Awake with ironic musings on truth & ambition (or the reason we’re all such assholes)

Truth is rhetoric, a tautology so obvious that we forget it, and which deconstructs itself and destroys truth even as it defines it. Language’s primary function has never been to pursue truth. Language is a game of power and control. It may be an innocuous, humble pursuit of a personal control over the world, a sort of orientation. It may also be a violent, political, or dogmatic control that needs to convert or destroy the opposition. Truth is a weapon wielded by a terrified human standing naked in a wilderness and attacking the wind.

(It does not follow that all language is equal. There are still a host of idiots who write and are not worth reading. There are some writers who capture things beautiful, encouraging, groundbreaking, etc. Such things can, and should, be called truth, too. The word has infinite volume.)

This malleable truth serves ambition, which is a desperate longing to feel important in an indifferent world. The fact that it is desperate should not be read as a criticism of ambition. When fulfilled (i.e., when the longing, through determination and fortune, or just fortune, is achieved), it is the emotional equivalent of “winning” an argument, converting a heathen, or conquering a nation: it makes the self giddy with the perception of a mastery of its own fate. When ambition is not fulfilled, the self finds orientation in some new myth. The American Dream, a utopian commune. It will usually only tweak, not abandon, whatever position it held, afraid that to heed Emerson’s words is to collapse the entire self so carefully constructed:

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

Sometimes, though, a conversion takes place, when one is able to find more power in a new myth, or the old has simply become untenable. The self doesn’t want to realize it is power-hungry Sisyphus trying to trick death, continually climbing and falling again, pushing that rock, always up hill, for all his days.