Smells LIke Self Expression

I've been reading the book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens, and at one point, trying to explain the social forces active in the 60's, he writes "Strip away the decade's thick impasto of sex, drugs, rebellion, politics, music, and art, and what you find is a restless imperative to change, a 'will to change,' if you will, and one that could be as explanatory for the latter half of this century as Nietzsche's 'will to power' was for the first." Change was the zeitgeist. This made me wonder what we might consider the imperative is for us now, ten years into a new millennium. Perhaps we might say that it is the "will to express."
The most vital trends I see in our culture, and perhaps the entire globe's culture, for we are quite intertwined, all seem to involve self expression. Facebook, blogs, podcasts--social media, in toto, is about self expression. It is about sharing your interests, your passions, your opinions and ideas with others. It is a way of trying to rise above the faceless fray, of asserting your individuality, of connecting with others in a meaningful way. One could perhaps say that the "will to connect" better describes our era, but what is connection without understanding? Without mutual recognition? We need meaning, and the meaning of "me" is found in how I express myself.
In my first post I made joke of what I considered the rampant strain of narcissism running through the American psyche. And indeed there are plenty of people who, already believing that they are oh-so precious, subject the rest of us to what surely is proof of this. Reality TV survives on these people and their self-drama. But this is just a slightly pathological version of what even the most humble of us feels (which I made joke of in my second post). We want to be understood. We want to be recognized. We want significance. We want a world that has meaning so that our lives will have meaning.
Maybe, then, that's what this all really comes down to--a need to understand the universe and our place in it. Since Mr. Stevens mentioned Nietzsche in his quote above, let's bring in something else that Friedrich said: "God is dead." What he meant by that was that the time of mythologies, taken on faith, had passed. That we were in a new age (led by the then relatively new thing called science, which would play such a significant part in that 20th century will to power) that demanded evidence. Sadly, it was only empirical evidence that was accepted, and God isn't going to be found with a telescope or a gas spectrograph. So God died and left us alone. Alone with our drive for power and its subsequent world wars and environmental degradation.
But if there is a bright side to all of this, it is that we learn and grow and just maybe this "will to expression" is a reflection of our disillusionment with power. Maybe we are reaching out to each other to rediscover what was lost in our vicious turn away from the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nietzsche never meant that God, or if you prefer, Spirit, had died, only our notion of God as a personified parent figure. And evidence can reveal Spirit, just not empirical evidence--meaning evidence that can be gathered by the five senses or their extension. Just as mind transcends the physical, spirit transcends mind. Mind is the physical plus something more, spirit is mind (including the physical--it is taken up as a component, embraced) plus a new something more. The evidence for spirit, then, needs to be established intersubjectively--between two subjects, like you and me, because it is only through us that this transcendent something (Spirit) can be known. It can't be known merely through the physical, because the physical is only a component of it. All of nature is in Spirit, but not all of Spirit is in nature. Because it is nature plus something more, something transcendent to the physical.
Which is all to say that reality TV may just be a manifestation of our hunger for meaning. In celebrating ourselves, in sharing ourselves with each other, we may be chasing the transcendent. We may all be blogging Spirit into our lives. We may be seing people's evolution from role identities, where the person defines himself by his place in his society, to an ego identity, where the person is first and foremost an individual with his own agency, free to define himself however he chooses. And from there further development beyond the ego, beyond the personal, even. Today's "look at me" culture may be a slight detour on the road toward the infinite. Toward our true identity. All little gods, coming home.