one of my favorite mottos, life-rules, beliefs. live questioning everything. no facts are taken for granted, everything's open to question.
it occurs to me (and i'm sure this is hardly an original thought) that modern american society exists within an epistemological crisis. of course, knowledge and authority and basis of beliefs have always been touchy subjects; the new world lacks the ghosts and chains of tradition that kept the old on track. starting history over, all that stuff. but throughout the first two centuries, there ran unifying threads: religion, the state, the rugged individual.
but at the beginning of this century, all these foundations began crumbling. religion was first to go, as society became increasingly secular and scientific. god made it, maybe, but we could do damn near anything with it if we tried hard enough. the great depression killed off most of the myth that hard work earns rewards and teh rugged individual makes his own way in the world. and the political events of the last thirty years or so have pretty much destroyed faith in the state.
no authority, no external source for knowledge. and we wonder why there's angst? everything we've relied on for centuries has betrayed us and we're left wandering shell-shocked through the rubble. the american myth, handed down through generations, has been exposed as a farce. what's solid? what can we rely on?
so we give our freedom to religion, or ideology, or science. we embrace a belief system fervently, look to it for reassurance that there's some source out there, some way to prove things, some way to *know*. but underneath, even if only subconsciously, we know it's not real, recognize the belief as an arbitrary decision, and leap to defend against any perceived threat to the order of things. we live with a vague uneasiness hovering around the edges of our realities, and most of us never dare to look it in the face and call it by its name. easier to get drunk or stoned or fucked or fervent.