The Present Age the present age is the age of advertisement nothing happens but what does happen is instant notification

The Present Age

the present age is the age of

advertisement nothing happens but what

does happen is instant notification have

you ever felt that the modern world is

sort of empty in a way that is difficult

to Define you trudge along in your

day-to-day existence but it all has an

underlying pointlessness to it it is

like you are watching yourself just get

through life without ever truly engaging

with it philosophers have given this

problem a whole host of analyses over

the past two centuries from political

thinkers criticizing our economic

organization to spiritual leaders

encouraging us to take back a sense of

wonder in the world no doubt they each

have their own insights and ideas to add

but today I want to examine how the

Danish philosopher sain kard criticized

the direction in which his Society was

turning and how his words may be even

more relevant now than they were in 19th

century Copenhagen in His Brilliant

essay on the present age kard predicts

with startling pressence the general

Malay many today report feeling about

their lives and I cannot wait to look at

this with you get ready to learn the

dangers of public life how too much

information may be a bad thing and so

much more as always be aware that this

is just my flawed and incomplete

interpretation of kicker guard's words

and to use these ideas to Aid in your

own thinking rather than just absorbing

them uncritically but with that out of

the way let's get started one a

A Passionless Present

passionless present an awful lot of

philosophy over the years has been

written in criticism of the passions

that unstable part of us that can gift

incredible energy animism and will but

at the same time is prone to

illogicality unpredictability and

Flights of Fancy the stoics often viewed

passion as outright dangerous and said

that it prevented us from living in

accordance with perfect and Universal

reason Plato said that a perfect society

would fight against the passions while

the rule of St Benedict encouraged us to

trade in our own unstable Wills for

obedience if we wanted to become true

monastic Christians and it is perfectly

understandable why so many have feared

the passionate nature of humankind at

its worst passion can lead to atrocious

crimes societal collapse and personal

misery if we simply gave in to wherever

our passions led us we would likely

destroy ourselves and those around us in

the process however kard argued that the

flip side of this situation would be

just as bad that having no passion at

all would not only be damaging socially

but would also leave us without the

special ingredients that make life worth

embracing rather than simply enduring

think about it this way a passionate

person could commit a murder but they

could also devote their entire life to

study or become a phenomenal artist

Isaac Newton experienced such passion

for his field that he reportedly devoted

Over 10 hours a day to Natural

philosophy Leonardo da Vinci was said to

be so in love with his work that he

could always be found writing painting

or at his workshop and passion is not

just useful in the hands of a genius the

person devoted to train spotting or

Dungeons and Dragons or dinner party is

still reaping the rewards of passion for

kard passion seems to be a cluster

concept around which a myriad of other

properties are associated passion is

decisive it stems from a strong

individual Outlook and can coales around

an idea or set of ideas he characterizes

the Revolutionary age as one filled to

the brim with passion almost overflowing

with it so kard might say the French

Revolution was passionate because it was

decisive energetic action around an idea

of course this is not to say that

passion is always a good thing kard says

if we have passion without inward

looking then we can fall into disastrous

results as he puts it when individuals

relates to an idea merely on mass that

is without the individual inward

directedness singling out we get

violence unruliness and unbridled this

touches upon a key theme in much of KAG

guard's philosophy a deep skepticism

around crowd actions put a pin in that

as we're going to come back to it later

if we have a group of considered

passionate individuals who each

independently subscribe to an idea then

we're on to something really quite

special that is the recipe for some

serious action in service of a carefully

constructed philosophy but this passion

is the very thing kard sees dying from

Modern precious he describes our era as

an age of reflection we are used to

considering reflection as a good thing

but kard thinks it can be taken much too

far specifically he is worried about the

effect this lack of passion and

abundance of reflection will have on our

existential development an idea

underlying a lot of ker guard's work is

commitment this is a complicated notion

but to simplify it is the ability to

shut out the vast majority of

possibilities in our lives and focus

instead on a few key things that really

