The world is a continuity of train wrecks.

The world is a continuity of train wrecks. And eventually we all die. We can engage in discourse all day, participate in the free press, have conversations on the internet, vote every year in November when Election Day arrives, but hardly do we ever look into ourselves and tackle fundamental questions about what it means to be a human being who lives on a planet where there is a possibility through human error or lack of empathy to blow itself up and then perish into nothingness. William Barrett perfectly reflected this during the fifties in his primer on Existentialism, Irrational Man, by saying "by this time widespread anxiety and even panic over the dangers of the atomic age; but the public soul-searching and stocktaking rarely, if ever, go the heart of the matter". The words of Barrett reflect the theme of this block.

Symptoms of  social discontent are best discovered through a culture's collective psyche. Anticipation and judgements about the pernicious fate humanity confronts vary according to geographical demographics , adding to the fruitless and complex task of universal explanation of human existence.  My own reaction to the milieu I'm living through is affected by a combination of news media, what I witness through my vocation in a public institution under constant attack by defenders of  malicious social inequality, ethical intuition developed from my progressive liberal arts education at a public university, not to mention a personal absorption of  art, music, and literature with a reflective and critical view of the planet, results feeling like I am watching present history unfold  through the initial events of each recent crisis that constitutes the logical end of mankind. But then I realize the wheels have been set in motion as it is Space Odyssey 2001 long before our current epoch; human nature has charted  the history of human civilization -a narrative of carnage and brief peace  -  begins when a pack of  primates discover  bones could be used as weapons when fighting rival packs. Since the advent of civilization, our logical end, conjured up when our ability to reason utilizes a few basic skills of critical thinking when pondering about the history of civilization, a succession of technological progress that amounts of to a gradual march towards our self-descructive banishment from the planet. 

Modern civilization continues where the primates left off. Has the result been a perennial reaction of resentment of the weak and oppressed  as Nietzsche suggests in The Genealogy of Morals, evident now in the twenty-first century  as any other period in modern history?

- The Committee