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Why is the world such a desolate place?
Because people are lonely.
Why are people lonely?
Because there is, at the deepest core of human nature, an incommensurability (quoth Kierkegaard) with the world. That is, an insatiable thirst screaming from our souls—and it is going unquenched. Why do we hide—behind friends, beneath alcohol, within dogma? Because we do not know who we are. We haven’t met ourselves. The irony: that knowledge which needs no source but ourselves—that is, self-knowledge—that is the one knowledge we have not the tiniest tickle of.
Hence the black-hole of modern science—gorging itself on nasty theories of the corporeal world, ever eating, never full—and why? Alas, not because the scientist has a deep-welling passion for the art (yes, the art) of empirical observation, but because he is escaping himself, that anonymous naked screamer on the wet streets of his soul’s cold midnight. Behold, the holy oblivion of objectivism: to transform all individual (perhaps irrational) aspects of one's self into a strangling blankness of methodical suicide. The scientist systematizes to escape. Indeed, escaping—like the professional lounger who dreams in cubes and technicolor, like the drug-addict who sells all (yea, even himself) for that numbed oblivion, like the aging woman I saw last week, saying, as she sat world-weary on the couch, “Oh, you know I don’t think after 4:30.” All living is a tumbling flight from the heights of existence, an escape from the pain of an inner glance. For what would one see there, beneath the mask constituting every aspect of one’s countenance? Just what we all fear: facelessness.