Existential, adj.
Relating to existence, "The climate crisis is an existential threat to the world,” concerned with existence, especially human existence as viewed in the theories of existentialism.
"The existential dilemma is this: because we are free, we are also inherently responsible,” (For a proposition) affirming or implying the existence of a thing. "The existential proposition that truth and reality are constructed fictions."
Existentialism, noun
A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Existentialism, published Jan 6, 2023
“As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.”
Thus, existentialism paints reality as an expression of one person’s own reality. From a scientific perspective, deductive reasoning of an individual. “Truth and reality are constructed fictions.”
While the word existentialism was whispered on the steps of the University Liberty as a new and mysterious thing, it spread throughout America as a synonym for truth.
Political parties fight over contradictory realties.
Media fact checks from ever more contradictory realities.
Truth becomes whatever you want it to be.
Gender dysphoria becomes gender affirmation.
The criminal becomes the victim.
Existentialism in medicine defines evidence as whatever profits the regulators.
Children are taught to be victims of their parents. Hate surfaces as a byproduct.
We theorize that civilizations reach their full potential, and then end as a result of some inherent flaw. We consider famine, environmental extremes, war, even the poverty of capital divergence, but few would consider a existential shift in the collective wisdom of its population.
As a conjecture, the collective wisdom of a population metaphorically resembles a hive. Statistically the N number for the collective thoughts of the hive yield a high value of collective-wisdom. That wisdom drifts this way and that based on generational experience. It has societal rules that result in a culture, which when successful drives a high degree of cooperation and productivity. Cooperation and productivity seem an antithesis to the personalization implicit in existentialism. Now, with an ever greater embrace of existentialism, it would seem that the collective mind of the hive, shifts to a narcissism incapable of exercising a common culture of cooperation, productivity, or collective wisdom. “Existentially,” in its common use, unintentionally, gives away a clue to the fiction which follows.
Time for Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and common sense.
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