Limitless

Turned 23 the other day and moved out of my house. Drove 5 hours down the eastern seaboard and ended up in some ramshackle locality outside of D.C. It's funny how our nation's lawmakers have allowed the country, even right outside their doorstep, to fall into abject disrepair, but it's not very surprising. I suppose they're mostly commuters anyway. What I did find surprising was how sad I felt when I left. An incomprehensible tightening of the chest and a wavering of the muscles in my face accompanied my flight down the LIE. I always envisioned it as a kind of two-lane runway. The farther east you go, the farther you are spinning out into empty space, taking off over the sparkling blue sea that takes you, if you slog it out long enough, to Portugal (there's a large expatriate community of portugese that reside in my home hamlet and I have often wondered why). Westbound is the frontier, the great American expanse, towards manifest destiny and all that. I get the acute sensation that what I am doing is destined, written in the stars, swept along by causes I can hardly fathom. After all, I left the day after my birthday. Now I'm an adult. The youngest millennial and the oldest of Gen-Z. Gone, cut loose, adrift, all on my own and of my own choosing. This is what I wanted. I get the willies, you know.

Something that's giving me the willies is the continued degradation of the near certainties and convictions I held firm in my mind up until about this moment. In a certain sense this isn't the cataclysm it would appear to be because I have so often espoused the rhetoric of fluidity and adaptability, expressed a casual disdain for fixed beliefs, and praised the virtue, recently, of harnassing the power of mass politics without the ideology. So why the fear? Because I have also spent this past half decade leaning into grievance, solidified a great antipathy for modernity, and pledged fealty, like a bird fluttering between nests, to a variety of exotic and niche ideologies. But this is all part of the game. A small cottage industry is being made out of it on the fringes of social media platforms, where energetic and politically aware young adults gather and hold discourse on hot-button topics and make a show of outdoing each other in posting the most self-gratifying, vacuous and loquacious aphorisms possible. Most of it is laced with profound irony, whatever the seemingly profound disagreements each niche faction has with the other. But that is just the supposed substance. The sentiment behind every such post is very real and masks sincere emotion. Without typing out an essay, the point is (to self-negate once again), there is no real point. It is a game of "clout-chasing", as we've discussed before. It is a transference of real-life interactions, both real and ideal, to the digital sphere. An e-agora. 

So, again, why the trouble? Because I too had latched on to strange and niche ideologies, neoreaction, catholic integralism, national syndicalism, and in doing so have left myself open to the quite fitting charge that I too am nothing more than a living, walking, talking charade. I have compromised myself, because by thinking that what I thought was certain and true, by my inflexibility and dogmatic stance towards the world, I have sunken into ignorance. I did not know what I did not know. 

This is tough to grapple with, but I can see now (just as I can see the future, I can now look back and see the past with open eyes) that it's been a long time coming. The tendency to sympathize with quietest thinking is no coincidence. In the vein of Parmenides, Wittgenstein and Pyrrho, self-negating philosophies are the only ones to truly grapple with epistemological limits, something not even Kant (for all his pretensions about "limits that dictate the possibility of experience") could stake a claim to. So what does that mean? What do I believe? 

I don't know (not entirely anyway). But what I do know is that this blog is part of my failure. Adam Tooze summed up in a sub-250 character tweet what I tried to say in an essay-length blogpost. Tiktok is the opium of the zoomers and this has become a threat to national security. Was that so hard? Apparently for small minds such as mine, it is. So once again I am confronted by epistemological crisis, greater perhaps in magnitude than the one that struck me in 2015 and 2016. But it is a natural evolution, just as it was then. The fact that it has led me here, towards these tendencies, is perhaps surprising. But it is a reconciliation of disparate strands I had tried desperately to string together. What is clarity anyway? It is waking up.