It is funny how in youth, enthusiasm bursts forth with the energy of the brightest star in the celestial sky, only to descend into darkness...ever more intense darkness. That's adolescence for you.
But how does this intense polarization represent something other than nihilism in modern politics? Neither extreme point is "healthy" for the pysche of youth. Perpetual rebelliousness, without understanding rebellion as something more substantive than crude reactions against "something" - authority, rules, "the machine". Rebellion as reaction invariably descends into a neutered nihilism. A majority of the 60s youth have come to accept the values that they rebelled against...they grew up and thought better of it. Their rebellion was empty to start with. Fucking, shooting up, and getting high ain't rebellion; it's just fucking, shooting up, and getting high.
Rebellion is often seen as an all-or-nothing proposition. "Don't you go to rallies or protest or picket?" All of those things are admirable steps towards genuine action, just as long as you don't need to participate for the sake of normativity, i.e. "I think I should", or, even worse, harbour the need to lord it over others in order to reinforce a sense of superiority.
The reactive element present in modern liberalism is an extension of this teenage angst. This isn't new or all that interesting. But the alignment of "good" activism against "evil" corporatism is, first, far too parisimonious, and, second, leads to nihilism. There comes a point when the radical battle is challenged by great adversity, when its constitutive "rebels" are persecuted and castigated. What then? What recourse does an individual sensualist take? The answer is the path of least resistance - the one that requires no thought or work at all. "Can't beat them? Join them!"
By drawing the lines of combat with vitriol, both sides have conceded defeat. The fluidity and flexibility valued by Sun-Tzu is utterly foreign in this context. Darkness is as facile as light. Spirit is absent when light is pitted against darkness in uncompromising antagonism. It is rather the meeting of light and dark is where meaning lies. But, alas, those in power often cling onto purity - in the abstract - rather than confront the contradictions that arise in actuality.
