Though dignity has a potential muddiness, a way to bolster up a sickly pride – let’s encapsulate it in a simple property:
Something has dignity if you can take it seriously. And you yourself may have no dignity left if you can’t take anything seriously.
Of course the argument there would be how the world is so absurd anyway, you’d be stupid to take anything seriously at all.
Nevertheless, at least in my travels, there’s a lot of things I just can’t take seriously. It’s even in the small things.
In a globalized economy with clown degrees and a lot of weird psyops embedded everywhere, that’s the convenience on giving up dignity: you no longer have responsibility. The more you can lean into a not-so-serious demeanor, the more you can evade any sort of repercussion.
A lack of dignity doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of power. It’s intoxicating, depending on the material. This is why anime is so popular, along with Marvel or whatever else: a hand coyly beckoning you to a lifetime of childlike dreamscapes. It is a chloroform to those who do not know what responsibilities are even worth having anymore while we’re waiting for the economy to collapse.
Not displaying any sort of dignity – forgoing this whole status game embedded – so at least the days may pass a little more peacefully, and the rage in your head may calm a bit. Who cares?
Well, of course nothing is free. After a life long enough without dignity, the intoxication turns into poison. And it all turns into a damper grey.
When you can’t take anything seriously anymore, so it does – of course – follow you can’t find meaning anywhere either. It’s in the definition of dignity after all: taking yourself and others seriously, with whatever rituals, even if you want to make fun of it, like the clean-shaven 1950s man even though that’s some psyop too.
Nevertheless I find myself here, with an inability to take much of anything seriously anymore. It’s a natural progression, ensconced in the natural post-modern response: who wants to be responsible for anything anyway? Why take things so seriously anyway? What a mood killer.
But the drugs stop working and then you mood is sincerely killed whether you avoid these questions or not. Maybe you succeed in blanking out your mind.
If you step back, it’s a real travesty that one cannot take much of anything seriously anymore.
And if this is all self-imposed, sure, let it be. But I just have a hard time seeing any dignity left in this world. Was there any to begin with?
Of course, as it is said, you see what you are. So I guess I am without dignity, and wondering how I can get it back, if it can even be salvaged.
But I am tired of the chloroform. Unless it surprises me and is the most potent stuff out there.
Thing is, once you start taking things seriously, there are so many things we accept and take for granted which needs to be called into question. Dignity to what is a good question too. If we just keep it in the scope of oneself, then a lot could be considered.
To have dignity so I imagine a court with a concrete wall half circle with silhouettes of old men – maybe the ones you used to look up to, the ones you read the books of.
Do you think they’d like for you to present the way you are? Maybe you wouldn’t care, that’s fine. In fact I’d join you and rebuke the whole lot. The only dignity worth having is of your own sensibilities – it’s precisely kowtowing to common norms which seems so revolting and probably gives the whole Dignity brigade a bad rep: an underhanded delivery so implied that if you aren’t useful writ large than you’ve no value; furthest from the truth.
Whenever I think of taking things seriously, so a lot of anger starts to rise. I think that’s ultimately why I don’t bother to take anything seriously. Because you shouldn’t take anything seriously. Because one gets lost in a lot of “should’s” which just aren’t true. Everything is permitted under our dead god.
Why in the world would you take anything online seriously? Or politics, the news, your job – I mean, when you really zoom out why would you care about any of these things at all? Why care about other people if they fade away inevitably, and even within your care it’s more of a masquerade, wishing your will upon them.
I don’t know. I do think having some standards is nice. Because when you have no standards, you basically bathe in mud with everyone else, and when you finally awake from this slumber of nausea nonsense, cognizant of the beast you’ve made of yourself since being a man was too demanding – if there is any shard of shame left, it only exists when you bother to look toward God.
Those who have any semblance of dignity left are often nice to be around, even if they’re high-strung – because you can rest assured they’ll at least keep to their codec. Maybe their codec has backstabbing embedded; well, it’s nice to be backstabbed for an ideal greater than being slighted at least.
It’s amusing to think of dignity against the usual humility demanded in Christianity; but that humility only persists by one’s constant awareness of how little dignity one has against the gods above.
“Nothing is sacred” – I guess one needs to make their own Eucharist then, huh?