to it. His death struck him out of his fascination, and thus broke him open to the glory of true and lasting life, even life unto death.
Narkisos, by Magnus Enckel (1879-1926)
Our danger today, howeer, is far greater than the one that faced the Narcissus of myth. To use an old but honorable language, our risk today in succumbing to fascination with our own image is the risk of the death not only of our bodies but also of our very souls. When we lose ourselves in the mirror of our ever-present digitized screens, whether computers, pads, or phones, our souls themselves die, to be replaced by an ever-reiterating loop of mere reflections lacking all solid content.
The profundity of the mirror robs what falls into it of all depth, replacing the infinite with the endless. Our cave today, unlike the one of Plato’s allegory, has no bottom at all. It is bottom-less.
* See my earlier post to this blog, “Advertising Diversions and Diverting Advertisements”: https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2019/11/11/advertising-diversions-and-diverting-advertisements.
** On LBJ’s service to our opinion-dominated country, see “The New American Doxocracy,” one of the “Interludes” in my soon-forthcoming book, The Irrelevance of Power.