The Broken Soldier

I’m having a bit of trouble.  Not the usual trouble I write about here.  Most of that trouble’s permanent, and while I’ve written a lot about it, I’m not big on repeating myself a thousand fucking times.  No, this trouble is of a different, but almost equally vexing kind.  A kind of trouble that’s caused me a lot of grief, and a trouble for which I have no corrective course to suggest.  I’m speaking of trying to ’shit higher than one’s ass.’

The phrase, sometimes attributed to Wittgenstein, though I don’t recall reading this statement in any of his work, I interpret as a ‘cautionary’ of sorts.  A handy, easy device to keep us honest and mindful of our strengths and limitations.  A device that, after 11 months of blogging and more closely observing the claim habits of others, many, if not most, don’t have in their intellectual tool belts.  Worse than not having it or something similar, most of those fail to recognize they need it.  This failure serves little purpose.  Other than to confuse whatever issue’s discussed, and possibly to ensure those discussing whatever issue go wrong with an undeserved and unsupportable self-congratulatory confidence.

This observation has me puzzled.  Why put so much time and effort into an activity one clearly doesn’t care enough about to get right?  I have some opinions.  Ego-investment.  A belief in ‘the right to one’s opinion’ founded on a lack of recognition of authority, expertise, difference, and understanding of even the most rudimentary structures of civilization, technology, knowledge-justification, and other foibles of our growing, greased-wheel eager impulse-slaking mass-man culture.  Toss in a bit of PoMo babble for flavor, which, by the time it trickles from the Tower to the streets has lost any meaning and application it may have had, and even the most simple and obvious truths are questionable (and questioned).

We do this at our own peril folks.  History is full of examples of this type of decadence and degeneration.  Many have followed the pattern we have (purposely or otherwise) adopted.  Most reside in the dustbins of history and unrecoverable retrogression.  Each time you assault and manipulate truth for some immediate gain, real or perceived, you plant another seed of our eventual destruction.