matter so a priest might be able to put

aside any wish for fame and fortune and

hone in on their relationship with their

God or a revolutionary might devote

their entire life to a key idea exalting

this Above All Else a parent might

decide that their family means the world

to them while a lover might show

absolute unwavering commitment to their

partner understood in this way

commitment can come in all shapes and

sizes even if kard favors a theological

one if someone cannot do this then they

risk floundering in a despair of

possibility this is a theme kard touches

upon both in the sickness unto death and

in either or someone despairing from

possibility is caught in existential

indecision they see the long road of

Life stretching ahead of them and they

don't know what to do with that they

flit from one shallow activity to the

next never being bold enough to plunge

into a single path as a result their

life slowly ticks away and an emptiness

takes hold of their heart they know they

are wasting time but they don't even

know what it would look like not to

waste time they lack the ability to give

their utmost commitment and Faith to a

single route this according to kard is

what happens when passion leaves us we

become embroiled in the existential

equivalent of situationships unable to

to settle down with an idea long enough

to find it meaningful and motivating

this is the rather terrifying effect of

a lack of passion and kard says that our

age is dooming us to these empty lives

but what is the cause of this

passionless and how can we stop it from

robbing us of a meaningful existence

well KAG guard's answers are both

surprising and terrifyingly relevant if

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description two

Information Overload

information overload do you ever feel

like there is an overwhelming amount of

information to take in on a daily basis

we might in a single hour check the news

see what our friends are up to on social

media read an opinion piece crack open a

magazine and become angry at a tweet

this in turn has spawned thousands of

blog posts and think pieces on how we

are just too overloaded with inputs to

sift through it all and decide what

really matters to us in his own time

kard faced a very similar issue but on a

much smaller scale he was concerned with

how the newspapers and magazines of

Denmark would affect our ability to take

committed singular action in our lives

in an incredibly prophetic 1997 paper

entitled kard on the internet Hubert

draer splits KAG guard's critique of

information overload into two distinct

characters we will call them the passive

Observer and the commitment addict the

passive Observer is the person who

surveys all the information available to

them and yet cannot commit to any of it

even even a little bit they see too many

issues of importance too many sets of

actions they could take and can't decide

on anything in particular to focus on

Paralyzed by this they limit themselves

to Simply commenting on events rather

than take committed action in the world

they pass their self-evidently important

judgments on every major issue of the

day and even many of the minor ones they

may even trick themselves into thinking

they are doing something worthwhile but

afterwards they will look back at all

their comments and realize that they

amounted to not even worse they become

more concerned with the Aesthetics of

ideas than their contents so they are

not even devoted to a search for truth

but simply seeking to be the cleverest

person in their local coffee shop they

may not know anymore whether their

statements are ironic or sincere because

their actions are completely

uncorrelated with what they say this is

the person with a total absence of

commitment and draus cleverly links them

to the aesthetic stage of Life kard

talks about in other works where people

pursue pleasure and distraction rather

than finding stable meaning in their

lives the passive Observer is just

distracting themselves with information

rather than with partying or drinking

next draus talks about the commitment

addict this is a very different reaction

to information overload but it ends with

the same inaction that the passive

Observer had the commitment addict is

someone that cannot tear themselves away

from an important issue so they attempts

to commit to them all and they truly do

care about each and every cause that

comes their way one moment they might be

absorbed with the water crime crisis the

next with malaria and then with some

aspect of electoral politics however all

of this commitment means that they

eventually just burn out or they cannot

devote a meaningful amount of time and

energy to any of the causes that they

feel so strongly about and this does not

just apply to the social or political

spheres this commitment addiction can

hold just as much for the person who

wants to learn everything committing to

subject after subject until eventually

they realize that they never discovered

that much about anything in any case the

commitment addicts becomes just as

