Human beings are changing beings, as the years go by we get new experiences, knowledge and ideas that shape who we are. In recent years we have experienced a capacity for expansion unimaginable in previous years. In the last 30 years we have generated more progress than we had made from the fall of the Roman Empire to the scientific revolution, about a thousand years.
It should be noted that these changes have not always been for the better, today the mentality of Western man just a few decades ago has become as distant for us as it was for our grandparents the warrior man 2,000 years ago. New generations are more likely to assimilate the great illusion of postmodernity: "Nothing matters more than how I feel. For this very reason, concepts such as freedom and truth do not have a feasible power within the spaces of society.
Stimulated by the feeling of speed and temporariness, developed societies have undergone a profound transformation that goes beyond the technological revolution and globalization. In just half a century, the ideological and moral precepts that make up our mentality have become almost completely detached from those of previous generations.
The old work ethic, where the important thing was to fulfill family obligations, sacrifice for children and be considered "exemplary citizens", has been replaced by another where self-satisfaction has become the new tyrant of our decisions. We have involuted, we have gone from aspiring to virtue to aspiring to the quick stimuli that satisfy our need to belong to a collective. For the same reason, today's society is much more manipulable than previous generations, much more sensitive to populism.
Individuals are no longer satisfied with carrying out an activity that allows them to aspire to become better people; much less do they strive to create value for society. Now they seek to satisfy their own desires, renouncing all commitment and any kind of effort. Neither are they interested in carrying out an activity related to their tastes, what predominates for this individual is the stimulation of their needs. It is different. Wherever he is and whatever he does, postmodern man demands to satisfy himself. He no longer does things but wants to be things. It is the culture of self-satisfaction.
When Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motors, stated that the key to success is to love what you do, he was expressing a very different mentality to that which today seems to dominate Western man. His was a vision where the protagonist was not virtuous simply because he was an individual but because he was virtuous for all the actions he committed in his life to reach the position he was in; where the personal recognition for making any idiocy in a video for youtube was not a purpose, but was obtained based on the contribution of what was contributed to society.
In fact, at present the law of desire prevails, the cult of the Self. What is important is no longer what the individual does, his achievements and merits, but what the individual is for having been born this way, that he feels satisfied with himself, at ease with what he is. Precisely because of this is that it has become a cult of obesity today, not that we should discriminate and mistreat people who suffer from obesity, but we do nothing to praise it and make it a model to follow by not hurting the feelings of others. Obesity is a disease and should not be treated as something positive. This is a mere example of the postmodern man is doing with the truth.
This promotion of personal satisfaction, which begins at the highest levels, spills from top to bottom, affecting an infinite number of subjects who, in turn, develop a perception of themselves that does not correspond with their achievements but with supposed rights. Thus everyone demands that the environment be a magical mirror that gives them back, whether they deserve it or not, an idealized image of themselves.
It happens, however, that when we do not fulfill our desires and do not see ourselves reflected in others as we hope, we feel a deep frustration. The experiences, disagreements, conflicts, adversities..., all the contingencies that our ancestors assumed as daily and normal, we interiorize them as existential traumas, even as aggressions that need a guilty person to take responsibility for and with whom to settle accounts. This substitution of "doing" for the need to "be", from which many current conflicts stem, is responsible for the emergence of the State as a therapeutic entity, a state with the capacity to have control over its citizens in order to watch over their interests of "being", a state whose powers are not limited and are used to violate the freedom of anyone who dissents with the thought of "being".
The paradox of it all is that progress has propelled societies into an era of well-being and security as we have never known before, but it has not made us better and more resilient, it has made us weaker and much more fragile. It is not curious, then, that we have more infantile adults as new generations pass by. A childized being who cannot rationalize what happens to him because he lacks the maturity to accept that, contrary to what he is taught today by pedagogues and politicians, the world does not begin and end in him, it is not the center of the universe unless he earns it by his own effort.
The worst thing, however, is that the renunciation of the adult self, which is constructed through self-improvement, conciliation and commitment, in favour of that infantile, intransigent and resentful self, not only converts politics into a vile activity destined to satisfy the needs of a collective homogeneously, but also transforms the most banal and simple causes into means for the attainment of particular ends and makes unviable the projects that require high doses of altruism and the renunciation of individual recognition.
Be that as it may, one can always choose. To love what one does and to love oneself above all things are incompatible options. We must, therefore, choose between one of the two. Because on that choice, and not on the idealized reflection of our ego, it will depend what kind of people we really are... and, above all, whether we will do something worthwhile in this once-lived life.
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