I think so many different cultures have their own fool on the hill example, as symbolic archetypal heritage or as welcomed public caricature, because after all is said and done in life there honestly is no distinction between nihilism and absurdism. They draw the same conclusions, and so their parallels do draw themselves accordingly, because the ennui of human civilization rests in how the only thing in all of creation more predictable than egoism, is love’s labour’s lost in the room it rents by the hour.
For those willing and able to toil their lives into dust, for what do they toil so? To be on the same level as those helped monetarily or spiritually, we are told publicly by our chosen representatives in life and privately by persons whose esteem we dream of claiming ownership over, although when the recipients of good will already possess among their holdings more resource and opportunity than had the do-gooder to give, the sacrifice stands revealed only for entertainment. And to stand for anything but that entertainment casts one as nihilist, or they must be absurd if they do not care to give away the better years of their waking livelihoods to being a replaceable tool, a replaceable toy or a replaceable weapon. Not to resolve their own needs and not to resolve the needs of those who concern them, but to reinforce the codependency of the most helpless. Lovelessness, programming boob tubes to convey how the observant servant concerns themselves with making plastic, with moving plastic around and then with destroying plastic; Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
And understanding no other standards or practices, with no irony does the absence of virtue get replicated individually and personally by all those used and abused for such entertainments, themselves giving of themselves for the sake of their own amusement and rarely for the well-being of others. The very presence of virtue, its opposingly non-lethal force, found only in the sacrificing for those whose continued life desperately hangs upon it, rather than for those with space and time to kill. The most surefire way to help the slaves is to simply not help their self-declared masters, just as the most surefire way to help those masters, is to simply not help the slave caste from bearing their weight. Good deeds without an audience are unheard of.
All of any life is a work. Our thoughts and feelings will not define the work, but the work will define our thoughts and feelings. Words unto themselves cannot create reality and they cannot destroy reality, but they can sustain reality, maintain it to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.