paralyzed as the passive Observer either

just from sheer exhaustion or despair

when they realize that they will forever

fall short of their own commitments no

matter how hard they try in both cases

we again see the issues found from an

excess of possibility there are just too

many options too much information out

there and as a result we become totally

indecisive both the passive Observer and

the commitment addicts are robbed of the

privilege of devoting themselves to a

stable meaning and kard thinks this is

an important component of a fulfilling

life this is partly why he thinks a

belief in God is a good root out of

existential despair he holds that a true

Christian must take a leap of faith to

trust in God wholeheartedly knowing that

that is to a large extent irrational he

must give God his unconditional devotion

commitment without caveat of course I am

not a Christian so I don't apply this

framework to God in particular but I do

think that kard is onto something with

this notion of faith and the importance

of some of our commitments having very

few conditions existential despair often

consists of a feeling that there is

little point to our actions thoughts

emotions or decisions we could get out

of bed today or we could lie there and

rot who cares it won't change anything

and I think that kicker guard's idea of

Faith provides a really nice inverse of

this state for him the truly religious

person would always have something to

appeal to to make their life meaningful

because they have a total and unreserved

commitment to an idea or a gun and this

makes every moment of their life lives

have a value it's also worth noting here

that kard thought most Christians did

not truly have faith in this sense and

that it was a rare quality to find even

amongst The Devout but whether you think

this sort of radical commitment is your

root out of existential problems kard

highlight something incredibly

worthwhile here when we are bombarded

with so much information it is very easy

to lose ourselves in indecision and this

would be a crying shame because

committed action is what makes a lot of

people's lives worth living and total

paralysis often leaves misery in its

wake we now face levels of information

overload ker guard could only dream of

so how are we going to deal with it but

the worst is yet to come now we will

examine the effects kard thinks this

passionless excess of information will

have at the societal level and some of

it will look disturbingly familiar three

The Pitiless Public

the pitiless public a lot of ink has

been spilled in recent years over

stochastic encouragements to violence

these are situations where no one

directly calls for someone to attack

another person or organizes a mob or

forms a militia but instead whole masses

of people mutually create the conditions

where such events are very likely to

occur sometimes without even knowing it

then responsibility is spread so thin

amongst thousands and thousands of

people that who knows who to blame every

individual can wash their hands of it

and say that they didn't call for

anything like this to happen even as

each one contributed in small ways to

its inevitability it's a bit like how in

some executions by firing squad one of

the rifles would be loaded with a blank

so that each executioner could tell

themselves that they had the blank

cartridge and so didn't kill the

prisoner and kard anticipated this

stochastic phenomenon over 15 years ago

he spends much of his essay criticizing

what he calls the public this is similar

to an ordinary collection of people but

is much more abstract it's a bit like

when someone talks about what the people

are saying or how everyone thinks this

for kard one problem with the public is

that it provides people the ability to

disown their actions remaining detached

from them and claiming they are just

speaking for the public he specifically

singles out the press as doing this

quite a lot this is a cover almost

anyone can use regardless of what they

are arguing for and it allows them to

avoid the risk of actually having a

judgment on an issue or even of holding

up their hands and saying that they

don't want to comment this all

exacerbates that lack of commitments

that kard is so worried about our

opinion are no longer spoken by us but

instead placed in the mouth of some

imaginary third party additionally kard

is worried about the violence and

vitriol that can be enacted by the

public without any one individual having

to risk their neck he imagines the

public as a Roman Emperor who has a pack

of trusty dogs at his beck and call if

someone displeases him or he grows angry

or just requires momentary Amusement he

can release the hounds and watch them

tear someone to Pieces then afterwards

he can say well the dogs did it not me

retiring to his throne with an

unblemished conscience if a large enough

group commits a horrific act as one body

then each individual person can say that

they did not really hurt anyone or if

they did it was only because everyone

else was doing it and it could truly be

that each individual only committed a

