"The foundation of such a method, is Love." in anticlimatic

I love you Sherriff Truman.
Not literally. That’s just how the quote ends.

I can’t deal with the nihilistic fuckboy lyrics of the 2020s. I just can’t. We were raised on our parent’s hippie music. Love was all we needed. And don’t you want somebody to love? And don’t you need somebody to love? For those who come to San Francisco, summertime will be a Love-In there. Love, love me do! You know I love you!

It was dated and cheesy, but it laid some groundwork just below a visible level- cultivated at environment, you might say. A worldview. A system of rules, and ideas. A culture of romanticism, carried on enlightenment values and a renewed sense of hope and progress.

It paired well with Christianity, which was a different set of rules, but was quite popular. Both were romantic tales, yet at the same time both tales seemed to be at odds with one another- the secular tale of human progress through the discovery of objective truth, which we could say is synonymous with beauty, and the religious tale which would say that God is synonymous with Truth and Beauty, and that he so Loved the world that he sent his only son to Die for the sins of the species.

I myself was on the side of liberal values once I became a teenager and objectively discovered for myself an evidence-based lack of faith in the God described to me by church folk. Both sides went to war in my world throughout the 90s and 2000s, and in the end after the dust settled across this new internet battlefield, both sides seem to have completely blown themselves out.

Am I missing something? Some avenue, maybe, into the culture and zeitgeist that I’ve overlooked from my hermitage? People don’t seem to be the delusional romantics that my generation was raised to be. The two most recent songs I discovered that seemed to hint at The Divine just behind the limits of reality, at least from a music theory perspective, had bafflingly shallow and hedonistic lyrics; “Sweet” by Cigarettes after Sex, and that “Excuse me, you look like you love me” country song. Both are just songs about hookups with near strangers, for purposes of pleasure.

The point of Love isn’t pleasure. The point of relationships isn’t pleasure. Pleasure is incidental, often, but the actual purpose is so much bigger and more important and more rich with meaning. The nuance to the concept, seemingly betrayed by the simplicity of the Love Love Love messaging in culture from the pre-internet era, was so vast and worthy of exploration. I thought it would be the work that society did over my lifetime, perhaps towards some great Truth hidden within, yet to be uncovered by human beings. A truth that could lead to greater harmony between the sexes, between families, between women, and between men. A harmony that we could use to stop damaging our children beyond repair.

Instead it was blown out in a weird sort of battle with itself and all but forgotten. Time spent under work and philosophy gave way to laziness and self-service. Now here we are today, confused and spinning. Or at least I am.

It leaves me with the unsettling impression that society is evolving backwards…though it might just be my own ageing into irrelevance that I am projecting onto the world. The later option I find to be more comforting, though that’s usually an indicator that it is probably not the one.