Death in the City: Plunging Below the Line of Despair

Table Talk Magazine ^ | Oct. 2018 | Sharon James

[spirited irish]

Half a century on from the publication of Schaeffer’s seminal books The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason (1968), our culture spins ever faster into irrationality. Schaeffer predicted that plunging below the “line of despair” would lead to social collapse just as surely as the Roman Empire collapsed amid decadence, self-indulgence, and immorality. Others (both Christian and non-Christian) sounded alarms as well. Philip Rieff warned in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) that a society released from all restraints would implode. Christopher Lasch argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that no community can flourish where every individual focuses on “self-fulfillment” and where self-control is excoriated as repressive.

[spirited irish]

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”   Friedrich Nietzsche

[MuttTheHoople]

God is dead- Nietzche

Nietzsche is dead- God

[Gay State Conservative]

Save for later

[Robert DeLong]

Geed read, and it all sounds way too familiar. Thanks for sharing.

[ChuckR163]

Scientists wonder why there is a plague of narcissism among Millennials. Stories here.

Some traits of narcissists: entitlement, blaming others for their own poor decisions, getting violent, verbally or physically, with people who disagree with them.

[_Jim]

Attempting to scratch an ‘itch’ inspired by the infinite via finite methods leads to ever increasing “push” into methods and techniques that warp the perception of reality. Killing conscience in this way leads to all manner of ‘things’ involving perversion.

[spirited irish]

Narcissists are self-centered, thus in their intense examination of ‘self,’ can and do imagine that other people must be as obsessed by thoughts of the pompous ‘self’ as the egoist is with him or herself. This is why the self-centered person can easily imagine that he or she is the target of persecution and hatred by others, in the following case, by millions of evil white racists whose obsessive thoughts and sole aim in life is to cause the self-pitying author to suffer. According to the paranoid narcissist:

"Racialized people experience systemic discrimination on a daily basis, on many levels, and in ways that white people may never encounter. The whole point of these safe spaces is to remove that power dynamic. That's partly what makes them spaces for healing. The presence of any kind of privilege puts unnecessary pressure on the people of colour to defend any anger or frustrations they have, to fear the outcome of sharing their stories..." (Ethnic Minorities Deserve Safe Spaces Without White People, 03/18/2015 )

Lurking beneath the paranoid suggestion that ‘racialized people’ need ‘safe spaces’ because of so-called ‘systemic discrimination’ by evil white racists is scapegoating.

A scapegoat is a person or group of people made to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. In practice, it occurs when the guilty project their own sins upon another person or group of people.