Individuality

For a while, perhaps a couple of hundred years now, everyone is encouraging everyone else to 'be yourself'; to vote as you like in elections; to seek to gain or spend money as you see fit; to chose your own love life and style of love; to do everything as if you were the centre of things.

This kind of thought is, in the light of the truth, a philosophy and a behaviour of evil. I say this bearing in mind what you learn from meditation. Meditation is, as Bataille said, its own authority. And its principle basis is the fading away of individual (usually fake and herd-like) individuality.

Hence, our culture is a culture of evil. People don't like to use that word, of course; it is a proscribed word. I suppose we don't use the word 'evil' because it reminds some part of all of us that it properly describes our entire culture.

Everything about the culture of individuality is calculated to bring about unhappiness, conflict, ignorance, herd behaviour, and the traditional vices demonstrated by Dante and explained by Aristotle, pitied by Buddhism, and laughed at by Nietzsche.

The same principle does apply in the arts, and their contribution to culture. Individualistic art, spontaneous and 'new', 'exciting' art is effectually an act of evil. The 'fresh' and exciting work of the winner of the recent John Moore's Painting Prize in the UK is a case in point. In order to be original and new, the painter has, like previous winners, painted something childish and stupid. Its merit, the merit of this terrible work, is that it is new, individual, and unlike anything you've seen before. But in reality, you have seen this kind of thing before: when people with no talent for drawing or the use of paint attempt to draw people. Presented as a serious work, and awarded the winner's prize in a competition - such events dimly show the evil of our culture.