I had a short conversation with an Internet friend today, that stirred the coals of a sort of existesntialist burnout I’ve been feeling for a while now. She’s someone I only really know by her occasional posts on various threads, including mine, but whose opinions I’ve always found insightful.

I had made some off-the-cuff post expressing my frustration with the state of our culture, referencing Huxley, and lamenting the fact that unlike his Brave New World, in ours, people willingly dumb themselves down. Honestly it was unoriginal, pretentious crap. But at the time I wrote it I was being assaulted by vapid bullshit from a 24-hour news station, and making that post had fewer consequences than ripping the TV off the wall and smashing it.

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social gears

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

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