tiny wrong but when added together these

amounted to someone's death or ruin kard

is referring to smear campaigns in the

magazines and newspapers of his time but

this is arguably even more of a risk in

the internet age if if you have

thousands of people all saying an insult

once then no individual person has done

anything particularly major but put all

of these tiny actions together and you

might have a full-blown harassment

campaign on your hands and this sort of

thing has driven people to suicide on a

number of occasions each person can

honestly say that nothing they did

constituted harassments they may have

left just a single cruel comment but

together they brought about someone's

intense suffering or even their death

this is just the sort of situation kard

feared would arise from the public that

real wrongs could be committed without

anyone bearing responsibility for them

when we combine this power of the crowd

with the lack of individual passion

found in the present age we have a

situation where few or no individuals

will take drastic action but there are

these lumbering crowd actions which lash

out at anyone differentiating themselves

from the amorphous mass that forms an

abstracted General opinion without

passionate individual investment in key

ideas the crowd will not even bring

about great change as in Revolutionary

ages it will simply be an indecisive and

changeable Guardian contenting itself

with trivialities as kard put it gossip

and rumor and specious importance and

apathetic Envy become a surrogate for

both this and that so kard paints a dark

vision of the future where the public

rules from on high with no one in

particular reaping the rewards because

the public is no one in particular real

existent individuals will suffer for the

continued health of a crow that is

unpredictable unthinking and yet

perversely aggressive because the public

is not simply a collection of

individuals it is something that each of

those individuals are attempting to

serve and these are not simply ker

guard's elitist worries about what the

unwashed masses will do if they are

given the chance to have an opinion the

danger of the public stretches to the

very way we relate to the world and to

ourselves fundamentally kard is

concerned about the death of

individuality and that is just our last

Levelling and The Individual

point four Lev and the individual over

the course of the 20th century the

Anthropologist Renee Gerard formed and

refined his theory of memetic Desire

this held that many of our wants are

essentially borrowed from the people

around us without a proper examination

of whether achieving these wants will

make us fulfilled so if all our friends

suddenly want fancy watches then we are

much more likely to desire a fancy watch

and if everyone we know is going through

breakups we might feel a yearning to be

single ourselves in itself this is not

necessarily A Bad Thing it may even help

us become more socially cohesive but

kard was worried about a much more

Sinister form of mimesis where our

individuality is gradually scrubbed away

and we lose everything wonderfully

idiosyncratic about our own particular

existence in all of his religious and

philosophical thinking kard remained a

staunch individualist not necessarily in

the political sense but rather in the

existential one he thought it was in our

individual relationship to God that we

could bring out everything that was

unique and precious about ourselves and

Escape existential dread this is partly

why he Associates religiosity with

inwardness and self- understanding so

perhaps the most terrifying aspect of

the public for this Danish man was the

effect it would have on people's

self-conception namely that it would

level us leveling is a concept kard uses

a lot in the present age and it's

indicative of some of his wider concerns

about the individual's ability to thrive

within modern society kard says that

with our age of reflection comes a

certain objective way of looking at life

but by objectivity he does not just mean

the ability to see things logically

taking all the relevant information into

account he also meant a Detachment from

our own subjectivity that is a refusal

to value our own perspectives and what

they might tell us principally about

ourselves kard thought that the social

pressures of the Modern Age would lead

us to seek assimilation rather than

individuality and cause us immense

distress as a result as he put it just

as a surf belongs to a state so the

individual realizes he belongs to an

abstraction under which reflection

subsumes him in other words he thought

we are discouraged from being

exceptional or even just individual and

instead encouraged to try and resemble

whatever the abstract public thinks in

every respect this leveling force is

only egalitarian in the sense that it

wants to make everyone exactly the same

rather than give everyone the equal

chance to thrive as individuals it wants

to sand down each person's inconvenient

edges and bumps until we are all

perfectly alike and perfectly

predictable importantly kard is not

