What better overview, critique of the fragmentation, of the lassitude of America than Zhuangzi’s commentary upon ancient iron-age China, and a near identical insight from Friedrich Nietzsche?

Disorder prevails in the world
–the sages and worthy men no longer
bring forth light.
The tao and its virtue are no longer
regarded as universal.
People in different places catch
one glimpse of it and believe
that they have glimpsed of it
in its entirety.

This might be compared to a scholar
who lives in one corner and breaks into pieces
the beauty of heaven and earth,…

…Consequently the tao,
which guides the inner being of the sage
and guides the actions of the ruler,
become obscure and dark.

Every man followed his own will
and advocated his own learning.

It is a pity.

Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchmann and Yang Guorong, Book 33 Under the Heaven

“For this alone is fitting to the philosopher.
We have no right to isolated truths of any kind;
we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths.
Rather do our ideas, our values, and yeas and nays, our ifs and buts,
grow out of us with the necessity
of a tree that bears fruit
–related and each with an affinity to each,
and evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.
Whether you like them, these fruits of ours?
But what is that to trees!

What is that to the philosophers?”

On The Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, Vantage Books, 1969, p. 16