“The suicide bomber is the muse of our time. They do not inspire us to sing of freedom, justice, and dignity but of consequence.”

- Aragorn!, “Anarchy and Nihilism: Consequences”

The 20th centuries monsters were the monsters behind a businessman's handshake, a politician's smile. Patrick Bateman: Successful, Handsome, Fashionable, Cultured – depraved murderer, sitting comfortably in cool self-satisfied smugness. The Enlightenment logic of doublethink, the Anglo conceit to shake with one hand and shoot with the other.

The serial killer was the muse of the 20th century: Our fascination with serial killers is with their honesty, their shameless lifestyle that we all are taught to at once admire and publicly shame. The Look of the serial killer is the Look of modernity: The charming smile of Ted Bundy diverting the perceived from his glass eyes. They are the Truth so long courted by Enlightenment logic, the truth of untruth and its denial.

Joy is the condition of life. Life without joy is not life at all, but existence with work cannot have joy.

If we once experienced joy, it was as children. The human race hit puberty and became conscious, and becoming conscious it had its first teenage existential crisis. This crisis was the crisis of reason. ‘Man wrote a necessary fiction, a logic to order the unordered mess strewn on the ground. This was only one coping mechanism, but it was the most effective.

Work is the praxis of reason, the ordering of time and space into workplaces and workdays. The timelessness of primitive survival became the work schedule; the nomadic tribes who once called the Earth their home now called an arbitrary part of Earth their home.

Reason, like many other ghosts, is made real by our belief in it. Now we’re stuck with it.

There is no joy for us. We are all stillborn.

The 20th century – an era of monstrous individuals and fooled collectives. Isn't this the consequence of the Enlightenment, the logic of the slave who has become the master yet still acts like a slave?

The serial killer was the muse of the 20th century, and the 20th century's greatest serial killers were its leaders. Charles Manson, the truest expression of a modern leader. Modernity was already undead, but he showed us that modernity and the Enlightenment could exist in any particular body. Any text can contain truth if it has the right reader.

All texts contain violence. Texts that have denied their violence have however developed poorly and started off abusing small animals – or, what their logic categorized as small animals.

The 19th century was beginning of the end of a long compulsion to beat up anyone that was different. The 20th century learned from the Holocaust that these temper tantrums can only go so far.

Never again – would we be so forward about our hatred.

Detoothed liberalism: The self-evident self-righteousness of college-educated white Americans listening to Eastern music.

It was only a few years ago that I first heard the term “millenial”. The “trophy generation”, they’re called. Because their liberal parents – their socially liberal parents – supposedly would give them trophies for showing up. Don’t rock the boat, everyone can just get along, don’t ever hurt anyone’s feelings.

I prefer to think of us as the Fight Club generation.

The Fight Club generation was born into a world where revolutions are no longer possible. “Radical” for us is a word skateboarding kids on TV (always wearing the proper safety attire) used to describe GoGurt and Lunchables. There is nothing for us to do outside anymore, which is why we prefer to spend time inside playing video games. Even then, we don’t play video games anymore. Now everyone passively consumes shitty memes on Facebook. We lost our violence so quickly.

We are our fucking memes. We are all special snowflakes; we all have our own personal narcissism-pages, manufactured for us. A fill-in-the-blank questionnaire for us to express whatever Self we’ve bought.

Time means nothing when cyber-time is what orders the only part of our lives we have any control over. For eight hours a day, five days a week, we are indentured servants. For the rest of the time, we willingly give out marketing data.

We live in a time of no time. Benjamin had an idea of Messianic Time – neither being radically absorbed in the present, nor detached from it. Benjamin associated this with radicalism, with revolutions, but revolutions are no longer possible, remember?

The Prophet tells us what is to come, that it is too late. The Messiah tells us what is already here, that it isn’t too late. Who tells us: What is already here is yet to come?

Usually people will try to cover their eyes if they see a monster. What they should instead do is try to look at it as closely as possible – because the things that are closest to us are the hardest to see, and often make the least sense.

The 21st century – it is too young, it is without personality, it has only the burden of the past to give features to its already weary face.

The millenials, the Fight Club generation, there is no future for them. There is no sunrise to signal our tomorrow's arrival, no sunset to signal its end, the clocks have all been torn off the walls. Our tomorrow is eclipsed by the past; there is no light.

Our non-tomorrow is despair. Does it really surprise us so much then, when we have been sterilized in the womb by any given radioactive postmodern ideologies, that there are already those who see no other way out? Everywhere, without any central authority, young men are lashing out at any displacement they can find for the dread they feel that tomorrow isn't worth waking up to.

What of the women, the people of color, the ones who should be able to most clearly see that there is for us only a dark non-tomorrow? Where are their riots, their mass shootings?

For all their privilege, the young white mass shooters of the 21st century lack one thing: The privilege of oppression. The fucked up truth of it all is that we cannot handle freedom within a prison. We young straight middle class cis white males have all privilege of having all the ideas of freedom in our heads, but no one who lives in a capitalist society can actualize them. None of us can be free, though we can believe ourselves to be free, we can be free emotionally even

Should we somehow figure out how to free everyone within capitalism from everything but capitalism, there would inevitably be the biggest popular revolt the world has ever seen. What else would be left, after all?

The muse of the non-tomorrow will be the mass shooters. Behind every mass shooter's childhood bully, every girl who rejected them, everything they've killed in every violent video game – there is the sickness being spread by a rotting God in the West's living room.

Whether or not God is really dead or alive or ever existed is irrelevant. The West's God is long dead, and all the idols it guiltily worshiped in the closet are lost or broken. The 20th century was a time of mourning, Existentialism being the first stage of its grief.

Our despair is armed, it has become nihilism with teeth.

I don't want to say that the mass shooters are muses, but I'm not the one in charge here.