Madness of Modern Life
Oscar winning producer-director Stanley Kramer’s 1963 film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, is truly a work of art that ought to be more widely known and recognized as the quintessential spiritual parable about America and the West. Surely today It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and has been one for decades and centuries, where it’s “every man for himself” in the proverbial fools’ chase after money (gold). See It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World section on Main Page of MOD•wiki, my personal wiki, where I collect evidence to build a mock legal case against the hegemony of western Modernity. Also see American Foundations section on Capitalism page.
The Criterion Collection describes the film as follows:
Stanley Kramer followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with this sobering investigation of American greed. Ah, who are we kidding? It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure, is the most grandly harebrained movie ever made . . .
Yes, “harebrained” it is, which conjures up images of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Modernity is full of bunny trails obfuscating truth with rabbit holes where delusion hides out. See HEGE Series on MOD•wiki Main Page.
By Oscar Wilde’s definition, the modern human is a cynic, who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Paul Bernal writes on his blog:
In Lady Windemere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde had Lord Darlington quip that a cynic was ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ As with so much of what Wilde wrote or said, it’s more than just a nice turn of phrase – it hits at the heart of the problems of [modern] society. Lady Windemere’s Fan was written in 1892, but what Wilde wrote is even more true now than it was 122 years ago. These days, our government, our businesses, our media and more seem to be dominated by what Wilde would have described as cynics. The idea that anyone in the ‘real world’ should even consider ethical, moral, philosophical or cultural values to be on a par with financial or economic ‘value’ appears whimsical, sentimental, even romantic. Hard-nosed, sensible, rational, practical people ‘know’ otherwise. It’s the economy, stupid.
What most would call the “real world” today is nothing but the inside out, Through the Looking Glass upside down and backwards modern world as described above, that’s anything but real. The modern world is unreal, not in the sense of being fantastic like was meant in 60s slang (introduced in 1965), but unreal as in “delusory; lacking in truth; not genuine; false; sham”, out of touch with reality — in a word, untrue. Hedonistic “eat, drink and be merry” lyrics to the theme song for the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World are sung about the unreal modern world, and say all about the modern world’s sole goal of pleasure seeking and self-gratification of desire:
…Have a ball, live it up, only fools give it up
Toujours the amour, but toujours
So be a happy gaffer,
Be a screamer, be a laugher
Let boys be gay and say, "What the hey"
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world…
Our traffic is so congested
Mass confusion on wheels
But Detroit is adroit, what they'll do in Detroit
Is make bigger automobiles
So be a happy fellow
Be a clown, boy, Punchinello
Get off the shelf and enjoy yourself
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad
It's a mad, it's a mad, it's a mad, it's a mad world!
Yes, “make bigger automobiles” is exactly what adroit Detroit did during my boyhood in the ’50s and ’60s, delusionally failing to see the writing on the wall that The Times They Are a-Changin', and Americans were to prefer smaller, compact cars with higher gas mileage. Traffic congestion then was nothing compared to The Road Home today.
I got my driver’s license with one of those “bigger automobiles”, a ‘66 Mercury Montclair, but not without some difficulty. A literal boat or yacht of a car, I failed my first driving test because the unreal, hard-nosed cop didn’t move the parallel parking posts apart for larger vehicles after the previous test of a small vehicle driver. I bumped the back post before I could turn around from making sure I cleared the front one, which he claimed was automatic failure. The real officer at my second try was easy going and level headed. Since I passed everything but parallel parking on my first driving test attempt, that’s all he had me do over, and I easily parallel parked and passed with flying colors because the posts were spaced properly.
“Bigger, new and improved” have long been touted as “better” in America, something concocted to presumably make Americans dissatisfied with what they have so they have to buy something more. And for what purpose other than Corporate America’s Love of Money rooted in the profit motive of their beloved Capitalism — The American Way, “The Highest Standard of Living in the World”, The System of Organized Crime.
Appropriate encore to the theme song of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is Burt Bacharach’s Alfie, composed for the 1966 film of same name, sung by Dionne Warwick, which asks, as does the byline to this first post —
What's it all about Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live
What's it all about
When you sort it out, Alfie
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if, only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie
I know there's something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed
You're nothing, Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you'll find love any day Alfie, Alfie
Yes, definitely “there's something much more”, which by the end of the movie, Alfie still hasn’t figured out what it actually is, but at least is starting to question his licivious, licentious, cad “toxic” masculinity. As Mark Albion would surely agree, life is something “More Than Money”, but evidence of that is hard to find in USA, as testified by American Foundations and Alexis de Tocqueville. America has repeatedly been touted as a “Christian” nation, despite the fact that Love of Money is rife in America and has been since well before its founding, even though explicitly denounced as the root of all evil by the One on Whom Christianity is founded. Apparently that is Christianity’s best kept secret, about which political conservative “Christian” culture warriors are mute, all the while cozying up to the Republican Party of crony Capitalism, and spouting diatribes against godlessness of unchurched unbelievers as if such ungraciousness will win any hearts to Christ. But then the only conversion they really selfishly seek is their preferential conversion of republican democracy to theocracy in order to legislate their Calvinistic, Puritan Protestantism with its moralistic morality, particularly against abortion and sexual deviancy from the norm.
The American Way, “The Highest Standard of Living in the World”, is finally being exposed like never before for The System of Organized Crime that it became post World War II, that works for less and less Americans than it did in the ‘50s and ‘60s, just as it originally worked for only the few in early days following the Second American Revolution. The Robber Barons of The Gilded Age have resurfaced after the Great Depression forced them undercover, and the writing is on the wall, the signs of the times becoming clearer with each passing day. American politicized pseudo “Christianity”, and it’s right wing Republican Party politics with its political plaform built on progress of “economic growth” are being exposed for what they are — unreal madness of Love of Money, love of riches primarily manifested in metropolitan centers of urban industrial Capitalism. Real Life has nothing to do with “economic growth” of industrial urban showplaces of “progress” like NYC and Dallas, delusionally touted as the center of the world, when they are actually unreal and don’t really have much of anything real to offer.
My dearly departed dad had a saying, “talking to hear your head rattle.” There’s a lot of head rattling today from talking heads, what with internet blogging, podcasting, social media connecting, and all. The heads (presumed “thought leaders”) are prattling on a lot about what’s wrong with modern life in the West, when what’s wrong is little more than Lookin’ for Love, like Alfie, in all the wrong places (in all the wrong ways). Their talk is erroneously “off the mark” (hamartia) because it’s reductionist to myopically identify the modern problem as mere technological dominance of life rooted in left brain bean counting.
It’s true that with the Enlightenment, the West forsook it’s cultural, spiritual foundation in Christianity, disenchanted human understanding of the world by turning to strict materialism, and since then has been attempting all kinds of re-enchantment fixes (like current AI Artificial Intelligence concocted “religions”), none of which work because they don’t even come close to that original cultural, spiritual foundation. Truth of how this came to be is much stranger than the fictions thought “leaders” tell today. And without that real analysis of the modern problem, conclusions and prescriptions for avoiding the problem will be nothing but more of the same old hamartia.
Stay tuned for “The Rest of the Story”.
