What is the difference between meaningful sacrifice, and the life of the living dead, those who sleepwalk through their day and defend their work as being "in service of a greater good". Sure, I might be miserable, am only capable of doing mediocre work within a degrading job which can only treat me as a replaceable part in a machine-like system, but at least I am working for a higher good! I am not like those selfish people who pursue happiness for themselves!
Unconsciousness manifests itself as two poles which present themselves as inherent opposites, like left-wing versus right-wing, or hedonism versus asceticism, or selfishness versus altruism. Dig a bit deeper though and you find the same defense of the system from both sides of politics, the same lack of passion between hedonists and ascetics, and the same lovelessness between selfish and supposedly "altruistic" people.
This points to a fundamental difference between genuine sacrifice and the life of the living dead: the lack of conscious qualities, which defends itself through external forms. Those who can't embody greatness wear a mask of "humility", venerating the ones who are genuinely great, as if this sentiment was born out of respect rather than fear and self-loathing. Likewise, those who don't have the strength of character to break from the herd find reassurance in their position, by convincing themselves that what they are taking part of is actually good.
But if you zoom out and see modern work for what it is, it consists in billions of people doing something they hate so that they can ... serve a collective which gives them more of that? How could that be considered the "greater good"? How could wasting the one thing you can be sure exists, because you are it, your conscious I and the qualities it can feel and express, in the name of same insane headless collective be a form of virtue? It isn't. This is why this is not conscious sacrifice, it's wage slavery. Nietzsche might have held some insane beliefs, but he was undoubtedly right about his ideas of the herd and the slave morality which they hold.
What is genuine sacrifice then? If the living dead which I have been pointing at, not just those working away in cubicles, but also those who are 'winning' at the game of money and status, because the losers and the winners are both slaves of the system, what does a sovereign, conscious person living for a greater good look like?
Sacrifice is a conscious act in the name of consciousness, such as a man risking his own life to defend his family, or an artisan mastering his tools (and himself) to defend the culture he loves, or a wife doing all the tiring and unappreciated tasks required to take care of her children, out of love, or even something as small as holding the door for someone else, a tiny gesture indeed, but still an acknowledgement of someone else in our lives, the important source of politeness. 1 The two sides are essential, conscious individual in service of a conscious collective. And the reason why genuine sacrifice is rare is because both of them, particularly the conscious collectives, have been gradually disappearing, as the scale of our world has increased.
Someone who fights for their country certainly embodies a lot of courage, but this is in the name of a power-hungry collective which justifies itself as a defender of "freedom", peace and comradry. You would never hear a military sergeant tell its soldiers that they need to invade a foreign country, kill its men who also happen to be husbands and fathers, destroy the cities where people grew up in and built their livelihood, so that we may get the oil under their feet for our own needs of power and money. Instead you would hear about the war on terrorism, or the fight for freedom, or the need to defend our brothers and sisters.
The military is the easiest example of such a facade, but in fact everything is like this. Companies are and can only be interested in profits, because if they weren't, they would lose to those who are ruthless about profits and their own growth. The same is true for governments, hospitals, schools, and even charities, everything which is large-scale eventually grows too big for the concern of conscious qualities to remain, and instead becomes driven by mere momentum and scale. 2
What happens when the collectives we live under are so utterly devoid of any inherent value? People end up swinging between two extremes: either total subservience to an insane collective, maintained by the submission of the individual to an abstract, vaporous sense of 'us', or the other extreme, which is the solipsistic drive for pleasure for its own sake, which leads to addiction, loss of empathy, loathing for anything difficult whatsoever, and detachment from human connection.
Many people want us to believe that the solution to all of the main problems in our times is to have more people in the first camp. They look at the Japanese and marvel at their ability to discipline themselves in the name of their society. They are not so interested in examining the ugly underside of such stifling conformity however, the increasing number of people who have no interest whatsoever in participating in society and would prefer staying indoors for months, if not years, playing video games (the hikikomori, the equivalent of NEETs in Japan). Or the disturbing sexual fetishes which arise in that country (which to be fair arise everywhere, unsurprisingly the ubiquitous access to porn has detached people all over the world from healthy sexuality). Or the anxiety, burnout and low self-esteem which inflict men who can only define themselves according to their career.
