MEON Mission Statement
MEON is a new socio-environmental journal for the youth of Ireland. We seek to illuminate and re-envision the future of nature, man, and tech. We aspire to end the glorification of Capital, and to graft a new Gaelic culture devoted to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
It is our belief that sooner or later Capitalism will end. The economic model of endless growth in a finite world is to be understood as a contradiction in terms. If left unchallenged, this mode of monetary greed will utterly degrade the natural world, and the humanity within it. The expression of this degradation will be one of ongoing political, societal, and ecological collapse.
Avoiding and overcoming this fate necessitates the action of a confident imagination, and the creation of a new political consciousness. The questions which need answering in turn are then, how will Capitalism fall, and what shall it be replaced with?
In this endeavour, we seek to build an integral appreciation of what Ireland is. An understanding of her people, land, and culture; of her place within Europe, the West, and the world. It will be an attempt at generating a specific ethos. An ethos aware of its origin and of its destiny. One that is cognisant of the environment which it inherits and imparts. We aspire to act with an ascendant conscience. A conscience which ascends through individuality, family, community, nationality, race, species, and being.
The enemy of this outlook is the base and unthinking desire for Capital; the drive downward to the purely material. In its absolute devotion to materiality, Capitalism constitutes a type of religion. This religion is a hydra of historical and heretical proportions. The heads of this hydra may be variously named as Liberalism, Individualism, Rationalism, Materialism, Scientism, Globalism, and Progressivism.
These ideologies are the numerous rationales which Capitalism uses in order to extend itself throughout the world. They are its shapeshifting faces and masks. They exist in order to serve its further development. Under the false ethic of Capitalism, science is truth, greed is good, and the consumer is king. This ethic seeks to disenchant the world, to cynically plunge it down into a mere limbo of economic exchange. In this sense, Capitalism is waging an ideological war, that of quantity versus quality, price above value, reason over faith.
To the extent to which Capitalism is winning this war, the communal feeling is that we have entered into a historical dead end; a total cessation of revolutionary developments. The advent of atomic weapons and advanced technological warfare portends an apocalyptic potential. Conventional conflict between military superpowers is now no longer conscionable. All violent dissent against the Capitalist paradigm must be expertly managed, and sublimated back into the self-same system.
It is a system which currently holds all the nations of the world within its realm. Held together in a collective maelstrom of telecommunication. The multiplicity of once distinct cultural contexts is now dwindling. Disparate cultures are now converging and conforming to a calculus of the single market. The result has been an ungodly centralisation of wealth and influence into the hands of a faceless, nameless, global few.
The West, as a civilisation, is entering its winter. It continues to degenerate physically, morally, and artistically. Its belief in and love of God has disappeared. Its world cities have become mere conduits for a universal commercial culture. The future of its youth is smothered by ever-increasing debt. Its elderly live in perpetual fear of death. Its populace becomes creatures of comfort, and less like human beings. We are in danger of denaturing into docile drones, content to spend our mortality between two mere modes of labour and consumption. All exaltation is lost therein, languishing under a constant flux of stimulation and propaganda.
The fall of civilisation and the rise of a global matrix presents a kind of unreality. An unreality where the heritage of ideas concerning ecology, culture, arts, religion, morality, nobility, and divinity have become too tedious for the comprehension and integration by the average individual. The public’s attention is instead increasingly directed into a televised abyss. The result is that we live in mass alienation from any meaningful sense of society. We feel a concurrent loss in our collective ability to actualise real-world change.
In surmounting this chaos there is need to retreat to higher ground. To ascend from societal neurosis and cultural miasma, and to build a fortress of the mind. To create a sanctuary for the spirit within the soul. One which in time would allow it to resurrect and renew the earth with its essence and its life force. Its source is supra-rational, its aesthetic is vital, and its expression is of who we really are.
Confessedly, it is a sentiment which is minute and yet to develop, but one which we seek to grow and propagate. The age-old wellsprings on which we will draw are mythical and mystical, classical and metaphysical. The areas of our exploration will range from permaculture to high culture, deep ecology to monetary policy. The new world must begin to reckon with the old; the Spirit of the Age calls for it.
Léigh ár gceann ráiteas as Gaeilge anseo.