Mehr Mensch Sein

 

Or, as it translates from the German; "Be more human".

Recently (well, not so recently, as this post has lingered for a long time as it's difficult to write for some reason) I posted a long, and likely almost completely unread, on The Benedict Option.  But it occurs to me in some sort of vague way that people have been grasping for something like that for awhile.  And in a plethora of ways.  Mehr Mensch sein really sums it up, and it was intended to by its originator, who was a Renaissance man and, as part of that, a theologian, but then a true Renaissance man would have to also be a theologian, in part.

And that's part of it.

This is a hard thing to define and write about, as the concept is so vast, but the single biggest problem in the Western World today is that people are not human, or rather they're not completely human. To put it another way, people aren't natural human beings.

They're consumers.  They're employees.  They're employers.  They're some self defined something which, increasingly in our society, is self defined by their sexual impulses.  Their statistical units.  Their professionals. Their careerists.

All of this is not very human.  Indeed, it's inhuman.

 

It's also confused and lonely.

And pointless. And that's a really big problem, and expresses itself in any number of destructive, horrific, ways.

No  wonder we see such confused and lonely behavior.

This manifests itself in any number of ways, but it might be easiest to sum it up by simply noting that while some celebrate the long industrial fueled liberation from want, we have reached a point where, as a society, we are confused and not very happy.  Indeed, those who study it tend to find that third world societies, as long as they're free from war and famine and the like, are made up of happier, often much happier, people.  In comparison, the Western world is increasingly in despair, confused and unhappy. 

Indeed, as one speaker I saw on the dreaded Youtube recently set out, in a speech regarding the fiction of fluid gender identity, suicide is mostly a White, Well Off, Western World, problem (which gender confusion, we might note, also is).

Almost everything that pop psych wishes to tag that on proves to be wrong in some ways, or at least a lot of it does. For example, the oft told story that bullying causes suicide has no statistical back up.  People who want to change their genders don't reduce their risk either.  Gay marriage doesn't create gay bliss.   A modern life full of defined categories previously unknown to man but now in the latest edition of the DSM doesn't operate to reduce those conditions, there just get to be more and more of them with each passing edition.

Somethings hugely amiss, and while we resist it, it isn't all that hard, really, to see what it is.

Except we basically don't want to.

What we know of our species, as a universal, is that we're a really smart intellectual mammal. We're part of nature, but our intellects universally look toward the divine.  Even people who would deny that, and there are plenty, do this.

 

We have largely freed Western Society from want, but not what it wants the most.  As it turns out, pretty clearly, as a species we tend towards that which we originally tended towards, almost none of which Western Society aims for.  We don't actually crave 1,000 Facebook friends so much as we do ten real friends. We don't look for fulfillment in a life of Hugh The Creep Hefner sexual abandon so much as we want to become one with one other person.  Denying our biological gender and pretending that we the other gender, or that being attracted to the same gender is normal, is not natural and will not make the person so afflicted feel natural.

And denying that there is a Natural Law, and that the Natural Law is outside of ourselves and a greater divine entity, and that that entity doesn't define himself by how we define ourselves, isn't going to cut it.  Clerics who pray to the Cosmos at local Democratic Party conventions aren't doing anyone a favor, in other words, they're part of the problem.

So it turns out that as a species we seek much of the best of the world that actually existed, even if our re-engineering of everything in order to free ourselves from the worst of what existed was not illegitimate.  But at the point we are at, things should really give us pause.

We're rushing head on to try to break down the barriers that are keeping what little remains of the Western World's sanity intact, while also shoving everyone we can into bigger and bigger cities that are simply reservoirs of societal despair in the long run.

 

A true cowboy, who is already about 100% more man than many men in this society will ever be.

And the byproduct so far has been youth who grow up with no sense of anything other than a need to have a career and obtain money fall into despair and take their own lives.  Others, old and young, about whom nothing more can be said than  "No religious affiliation. No political affiliation. He just hung out" become violent killers.  Boys whose anemic pathetic upraising never taught them how to be men or have manly virtues decide they want to take refuge in the former protected class of women and become one.  Girls who are taught that the only glory in life is to act like the male protagonist in Wall Street decide to become those people including their gender.  The denial of the fact that the world is fallen and we must deal with that fact has lead to the denial that there are conditions that deprive some of their sanity in serious ways and causes others to pack animals around for legalized "comfort".

 

Enough of all of that.

If we as a society are really to deal with this, in some ways, it's time to go back. And up.  And that means accepting that an increasingly urbanized world joyfully imagined both by laissez fair Republican politicians and Democratic social reformers is from, a human point of view, an dung heap.  We don't want to do there.  And things need to be real, not computerized, and not sanitized for your protection.  Men need manly things, and women need womanly things, no matter how socially improper that idea is to the nurtured crew at the DNC and the faculty lunch room.  And acknowleding a sense of a greater entity out there, and that not all beliefs are equal merely because they are beliefs, needs to be accepted.

If we don't, we'll get more of the same. And that isn't working out.

 

And so you'll see some mehr Mesch seiin post tags here from time to time trying to get at this certain difficult to express essence.  Be more human.  And know what it is to be human, truly.