Lessons From The Garden

I am continually amazed that a culture who values inspirational quotes so highly could have created something so vile and intolerant as a twitter mob.

That social bubble seems to force us all to retreat into bubbles having been forced out of one, or sucked into another.  These bubbles are like the Garden of Eden.  Inside the bubble, people live in perfect harmony with nature and one another in beautiful eternal peace.  There is no violence, no struggle, only flowers, sunshine and a celebration of naked bodies.  Unfortunately for these Garden Dwellers, there are people who live outside the bubble–in reality–who understand that the real world is not like the Garden of Eden.

The reaction of those inside the bubble to these realists is to retreat further into their bubble or–to become intolerant and even violent against those who will not accept the fantastic concept of the Utopian bubble and live in it–even if it isn’t real.  Instead of embracing the reality of the struggle outside the bubble, the fact that nature does not seem to like us, those inside them insist that they can make the bubble, as perfect as they envision–but first, they must destroy everyone and everything outside the bubble.  And things keep getting worse as these horrible Outsiders point out reality.

So here we are, with the Garden dwellers, trying to help them adapt to the difficulties of reality while they insist that the Garden–a place they can never return to–is a better place and that you MUST accept the Garden and give up everything you have to them to help THEM attain it.  Instead of embracing reality, working with it to make a better, stronger humanity, the Garden dwellers insist that not only is life outside the bubble too horrible to continue living with–focusing myopically on adversarial situations, blaming all ills on the outsiders–they create even more horrible situations out of whole cloth as proof like the Jussie Smollett Hoax, become unable to work with political opposition or even recognize them when they do something good.

Friedrich Nietzsche,  famously said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” and the bible itself promises that it will make weak things become your strength–but modern day America doesn’t seem to agree that struggle is a good thing, or even valuable.  In fact, it seems they do all they can to avoid struggle, which strangely results in mob action against those who confront them with any narrative that puts their mental safe space in jeopardy.

Where there was once an ethos of “can do” attitudes even in an overwhelming situation–the type that brought us epic movies like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Saving Private Ryan, even Ready Player One, that all embody the heroes quest, we now have unsatisfying real life situations that can not seem to be resolved.

One would think that someone who demands a safe space on campus would also want to create safe spaces for other, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  While businesses, religious and educational institutions and even the military are struggling to adapt to the needs of coddled, helicopter-parented youth now-become-adults, the entire world is learning the lesson from the Garden of Eden: There is no progress without opposition.