So, today’s little sunflower is kind of a critique of somebody else’s stuff, but I prefer to think of it as merely having grown out of that compost. I did not and do not intend to pick on that person or construct particularly. But her tone and concerns about how her identity is being erased as her web content is diminished seemed silly to me, and yet also like a good representation of the majority chorus of “me-ism”, the narcissistic faith that has replaced all the others. Having read her article a couple of times now, I want her to be meaning this complaint as irony or sarcasm, but I can tell that is not mainly where she’s coming from.

This will be my second podcast about issues of identity, because that idea has occupied my thinking for a bit. I have mixed feelings about the meaning and the value of user-identified and embraced identity. I do not know what we all, but mainly you all, ought to be doing. instead of the mindless and catastrophically evil things you are doing, but I know that a lot less of it would be a good idea, and that can be assisted by drastically lowering your estimates of your own value as beings and your demands for what you feel is owed to you. So, you know, embracing your true identity as specks of dust.

I understand that is not in any way a popular view. The world mostly wants to do what Americans do, mainline insatiable greed and consumption, but just more and better and worse. And that, for example, is why the world has so far never been able to take such things as global heating (and burning to the ground in a pile of ashes) very seriously. Because changing in accord with warnings about doom and gloom just doesn’t sound like very much fun. And life is short. And people will have their fun. And if you say otherwise, you will be done.

The reflections towards the end of the podcast regarding the true meaning of salvation may be of more than passing interest. Because while people get the joke or symmetry about having sympathy for the Devil, they seldom get the shadow side of that sermon, having sympathy for God, who might have become exhausted by your many thoughts and prayers a long, long time ago.

The original article which in part inspired this episode.

Happy Monday, if you are into that sort of thing.

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