Modernity, with all the good it came with, brought something else upon us: cynicism and materialism. Modern man is nowadays so enclosed in his own filth and ego that he forgets that, by definition and evolution, we are a social species, and because of it, we're meant to live in community. Living in community is not a passive act; it's an active one. Some people can lead, and others can follow, but they all share the same duty: to serve.

 

This is not a new crisis, mind you, but a culmination of a century-long fracture. The philosophical and ethical foundations of the West were blasted away in the trenches of the First World War and buried under the rubble of the Second. In the wake of this civilizational devastation, modern man found himself hollowed out by despair, stripped of the traditional certainties that once anchored his existence.

 

Some reacted to the horrors of the war by turning to the utopian illusion of twentieth-century state communism. By wearing the mask of the collective, claiming to be "for the people," it managed to gain hold not only politically but spiritually. Communism, by being built on a foundation of materialism and atheism, stripped away the transcendent spark of the human soul, reducing man to an economic unity, a cog in a vast historical machine. This Animal Economicus, as the communists called it, or Animal Racionalisticus, as the liberals called it, was the same thing; a man independent from God, and severing man from God reduced human lives to disposable raw material for the state.

 

Living under, or seeing from afar, the catastrophic failure of these regimes serves as a historical warning that community cannot be engineered by any means through state force or materialist dialectics. It can only be built on love, but not any type of love, but what St. Augustine of Hippo called the Ordo Amoris (the right ordering of love). St. Augustine understood that a healthy human society requires Caritas: a sacrificial, divinely inspired love for one's neighbor. Totalitarianism and authoritarianism have always demanded a fundamentally disordered love, forcing the citizen to worship the political system above God and the party above the family. When our loves are misordered, when we put the ego, the state, or material wealth above the transcendent, tyranny and isolation are the inevitable results. Communism tried to build brotherhood without a father, and in doing so, it became an engine for destruction and hate.

 

When the Iron courtain fell many intellectuals rushed to publish papers on how we were living in a post-ideological world, how capitalism won and how we're moving forward to a new era, and although positive elements were coming out of that deal, modern man is still surrounded by the echoes of that same chaos, the lack of purpose, the loneliness epidemic, and an ambient sense of gloom and doom makes easy to feel helpless and miserable. But no man has the right to surrender to that despair without at least attempting to serve his fellow man.

 

Ultimately, serving one's people is one of the highest duties a man can perform. It is a singular act of devotion executed simultaneously for his God, for his nation, and, in a profound paradox, for himself. In the absolute surrender of the ego to the service of others, the cycle of modern cynicism is broken. Through active service, you find a love that validates your own existence, a deep affection for the neighbor you shield, and ultimately, the one thing modernity promises but can never deliver: a true, unshakeable sense of purpose.