humiliate ourselves before false gods

It’s sometimes easy for me to grow depressed about the world we have brought our children into. There are so many different calls for attention, so many things that people place in the center of their lives, things that at their heart are not only meaningless but actually harmful yet somehow seen as the ultimate good. It all falls under the banner of materialism and instant gratification, and the technology of today only heightens it. Indeed, the technology is often part and parcel of the whole game: smart phones to take pictures of unhealthy food to share with friends who have just posted pictures of the new car they bought that they really can’t afford; tablet computers that allow people to feed their obsession with sex, shopping, or whatever their fetish anywhere and everywhere; televisions large enough to cover most of a wall so we can see in painful clarity the details of our visual obsessions. Add to it the realization that children growing up today face new peer pressure to fit in by owning all these gadgets, using all these gadgets obsessively, virtually praying to these gadgets — and anyone who doesn’t fit in will faces a barrage of bullying, taunting, and rejection.

It’s not a world I would personally like to have to grow up in.

Weil speaks of these obsessions in terms of false gods:

We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility is us. Only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.

The fact that humiliate and humility have the same root is ironic today, considering how so many people humiliate themselves, all the while thinking they’re elevating themselves.