Systems Two- Survival Sickness (More Than The Sniffles)

Kierkegaard describes survival sickness well: "Let others bemoan the maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness, for ours is an age without passion...My life comes out all one colour." Survival is life reduced to bare essentials, to life's abstract form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure people's participation in production and consumption.

Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to remain on the level of appearances! The media gives wide currency to a whole personal hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions, watch your blood pressure, eat less, drink in moderation only, survive in good health so that you can continue playing your role.

We must be economical with survival for it wears us down; we have to live it as little as possible for it belongs to death. In former times one died a live death, one quickened by the presence of God. Today our respect for life prohibits us from touching it, reviving it or snapping it out of its lethargy. We die of inertia, whenever the charge of death that we carry with us reaches saturation point. Unfortunately there is no branch of science that can measure the intensity of the deadly radiation that kills our daily actions.

In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with what we are not, of switching from one role to another, from one authority to another, and from one age to another, how can we avoid becoming ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition which is the process of decomposition?