Too Late…?

I am afraid that it is too late for us. When I speak to friends about the state of things, it seems they are all of a mind that it is too late, too late for everything but living your life to the fullest, despite all the terrifying emptiness. Too late for everything but charging at windmills and fighting windmills, though now they are windmills everybody sees, the absurdities surrounding us all, chopping the sky itself into bits.

Too late for spirit, definitely too late for spirit. The last philosophical attempts to name spirit, Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s, have been consumed by one ghastly and vast mechanism and subsumed under it. The apparatus of technological capitalism has hijacked every known human endeavor. Its ways are so captivating that we cannot conceive of an escape. Every escape we can possibly conceive has to make use of the very mechanisms we hope to thwart. All of our labors now are labors for data and capital and data as capital and vice versa, all stored somewhere for the future use of a few with a vision hidden yet still known to us for its crudeness and its brutality. We still have to shake paws with fat cats to buy our communes, we still have to use emojis and memes to start the revolution, we still have to give those cats the feeling, the certainty, that they are winning even when we are trying with our might to make them lose and to sabotage the game.

Too late to believe. To believe in belief, as a dream of a philosopher once prophesied about our age. Now it is either knowledge or ignorance, or ignorant knowledge or knowing ignorance, but not belief. What we believe now is easily seen as but another form of ignorance, or easily passed off as but another claim to knowledge. It is too late for us now to believe in that ambiguous zone where some magic occurs, where we are neither ignorant nor knowing but where life happens. Beliefs now are replaceable and laughable things, and they no longer guide us, let alone serve as the wellspring for our creation and destruction. Now we simply charge ahead because we have to, empty-headed and usually fearful, and we are content to simply get by. There need not be any special glory or shining to life. But when belief occurs, it opens up another time, the time of the playing- and spinning-out of that belief. The reactivation of our ability to believe is the only way we will ever catch up with ourselves. For with that faith, as it is faith, it is never too late. For what matters a time, Zarathustra asked–rhetorically–in which it is “too late” for Zarathustra?