At the Funeral of Our Generation

At the funeral of our generation,
We mourn the loss of our own,
But lift high their pride in exultation,
And rejoice that they all died alone.
Their hearts had grown out of proportion,
Too big to fit inside their chests;
Unresponsive to defibrillation,
Lost to cardiac arrest.

And we all cry, “Hallelujah”?

At the funeral of our generation,
A hymn is sung for those few proud
Who, in secular sanctification,
Spilt their blood and died to win the crowd.
"All hail the Saints of our great nation!
They've given us our crutches back;
The pinnacles of pasteurization,
They've made our milk nonfat!

Hallelujah, hallelujah!"

At the funeral of our generation,
The eulogy brings us all to tears
Over the heathen proliferation
We've loved to hate for years.
In a grand miscommunication,
Sovereign stomachs rule minds amiss.
Destroyed by lustful fornication,
Just missed joy in coital bliss.

Why do we cry, "Hallelujah"?

At the funeral of our generation,
Somber smiles trade for happy frowns.
And our shepherd, in his mild frustration,
Throws his pulpit to the ground.
As the symbol of our desecration
Is smashed beyond repair or mend,
He's baffled why, like carnal duration,
The climax was our end.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah!"

Death by Plato. A Herald of Doom.

Here's something happy. :) P.S. I am by no means a Plato scholar. This is just something to think about.

"We've found our meaning in a bottle of beer,
Diluted what's true to escape our fears,
And lost sight of the present using lens-less glasses.
Replaced our lives with a fantasy,
Because life isn't what we'd like it to be.
It's steadily becoming a brand-new opiate for the masses.
It's soma for our brave new world."

excerpt from "Opiate"
- Looking for Atlantis


Well, on my quest to be a "good" Torrey student, I've just finished book 5 of Plato's Republic, and after about two hours of intense reading and thinking, my brain has never been so enthralled and--for lack of a better term--so mushy. My brain literally (and I do mean LITERALLY) hurts from the pounding Plato just gave it, and every fiber of me that is still capable of coherent contemplation is frightened, again, out of its wits. I suppose it's not ironic that what sanity one has that Plato doesn't at least give a hard "tweaking" to from his depth of thought is completely driven away by the brevity of the actual content of his thought.

The Republic (at least through book 5) does exactly what Socrates sets out to do, at least on the surface level (I'm not willing to speculate any deeper, mostly because I don't think I have sufficient knowledge to concretely go any deeper than that); it describes the perfect city, a utopian society. Now, there is really nothing wrong with a utopia (irony intended), except for the fact that they do not exist, and this not because no one has ever tried, far from it. I think this brings up a situation where I could honestly say, "Many are called, but few are chosen," but what might be more appropriate is this: "No one was called, and those who actually try are stupid and fail miserably." :) Utopias do not and CANNOT exist on this earth because humans have been corrupted by sin and so cannot act out the laws put forth by Socrates and Co. in the Republic with the desired effect. This perfect society discounts the individuals living in it of just that: their individuality, and along with it, their individual free will (that will most likely seek what IT wants). This is probably the most problematic part of human nature for a utilitarian state.

The most frightening thing for me about all of this (for the moment anyway) is that, in this system, our problematic and self-seeking free wills would combine with Socrates' "laws" and the communitarian lifestyle of the city, creating a whole new Sodom, full of self-seeking individuals who, because of their communitarian lifestyle, will have every opportunity to take every advantage of the others in their community. Debauchery would run rampant as the sense of family and love for the individual soul is destroyed; this destruction of the love of the individual along with the repressed emotions he suffers under Socrates' laws will lend to a selfish search of the individual to find this love that he lacks, causing physical and emotional whoring of the worst kinds. This, again, would cycle around and further the lack of the sense of love for one's individual soul and, in turn, the selfish seeking to fill these deficits. It sounds altogether too much like Brave New World meets Equilibrium, for undoubtedly, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Wimmer found similarities SOMEWHERE, right? This vicious cycle--just as the Charing-T Tower and the Tetra Grammaton really would build EACH OTHER--would congruently build gratuitous immorality and emotional callousness, destroying the society in a maelstrom of self-service, self-pity, and SELF-destruction, instead of leading upward toward Grace.

In all honesty, I think I'm beginning to understand what Dr. Reynolds means when he says that this document is probably one of the most dangerous that has ever been written in the history of the human race. Pray that our rulers do not become philosophers a la Plato (or if Plato himself doesn't believe anything that Socrates is saying, pray our rulers do not read Plato and miss what he is really saying), else WE become worthy of perishing in a rain of fire and brimstone.


In short, be afraid.


Be very afraid.


Please.