[Updated September 26]. A Swedish journalist writes in the review "What's the oppostite to love?" about a book with the title “Our Era’s Fear for Seriousness” that came 1995. In this book of thoughts the author tilted at a spirit of the time refusing to set about the large questions of society and life. To express it simpler: people (or the society in all) refused to discuss any deeper issues the author thought.
And this is still valid, and has become even worse the author thinks as you can read below. And some are wondering where all the intellectual are in debates. Why they are so silent and not reacting. They are only talking and writing about what's opportune?
But talking seriously doesn’t exclude laughter the reviewer thinks. On the contrary, these two parts have to go together. Roy Andersson, the author of the book in the review, wrote his thoughts down in a decade lined with a long neoliberal era and a gigantic retreat to the idea that "alone is strong."
And once again see what Owe Wikström writes about the individualism and the negative effects of individualism. The idea about alone is strong is that a defense mechanism, namely denial of needs, a denial that gives you a false sense of power - and strenght. Which doesn't mean that we don't have (can't have) a natural, genuine strenght.
We were in a deep economical crisis. The gulfs between the classes had started to grow again. The belief in the future was gone with the wind. The humanism was on retreat. The humor that ruled was above all the ironists, the ones making fun of seriousness and engagement. See what Alice Miller writes about irony.
There was an increased contempt for moral values, a contempt that was attacking the fundamental or basic content of the notion solidarity – to see yourself in other people. My addition: but at the same time there exists a new morality. People joked over the notion solidarity, over people who believed in solidarity and were trying to uphold such ideals, people who believed in seeing yourself in other people. How many damaged people do we actually have I can't help wondering, who have to make fun of people who try to be empathic and compassionate? What does this phenomenon say? I have my ideas.
What’s concealed in the wake of this if not a slowly growing belief in the übermensch-ideal (a super-human-being ideal) once again, which means a contempt for weakness. People blowing their trumpets: I can indeed! But this is problematic, because there are also people hiding their light under a bushel. And that's the other side of the coin. The lack of people with a sound selfesteem?
Back to the reviewer again: a contempt for weakness that once upon the time formed the breeding ground for racial biology, Nazism, concentration camps and gas chambers. There are new self-appointed master races in both Sweden and Europe today the reviewer thinks (and yes, that’s actually true, but they look differently than older times’? And see what the Swedish journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius writes about narcissism).
Now a new edition of this book comes, and Andersson establishes with distress that the content in his book still is valid. No, the development has changed even more to the worse.
The simple black-and-white conception of the world begins to see its chances again.
In those musty mud puddles the extreme right is growing once again.
Profiting on a powerlessness and frustration among many of the exposed people – not least among young unemployed men.
But it’s not the patriots' hate that frightens the reviewer most, but the widespread drowsy indifference in the broad middle class. He thinks that Elie Wiesel is right when he says that
“The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”
Yes, it was this with the back leaning indifference.
Inlägg
