Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Self-Deception At Any Price
In The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Matt Damon as the disadvantaged title character, steals the identity of a rich playboy and then proceeds to murder each person who comes close to exposing his ruse and ending his lavish lifestyle. With increasing urgency, the Ripley character fulfills the George Bernard Shaw observation, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” Damon's Tom Ripley quickly evolves from a low-income piano player in New York to a well-to-do serial killer in Rome, confessing in the films narration, “I thought it would be better to be a fake somebody, than to be a real nobody.”
What a statement for our Darwinian culture! Our Darwinian philosophy persuades us that we are chance chemical entities (i.e., real nobodies), but we do anything and everything to maintain the illusion that our lives have meaning and purpose (i.e., we fake being somebodies). Whenever someone reminds us that we fake emperors "have no clothes," and that our pretense to meaning has absolutely no basis, we grab whatever argument comes to hand to censor that troublemaker, whatever the cost to reason or integrity!
What a statement for our Darwinian culture! Our Darwinian philosophy persuades us that we are chance chemical entities (i.e., real nobodies), but we do anything and everything to maintain the illusion that our lives have meaning and purpose (i.e., we fake being somebodies). Whenever someone reminds us that we fake emperors "have no clothes," and that our pretense to meaning has absolutely no basis, we grab whatever argument comes to hand to censor that troublemaker, whatever the cost to reason or integrity!