being conspiratorial here he does not

think that leveling is being

orchestrated by some cabal of

antiexistence of passionless Envy

amongst people in the present age and

that this passionless Envy in turn

stemmed from the inability to commit

ourselves to anything in our lives it

all links together into a single picture

this is not dissimilar to n's famous

idea of resentment where he says that

those with less power attempt to repress

and constrain those with more power by

crafting a morality which makes

greatness itself evil however whereas n

thought this was baked into Christian

ethics as early as St Paul kard thinks

this leveling is characteristic of

modernity in particular and that our

present age either originated leveling

or made it significantly worse it is

symptomatic of the deep suspicion of

passionate action in general which we

are encouraged to abandon in favor of

endless reflection and discourse the

disastrous effects of leveling only

become clear when we compare it to what

kard thought made an overall fulfilling

life in the sickness unto death kard

analyzes all sorts of ways that we can

become as miserable as possible but most

of them involve some corruption in our

relationship to ourselves while this

sounds quite abstract in its simplest

form it's rather straightforward if we

don't know ourselves then we could spend

our entire life chasing mirages never

knowing what we truly want or to use KAG

guard's terminology what we are willing

to have faith in kard cares deeply about

individuality both for its own sake but

also because he thinks that if we all

become subsumed within this public crowd

then we will inevitably end up deeply

unhappy we will fall into a kind of

nihilism because we will have ceased to

view the world through our own eyes and

thus the ability to affirm what matters

to us instead we will attempt to view it

through everyone's eyes and

unsurprisingly find that no part really

matters more than any other bear in mind

this is a simplification of what kard

thinks because he also holds that true

individuality is found through a

relationship with God this emphasis on

the individual also links back to the

theme of commitments that runs through

ker guard's essay if we refuse to be

individuals then we cannot give our

commitment to something as individuals

if our only wish is to be a perfect

member of a bland public then we will

never feel brave enough to take any sort

of leap of faith where we descend from

our comfortable reflection to engage

with the world as it is we will remain

endlessly chatting as kicker guard puts

it distracting ourselves with our public

putting forth half considered musings on

everything from the price of milk to the

latest show at the opera house then when

we look back on our lives all we will

truly be able to say is that we were

unfailingly Anonymous and unremarkable

this is the existential horror kard says

leveling has in store for us and it is a

truly terrifying thought for anyone who

values their individuality it would be

somewhat irresponsible for me to

speculate on how relevant this final

observation is for the present day but I

will leave it to you to decide how much

of this chimes with your experience of

the world do you feel the everpresent

public pressing down on you attempting

to stifle your individuality if so do

you think this is a new phenomenon has

it got worse in recent times or is this

just how things have always been the

inevitable result of the human tendency

towards Conformity that allows societies

to actually function do you think we are

encouraged simply to be a face in the

crowd to not put our head above the

parapets or think for ourselves or do

you think that this fear is overblown

after all in the same essay where kard

talks about this extreme Conformity he

also speaks of the new found ability

people have to form opinions on almost

everything even if they are uncommitted

opinions and surely this has the

potential to support rather than oppress

individual differences my point is I'm

not saying that ker guard's observations

should be parroted uncritically there

are aspects that are plausible and

aspects that are far less plaus possible

he is writing in the mid 19th century

and we live in the 21st but I do think

that kard is analyzing many of the same

issues we face in our internet age and

moreover he is doing so on a much

smaller scale information overload being

a passive spectator and a lack of clear

direction are all problems we face now

today as a result of our own social

political and philosophical pressures

and I think that K guard's essay is a

wonderful starting point from which we

can develop our own ideas who knows we

might find doubt that this old Danish

thinker has spotted something about our

own time that we have missed in all the

chaos it's certainly worth a glance if

you ask me and if you want to look into

some of these existential issues in more

detail then check out this video where I

attempt to make the notion of nihilism a

little bit clearer and stick around for

more on thinking to improve your life