Many lament the past yet are at ill ease in the present, these are those for whom the drive to tarnish the past is the epitome of their own lives. These intransigent ideologues and idolaters fail to realise that it was their own kind that enabled and actively propagated the atrocities of the past that they so vehemently, and in many instances rightfully, detest.
Then then are those whose ossified dogmas govern their every step, those who view anything with even so much as the slightest hint of pleasure as an inherent diabolism, those whose admiration for the past is only triumphed over by their desire to end human experience. Their particular brand of zealotry is not only not subject to reason but it is simply put beyond the realm of discourse altogether. These are those who have committed ‘philosophical suicide’ in the words of Albert Camus. This, in my estimation, is far less honorable than the physical manifestation of the same phenomenon.
One wonders how such simpletons can have such pertinacious conviction towards texts and ideas that they can barely comprehend. Neither the religious zealot nor the postmodern ideologue (if one can call them either, for their understanding of the scope and limitations of their particular (meta)narrative is so incredibly limited one must question whether it exists at all). They are both driven by a response to the absurd, to the indifference of the world towards our quest for a pre-ordained meaning which ultimately deprives us of what we may most desire, it forces upon us an unwanted awareness of our mortality which we then desperately scurry away from. They seek to create a utopia to then establish a strict objective standard where there exists none, or they seek to abolish objectivity where it should exist. Both are categorised by an indefatigable desire to establish uniformity in one sense of the word or the other.
Then there are those who are devoid of all passion, the ‘last-men’ as Nietzsche prophetically termed them. These are those who seek comfort and security above all else for they realise, albeit subliminally, that the slightest blemish on their edifice of passive nihilism would plunge them into the abyss. Nietzsche proclaimed that ‘those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music’, these last-men have heard the music but are simply intimidated by the sheer ecstasy and accompanying suffering that it brings. They forgo the Dionysian spirit only to be a disgrace to the Apollonian.