On the Efficacy of this Blog

I fit the description of Flannery O' Connor's "displaced person" with one qualification, I'm Austrian. My family moved to America in the summer of 1998. This fact has afforded me, as is the case with most immigrants, a peculiar vantage point into American culture. To be sure, I'm not exempt from the many human social conventions that commonly pull the wool over our eyes, but I move amidst a people with whom I share very little in the way of values. True, if pressed we will all answer to the same needs: love, acceptance, personal freedom etc. But my private life, my inner world, those thoughts and compulsions that shape my endeavors most deeply, I guard as though they had immeasurable value. This, my intangible property—a pastiche of ideas, values, and tastes that are, on a graded scale of utility, useless—still has the quality of being irrevocably mine, and I like that.
But here people seem to flaunt whatever runs through their fevered psyches as though it were some strange currency. We all trade confessions and thus validate our existence. Whatever earns the most pronounced reaction is of highest value. If you've got a skeleton in your closet, put a hat on it and hurl it at an audience. It seems strange that this kind of narcissism masquerades as honesty. As if proclaiming to the world through a loudspeaker that you have syphilis, enjoy child pornography, and like to "rip the legs off of spiders" somehow elevates you to a seat of moral grandeur.
My initial posts will concern what I believe to be at the root of this phenomenon. These are the thoughts of a layman and I do not claim the credence of an expert. Little of what you see here will be original and I will try as best I can to render credit where credit is due, though it is of little interest to me whether my thoughts overlap those of greater men. Suffice it to say, the thinkers that have exercised the greatest influence on me are, in order of ascending social deviancy: Soren Kierkegaard, Hans Urs von Balthasar,Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Flannery O' Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Fiedler.
More to follow...