Modern liberalism and the pursuit of darkness

From today’s New York Times website, further indication that the fun, innocent Halloween of my youth has been transmuted into a culture-wide witches’ sacrament:

Here and here are the linked articles.

What is the connection between the liberal elites’ relentless, boastful celebration of their wonderful selves, their wonderful lives, their wonderful families, their wonderful homes and vacations, and their simultaneous fixation on horror and ugliness, for example, their attraction to hellish representations of reality in fashionable contemporary movies, plays, and novels, and the fact that their children disfigure their bodies with monstrous tattoos and metal studs? I think it’s the fact that the liberal self has no transcendent good in which it is rooted. Since the liberal self believes in nothing higher than itself, it must worship itself. At the same time, since the liberal self believes in nothing higher than itself, it is vulnerable to and attracted to horror, and, indeed, suspects that horror is the ultimate reality.

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Josh F. writes:

Mark Richardson asserts “self-creation” as the liberal’s “highest value,” while you would assert “nondiscrimination” as such. When those two are taken together, we see that the liberal’s “highest value” is actually self-annihilation. Self-annihilation is “final liberation.” It represents an internally consistent process that must transpire after every unsatisfying and ultimately failed “self-creation” leading one back to his “indiscriminate” thoughts and actions. Leading a life of indiscriminate thought and action is the surest path to self-annihilation, i.e., Final Liberation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2012 06:23 PM | Send