This entry was posted on 3/23/2008 9:04 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
23 March 2008
Nietzsche, Adorno, and Clarke v. Winfrey - Herdism via the Cult of 'O'
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Disclaimer: Before you read the below, it is not my intention to offend just as it is far from my intention ever to follow a herd mentality. It is because I have been hyphenated all my life that I can come to create hyphenation thus overcoming marginalization by realizing inherent potentiality in all. Equally, from this perspective it is my natural proclivity to speak however ostracized and no matter how stridently...(If anything, take heart that I rant not against the person, but the mentality.)
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In Jesse McKinley's article, the problem lies with Winfrey's current choice of book and in a genre fetishizing primarily Eastern philosophies and transmogrifying a way of life into defilement as synthetic as PVC. A bookseller McKinley quotes speaks on the author of Winfrey's book choice, "...you don't have to read 20 books to get this wisdom. I'll give it to you in a $14 paperback" and so the fetishization of horrors ensues (Jesse McKinley, "The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway," The New York Times, 23 March 2008).
A further indication to Winfrey as a 'sell-out', comes unwittingly from a quote by a publishing marketing manager (ibid): "We have already published books with very similar messages...and we will continue to do so...We just need to slap a cover on it and get it into Oprah's hands."
The horror....
Couple this article with Mark Morford's on life as commodity, and the perpetration of our decline further unfolds. Indeed, Morford calls it "Carpe Diem Syndrome" and "life as commodity, your soul on a credit card, experience as the pinnacle of meaning" but the stark reality, "the truth is, you could eat at every restaurant in the world and see every exotic wonderland and read a million great works of art and still be quite a miserable spiritually vacant neoconservative jackass with a world-class photo album and the sould of a cockroach" (Mark Morford, "Read this column before you die: 1,000 sights, 1,000 books, a few hundred drugs, 397 kinky positions, one million blasphemies. Get busy, " San Francisco Chronicle, 7 March 2008).
The true horror is not just that Nietzsche and Adorno are being proven true in spades, but more so that we are collectively, with full force and unwavering passion, speeding towards our decay and the destruction of our future hope.
The true terror is thus, the reign of herdism veiled by the commodified, fetishized genre of spiritual self-help that is more a sham, defilement, and an ersatz version of their originating philosophers and the precepts they extolled and penned.
How about this for some advice worth heeding:
Why not look to the ancients, the classics, and the original philosophers for their texts, their truth, and in the context of their history...why not encourage that, Oprah, rather than perpetrate the sham bargain-basement falsities?
Today is a bastardized, defiled version of decay far worse than Nietzsche ever dare imagine...
...this is the true stuff of science fiction gone awry because it is the state of our presence and even worse, against the movement towards progress and transcendence mediated by potentiality still to become realized...
...as a true tragedy of potentiality is creativity defiled and imagination truncated in regressive submission via the cult of herdism...
How about this for a step towards self-improvement:
Why not get off your self-fixation and try an authenticity of creative potentiality to effect difference for the aggrandizement and improvement of your fellow man?
Why not give speech to the voiceless, bring the marginalized to center stage, and give of yourself rather than horde for yourself?
Why not get off your narcissistic tunnel-vision and acknowledge and help others in need - on a daily basis?
Authenticity v. Hypocrisy
Truth v. (Self) Deception
Perhaps these are the last significant vestiges of duality in a postmodern world...
Of power, influence, and reckless herdism, Oprah and Tolle - 'achtung!'
Hyphenation by all means...
...at the very least, Finland: please help!
