Yukio Mishima Interview

So lately, I've only been able to post videos. Life has just been a little too hectic to be able to write out full blogs. I have however made about 4 or 5 drafts that I'd like to finish up at some point.

But anyways regarding this above video, I posted it because it reflects a lot of my sentiments I brought up in a previous post. I don't agree with everything the Mishima says. For one, I disagree with his nationalistic sentiments.

But I fully endorse the idea of living for "principles" and "great causes." I do agree that any life lived for itself is absurd. I, in honesty, do not know how such a person can keep from suicide. Moreover, as a Christian who wants to defend the sanctity of life, I also do not think that I can not give any honest reason why a person should entitle themselves to life if their only aim is to search for more distraction. People who are eternally roaming about for entertainment, are in my view, no different than a worm crawling through the slime gorging itself to stupidity with filth.

But his worldview seems so nihilistic. I do not think that "great causes" should be pursued because the alternative is death-by-boredom. In such a case, the great cause becomes nothing more than lofty entertainment. A great cause is only great because it demands pursuit. I hope in my life to do something to fight sex trafficking. It's villiany is such that I would gladly die bleeding slowly from a stab wound to the stomach or a bullet through the lung if I could contribute to its end. It creates such a visceral reaction, such anger and rage, that would degrade humans to less than animals, that I believe the pursuit of its end is a great cause.

There are other great causes in the world. But I believe Mishima got it wrong.

A nation, I do not believe, is a great cause. It is only an expansion of self-centeredness. Here, it is only that the self expands to a larger community. Climbing a vast mountain is no great cause to me (here referencing one of my own personal hero-demons, Mark Twight) because in the end it is simply a fancier distraction.

Justice is no distraction. God is no distraction. I am the distraction in my own life. He is my life. God's nature is beyond any comparison to nations or states. Too often Christians and non-Christians alike treat my devotion to God as a dressed-up way of saying I am devoted to this group of people who verbally agree to certain principles, or to a building, or to a chain-of-history. It is not.

It is devotion to the only absolute being. Apart from that Absolute Being, all else could face annihilation and it would be still only a flicker at the edge of the horizon. It is only through the mediation, the interstitial presence, of this Absolute Being do things like church and family and individuals begin to matter. I think this is only right. First, they must be left. Then they must be revisited. And only then may the words 'love' and 'affection' and 'sacrificial' have any sense and meaning.

But yes, at its heart, I agree with Mishima. And I say with absolute conviction and no qualification whatsoever, that if my life ever becomes preoccupied with entertainment, accumulation and gross excess, then be a friend and a brother or sister and stop my heart from beating, my brain from producing any currents. You will be doing me a mercy for if I am ever reduced to such a person, the only 'me' that is worth a place among the living will have already died.