In most cultures there are various tendencies towards dystopia and criticism of civilization. It can be about the future looking dangerous and uncomfortable. Or that the best days are already past, the golden age is over, and culture is turning into decline and fall. That doomsday is approaching. Freud believes that there is a death wish in the human race that contributes to war and misery. Nietzsche believes that God is dead. Tolkien writes that the Elves are leaving Middle-earth, and the dwarves are retreating.
Modern thinkers and writers write about consumerism, and the worship of shopping temples. Urban people are alienated, lonely, lost, pale, anaemic, asexual, frustrated, angry and have lost their community and their origins. There are no longer any free peoples or individuals, only masses of people. We are fighting against nature, we are poisoning and destroying it, and soon it will turn against us. Man is lost and without purpose or goal.
There is another way of looking at it.
Perhaps we are the only intelligent beings in the whole universe, or very few, scattered in the sea of night. We are utterly unique, we are truly the crown of evolution and creation. We are our own purpose and goal. Our culture, our knowledge, our music and our art are manifestations of the highest nature can achieve. Everything else is dead, rocks, minerals, elements – without life. Whereas we humans are something completely different, we are godlike, we are superior and greater than anything else. Our destiny is to tame the laws of nature, to travel between the celestial bodies and the galaxies. To spread our divine seed to the rest of being, so that the dead is no longer dead. So that the living can bring order to the frozen and black. We create meaning by our very existence. Everything else is meaningless, it is we who create meaning, joy, sorrow, happiness, hatred, culture, laws and sometimes war and destruction. Without us there is nothingness and indifference, for the universe has no soul or eyes to see with – we are its eyes, we are its soul.
