City Of God 47

I heard a little bit on the radio this morning about the problem of perfectionism and how it is afflicting young millennials. This has long been a problem, and not just for the millennials. We still live in the throes of modernity. Everything has to improve, be improved, made better. This ties in nicely with global capitalism, where it is always about improving the product, the delivery of services, and always finding new and more effective ways of manipulating the consumer (we are no longer persons, but life forms that consume, that inhale and suck up goods and services), suckering them into buying said goods and services, making the manufacturers rich, and if your name happens to be Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, so obscenely wealthy that if he gave ninety percent of his wealth to the most needy Americans, poverty and homelessness might actually be solved in the USA and Bezos would still be obscenely wealthy. In advertising, we are bombarded by images of young, fit, beautiful people, fabulously dressed and undressed. People, for the most part, are poorly equipped for critical thinking. They respond emotionally and viscerally to this constant onslaught of beguiling images and beautiful sounds. Even if they are smart enough not to get suckered into buying the product or service (and some of you, my Gentle Reader, are that savvy), they will still be left feeling somewhat incomplete, wanting, and inadequate. They have just been visited by all those visions of perfection and beauty, such as they can never hope to fulfil for themselves. We are imperfect. Yes, I get it. We will never be good enough. Good enough for what? I suppose the ultimate underlying and not so subtle goal and motivator for many is to make themselves sexually attractive so that they will be chosen as sex partners and, but for the intervention of birth control, can pass on their genes to make a more perfect humanity. Well, that is the take from evolutionary biologists. But the atheist eggheads have a very limited scope of our shared humanity, and for the simple reason that they do not believe, nor accept the essential part that spirit and spirituality play in the reality, formation and progress of our humanity. I have a rather different take. Read the mythologies of various cultures from antiquity, particularly the Greco-Roman. Study the gods and deities. They're almost all, for the most part, unassailably beautiful. Jung would have called them archetypes that have arisen in our prehistory to become dominant to our human collective unconscious. We aspire to be gods and goddesses. We long to be divinities, to be divine. We want somehow to make ourselves sacred and holy, and we seem to feel that we can only arrive there by becoming perfect. Or becoming better. Modernity has really ploughed and sowed this field and now we are reaping its fruit. In our near-animal existence in prehistory as hunter-gatherers, there were constant dangers to our survival and modernity, following agriculture and the rise of cities, modernity has provided a way out, or a way through: making everything better, more efficient, cleaner, healthier, more beautiful, more comfortable, less poor, less sick, more desirable, and we have to work hard, harder, and harder still to attain that elusive jewel of perfection, and the advertisers who are the mouthpiece of global capitalism have very neatly cinched the deal. We are slaves now, not to cruel human masters, but to products and a chimerical image of beauty and perfection that dangles always before us like a little piece of gourmet chocolate baiting a very sharp and deadly hook. There is a vision of perfection that could be of benefit to us, but this speaks of perfecting the inner self, a self that loves, that appreciates, that cares and that gives and shares. The self that isn't warped and made into a devouring monster by the lies of competitive capitalism. I am referring here to what the holy scriptures refer to as the beauty of holiness, the gateway to the City of God.