beyond wishful thinking 33Th e greatest and fundamental mistake of Prometheanism, however,
is its hidden program: to overwhelm, through power and power wor-
ship, through the raising up of the strong self over the weak herd, the
irremediable defects in our existence, death fi rst among them.
Th e cure for insatiability, according to the Promethean, is to direct
desire inward, to ourselves. Only the infi nite self, towering over cir-
cumstance, can quench our desire for the absolute, which the believer
sought mistakenly in the love of a God who was only the alienated pro-
jection of his own self. By such a projection, the believer leaves enslaved
what the Promethean proposes to unchain.
Th e remedy for groundlessness is to ground oneself through succes-
sive acts of creation of a form of life for the design of which no man need
apply to his fellows. From this self- grounding, forms, values, and prac-
tices will result, cleansed of conformity to the social regime. How is this
self- creator to know what to create? He will discover himself through
non- conformity to his society and re sis tance to his time. Having dis-
covered himself, he will become, by that same struggle, himself.
Th e antidote to death, the most important concern of Promethean-
ism, is a surge of creation. Th e objects of creation are the elements of
such an inner- directed and self- grounded form of life. Th e aim is to act
as if we were not the hapless and inconsolable creatures that we seem to
be. It is acceleration and empowerment in the face of an imminent dis-
solution. It is to fi ll existence with activities that make time stop.
Prometheanism fails above all because it lies to us about the human
condition. Like the religions that it despises, it is a lullaby: a feel- good
story, and an eff ort to arouse the will, in its confrontation with circum-
stances that the will is unable to alter.
Th e self- deception has a price. Th e cost is to undermine the very
good of life that it aff ects to prize. It does so by discrediting the context-
bound engagements and attachments on which the quickening and
heightening of life depend. It does so as well by treating truth— the
truth about our situation in the world— as subsidiary to power. Because
the fables to which Prometheanism resorts misrepresent our existence,
they cannot guide us in the enhancement of life.
It is the irreparable fl aws in existence that help give our lives their
shape and potential. It is their terrors that awaken us from the slumber
of conformity and bring us to the encounter with time. In turning away