American culture has become addicted to black pilling. Americans have become systematically inclined to emotionally and mentally surrender when they see negative odds and treat them as a certainty. We watch our podcast or the news, and we hear the same talking points from all sides. Americans are given many viewpoints on how an issue will negatively impact their lives, and very few solutions. But when we hyper-fixate on the potential chaos looming in the coming future and ruminate, we slowly fragment our society.
Read more The Radical Left’s War On The West: From Tirana To Paris
Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that a person’s character and agency are formed by what he focuses his mind on and by his refusal of what Christendom would later call sin. The soul itself is shaped by that which you focus your mind on. One obvious consequence is that a free people who truly start to believe “nothing I do truly matters” have already, in part, relinquished their right to self-government.
Social media feeds today are filled with nihilism and shared despair. You have endless content immediately available, presenting ideas about society and the state of the nation. Content that expresses ideas such as building a career being pointless, being a homeowner being impossible, and the only guarantee being the inevitability of personal failure. Instead of encouraging people to seek ways to improve or fix the issue at hand, it encourages them to bond over a collective notion that “it’s over.” These same individuals also get pulled into nihilistic ideas about physical determinism, eco-fatalism, and political defeatism. When you fail to discipline and focus your mind, it becomes intensely drawn to whatever is brought to your attention at any given moment. You diminish your own character by limiting yourself to merely reacting to stimuli and are subsequently stripped of all autonomy. This constant fatalistic nihilism breeds a culture of social isolation, which idolizes withdrawing from society and romanticizes abandoning Western civilization.
Now I believe very strongly that this country is worth preserving, that America is the last beacon of hope for Western civilization, and that the issues plaguing society demand our attention. We must confront and overcome them without allowing them to consume us.
Our habits shape our character, and immersing ourselves in patterns of debauched thought and behavior is destructive. When we allow every crisis to command our attention, we lose sight of what is to be preserved. When we correctly order ourselves towards something greater than the next crisis, we can begin to distinguish between the problems worth confronting and the principles that guide us through that confrontation.
What is the highest good toward which we should order our lives? If human flourishing depends on living in harmony with objective truth, then truth and goodness cannot be subject to fleeting whims. Either they are realities beyond our control by which our lives and actions can be judged, or we are left to construct our own standards in the hope that it will lead us somewhere worth going.
Let us look at the man who places the study of his country’s decline as the highest order in his life. He intimately knows the statistics, shortcomings, future demographic projections, and historical trends. He can tell you why the solutions are beyond us, why the culture is lost, and why the future looks like it’s over. And when you ask this man what can be done, he will give you every reason why it cannot be done as the answer. The politicians are all corrupt, the institutions are beyond repair, the people are complacent, and the hour for change has passed us by. He has an answer for every solution and a piece of evidence for every reason, and he falls deeper into despair.
In time, his pessimism ceases to be a conclusion he reaches and becomes the premise from which he begins his reasoning. Every time he sees those ideas or people he voted for fail, it confirms his judgment. Even if there is massive success, it is either merely chance or a campaign of deception. Hope becomes the evidence of ignorance he needs to hold those who continue to work towards a better life in contempt. He believes he sees reality as it is. He is unable to recognize that his mind and soul have been captured by the nihilistic despair he has focused his entire being towards.
And so time continues to pass. He continues to lament the country he claims to love. Still, the hours he might have spent with his family, serving his community, or preserving the principles he professes to defend are sacrificed to the despotism overtaking his mind. He can describe the world he fears we are becoming and that his children will be living in. Yet he gives far less thought to what he should be doing to prepare them for it.
Read more Prison For Pennies On The Dollar
Western Civilization has wrestled with this question, and its Christian inheritance has provided a definitive answer: the highest good is not found in the pursuit of power, pleasure, or worldly success, but in God himself.
If we are to order our lives toward what is eternal, true, and the highest good, we cannot reduce our purpose to material success. We must learn to remain grounded in principle even when the future remains uncertain. The possibility of failure and the reality of suffering do not absolve us from the pursuit of what is good.
When you do the opposite and withdraw from your public responsibilities because you fall prey to the idea that outcomes are already determined, you sink deeper into nihilism. This is where we must be willing to confront the problems before us, no matter how uncomfortable the underlying truth is. The way forward is to develop actionable solutions and orient ourselves toward them, rather than allowing circumstances to mold us into their image. This requires a disciplined mind and body and a deliberate refusal to make a home of despair. For despair, when indulged, entrenches itself deeper than an emotion and becomes a disposition toward life itself.
The Founding Fathers did not undertake tremendous sacrifices because the future was uncertain. They did so because they believed it was worth the risk.
If we allow ourselves to be consumed by the immediate and surrender to the nihilism of our time, we will leave our children a broken society. We will ultimately leave them a confused people who have forgotten why it was worth preserving.
Let us refuse to accept pessimism in place of wisdom, resignation for realism, and surrender for inevitability. Our forefathers crossed oceans without knowing what awaited them upon their arrival. We stand today on the same ground that they conquered and on which they built, and we have no excuse for surrendering before the fight has truly begun.
Cole Ellison is a writer based in Missouri. He focuses on culture, agency, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Read more I Walked Through A ‘Peaceful’ French Protest. Hours Later The Same Street Was On Fire.
Image: Edvard Munch