The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
---Albert Camus
Albert Camus, a renowned philosopher, essayist and novelist, passed away in 1960...long before the Internet, talk radio and slanted TV news networks fed into and bolstered people's belief systems based on their own presumptions and prejudices. But today we've gone beyond formulating our diverse values and priorities according to the facts of the world. Instead, it's our diverse values and priorities that seem to be formulating our own versions of the facts of the world around us: that is a nihilistic world view, which posits the notion that truth isn't absolute but rather relative to the purposes we have in using it. Welcome to today's alternative facts, "fake news", bonkers conspiracy theories and knee-jerk accusations of "hoaxes" whenever someone presents a truth that someone else doesn't want to hear. If the modern mind is a composite of how the masses today think and form their belief systems, then Albert Camus was spot-on in describing it as being in complete disarray...and it is only going to get worse, I suspect. Well, I can at least take care of my own mental health by staying rooted in reality, which necessarily entails keeping those nihilistic thinkers around me at arm's length, both in person and in the social and mass media. Go ahead and be conservative or liberal, I dig that...but as John Lennon once sang, "Gimme some truth"...
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