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Once upon a time, a man lived in a valley between two cliffs. The valley was carved by the river that flowed in that place for millenia. So taken was he by the beauty and glory of what nature wrought that he set off to carve another such pair of cliffs and dig another valley.
"You fool," said his fellow villagers, "you absolute buffoon. You can't replicate nature. Even if our entire village moved to the spot you picked and toiled for generations, it would take centuries to approximate it, and then, without the river there to keep carving the path, the cliffs would collapse and undo all our hubris anyway."
A few millenia later, another man in an entirely unrelated place invented dynamite.
A very modernist tale. It has all the features of that metanarrative. Ayn Rand, Thomas More or Karl Marx could have written this, and in a way they did.
I am, as a westerner, obligated to hold dear this Faustian impulse to reach for the infinite at any cost. But as with any impulse it becomes insane when it goes too far.
The XXth century should be informative enough to those who do not fear looking at it as to the limits of Faustianism. When you seek to change your own nature to perfect it and put yourself in the place of God, all you reap is horror. This is why Faustian civilization is only stable when it is under the dominion of its own religion in Christianity incidentally, because it nails down some sense of humility into western man.
Kill God, and as Nietzche prophetized, you will bathe in the blood of millions.
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