Empire Of Panic And Ephemera: Applying Rigorous Imagination To America's Paranoid Style

[marmar]

Published on Friday, February 8, 2013 by Common Dreams
Empire Of Panic And Ephemera: Applying Rigorous Imagination To America's Paranoid Style

by Phil Rockstroh

"Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.”
― John Fowles, from The Magus

In the consumer paradigm, one is induced to exist by Eric Hoffer's dictum: "You can never get enough of what you really don't need." Wherein: The individual exists in a state of perpetual adolescence, emotionally oscillating between life lived as a bliss ninny and evincing chronic dissatisfaction.

Ever shifting, inchoate compulsions and endless distractions define the days of the denizens of the consumer state. Text messages and tweets gibber like souls stranded in a limbo realm between the worlds of the living and the damned.

Craving and angst are interwoven. Held by the dazzle of light playing over the surface of a deep abyss, the consumer floats along on waxen wings of debt. The landscape does not seem solid.

Constant craving and callous disregard ascend to the throne room of consciousness in this empire of ephemera. The passions of the heart are circumvented by chronic discontent. In this manic mythos of the eternal moment, consumer items are collected, clutched, and discarded, like the idols and talismans of a dying cult. But there is neither the time nor inclination to erect statues to these gods of the limbic system; the gods exist as ever-reconfiguring constellations of pixels…As noxious as nixies, they hold the senses enthralled as the global, capitalist paradigm sinks beneath a drowning tide of self-created illusion. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/08-2

[kairos12]

1. Chronic, anxious consumerism to keep at bay...

the spreading tide of ennui.