The contemporary
man understands, more than his progenitors, that Orwellian language is in our
society, “the language of power”; therefore he believes that to be part of the
“power system” and receive his little token of requital for his obedience, he
should learn how to speak in that way, i.e. use the language of inauthenticity
to its full. More than any other man in history he understands that he has to
abdicate himself in order to become part of the new social order. In a more technical
way, Herbert Marcuse would have said that the contemporary “consciousness lags
behind social existence” (“The Movement in a New Era of Repression”, 1971).
In its
fundamentals, this grim transformation of the contemporary man, stripped of his
authentic life and secluded in an egotistical universe where all that counts is
the solitude of the anti-ethical motto “what’s in it for me?” is just a
reverberation of his abandonment of ethics. One further consequence of this new
attitude is that he also believes that the law can be an easy substitute for
ethics: he is not doing such and such only because there is a law forbidding it
and not because it would simply be wrong. It’s this way of thinking that has
brought the contemporary man to the point of having no ethical boundaries: he
does all he can - - in the case he is not a criminal - - all that is not
forbidden by the law is allowed! Consciousness, ethics, humanity and other
considerations, play very little or no role in this new form of existence. This
mortal loss of integrity also makes the contemporary man a being ready and
prone to accept, without conscious resistance, the language of inauthenticity
as his own and this makes him a man cut in half that has mislaid and bartered
authentic life on his descent to a petty end.
(Sergio Caldarella, The man in the bottle, in RantRave, February 21, 2014)
