The New Nihilism

I wrote a post about the production of Macbeth I saw last week (and I’m now entirely unhappy with the observations I made, eh). I then got caught up in a week of art history exams, projects that culminated in me catching the flu. I finally regained relative functionality late yesterday and was forced to then speed through my weekend art assignments. They actually turned out good—deadlines can be a good thing.

What got me thinking about posting was this scholarship application I am currently working on. I realized how little time I have spent volunteering since my days in Florida. In part, I think this is steeped in the general disillusionment that we all felt with the horrid (and traumatic) Kerry election. It was truly dis-heartening. It created a deep cultural nihilism. This stopped somewhat with the election of Obama. But I also think that people have now thrown their progressive hopes into the establishment with the election of Obama. The grass roots of liberal progressivism are dead/dying.

I wonder how the hipster and pseudo-hipster connects to all of this? The hipster is definitely of this same period. I guess the hipster is of a vague liberalism that is steeped in commodity culture. Maybe this has something to do with the belief in the political establishment that seems to be prevalent. An acceptance of the slightly-progressive status quo as one goes about in expensive flannel shirts and vintage clothing while texting on an iphone. The wars are now status-quo. They don’t shock people into thought or political interest. The whole debate is framed by a circus of teleprompter monkeys paid by huge media conglomerates. The whole debate is just more irony for the hipster. Irony may very well be a disease--we're just too caught up in it to see it. The technological culture that creates this disease can be seen clearly enough. That said, it is the lack of meaning within the technology that causes the disease--not necessarily the technology itself.

Let's un-explode time for a moment and get back to some Heideggerian Care-Structures and so on.