There is no solution to the insanity of the technological system, and all of the problems that it leads to, whether ecological or social, because it is an inherently unconscious collective. It is not driven by human participation, but rather by the coalescing desires of the alienated ego, which is why our world always needs more, more and more. More energy, more resources, more people throwing hours and mental energy to work at inane tasks, and defending its various myths and institutions.
This is why heroism in our times has to be morphed, to trick people into believing that it's the same as a father sacrificing himself for his children. We have the super-heroes, people enhanced with abilities which greatly extend their power and agency, which gives us the illusion that the fight between good and evil in our times is at the level of individuals, rather than the fact that systemic effects drive all of the evil in our world, something which has no equivalent in the good side, because consciousness can only maintain unity within smaller collectives. 3
Or we have the type of heroism described in science-fiction stories, which is why I began thinking about the difference between conscious sacrifice and living death to begin with. In the story Mono No Aware by Ken Liu, part of his collection of short stories titled the 'Paper Menagerie', what struck me was how it sounded theoretically poignant, witnessing the sacrifice of a person for a greater good, yet it left me totally unphased.
Someone might say that it's because I'm emotionally stunted and can't feel anything to begin with, but my conclusion after reflecting on the experience was that the sacrifice meant nothing because the main character's life meant nothing. I remember reading about that one death in Hesse's book 'Siddhartha' (won't give the name to avoid spoiling the whole thing) and feeling very moved by it, Siddhartha's love and melancholy as he acknowledges that nothing can be done to save them, and how I truly understood what it meant for a death to be noble, honored for its gravity, but also celebrated in the love which the person embodied while they were alive. That death meant something because that character meant something.
Deaths in science-fiction tales on the other hand feel insignificant because the relationship between individuals and collective feels more like that of an ant and its colony, rather than between a human being and the culture they are a part of. We don't live in a living culture which people participate in, feel a sense of belonging in and wish to express in their life, rather, we live in a Borg-like collective which assimilates us to do the bidding of some insane machine-like God.
The deaths are sad, to be sure, because every human being has the spark of consciousness in them, even if it's been mostly snuffed out of them, as can be seen by the fact that most people are basically dead inside once they become teenagers and young adults, in constrast to how they were as children. But they feel trivial because the lives led by such people, and their writers too, are so empty, which is why Ken Liu feels the need again and again in that book to talk about the "empty, cold void of the universe", or the "unfeeling, accidental universe" we are a part of, or about the need to build meaning in a meaningless world, and so on.
The death of unconscious characters doesn't make us weep because their life doesn't make us feel anything to begin with, it's just a series of events without any inner quality, which is a reflection of the internal desert of their writer, itself an echo of our internally dead world. Sacrifice is beautiful precisely because it comes from people who lived beautiful, loving lives, and we feel the sorrow at what they've left behind, but also are grateful for the examples they've shown, and the love which continues to resonate after they've passed away.
Living collectives can keep resonating through time, through the sacrifices of their conscious individuals, while dead collectives can only pursue self-expansion, at all costs, even if it requires the destruction of our environments and of human nature to do so, which can only result in death, which is why our society is declining, and there is nothing, but nothing which can revert it, because it is already dead, which is why the living dead fit so perfectly in it, and are necessary to maintain it for as long as possible.
1 Politeness which, as anyone knows, can easily become hypocritical and shallow, but which is rooted in a greater context, the felt knowledge that living with others necessarily requires compromises here and there for our (selfish) freedom, which is why people who hold no courtesy whatsoever when around other people can hardly be trusted for important matters.
2 For more, see also Society is not a conscious design. I would like to write a fully fledged philosophy because I realize that some of the arguments I am presenting here are a bit weak, but I can only write so much per week at the moment.
3 Which is why we can talk of genius, or even scenius, but not of a genius company, or a virtuous government. Every large scale movement becomes driven by literal goals and methods, which is why religions lose touch with the ineffable which mystics tried to point at, why charities become ways to funnel money by pulling on emotional strings, even if they start from good intentions, and why hospitals can only help people live longer, but not qualitatively better, more in love with life.
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Discernment Consciousness Livingdeath Zombielife Technosystem Sciencefiction Death Eternity
2026-01-29