*Where are all the good men dead; in the heart or in the head?

...don’t know or don’t care.
A solid argument can be made for death in Everyman’s head. In some ways we are spoiled. Anything I want to know I can google - why remember anything? There are thousands of opinions out there, why create and (gasp) defend my own position? Why read, think or debate when I can watch pillow fights on my local news? I know there was a time when the internet didn’t exist (I’m old) and I imagine there was a time when people had to find other things to do besides watch the “boob tube” (not that old). Was there some magical age, before the internet, before TV when people delighted in reading and thinking and debating and writing? A more likely explanation is that there was a time before the internet and TV when people found other distractions to spend their time on that involved as little reading and thinking as possible.

On the other side of this coin, is modern Everyman dead in the heart? Hmm. What does it mean to be dead in the heart? Certainly this is a different condition than having a broken heart, as the implication that a heart is broken leads one to believe that the heart is alive enough to be hurt. It seems likely that a broken heart can lead to a dead heart (I’ll suggest that a broken heart can also resurrect a dead heart, but that discussion is for another time). But the reality is that it is something much more dastardly that leads to a dead heart, something much more sinister.

It’s not an easy thing to kill a heart. It doesn’t happen in an instant or a single moment, it takes days, months, years. You can’t take it out in one shot, it takes many blows, one on top of the other, pounding and pounding and pounding. But even then its not the heart that is heart by these blows, its deeper than that. These blows don’t kill the heart, they weaken the spirit, This is where the real trouble begins. See, the heart can’t be killed from without, only from within. A heart dies when someone decides that they’d rather feel nothing at all than feel that pain anymore. So, the spirit and the deceitful mind get together and beg the heart to give up, to throw in the towel. They come to the soul and argue that they don’t need the heart anymore, they can get by on the shadow of pleasure given by the flesh and the mind. So the heart, hurt and dejected, dutifully slinks into the background, lessening the pain, but taking joy and love with it as well. Eventually the spirit and the mind convince the mind that this is how things should be; calm, peaceful, familiar, and even keeled, running like clockwork - like a machine. Seeing them content, the heart is left in the shadows, to collect dust and rust solid, dead.

A steady onslaught of blows, reigning down in the form of greed, pain, sorrow, mocking, rejection, lust, anger, sloth, idolatry and gluttony. What kills a heart? Sin. From outside and from within. Sin studies it, stalks it, seduces it, surrounds it, and suffocates it. Calm, cool and calculated, it works in such a way that the man doesn’t even know what’s coming, he may even welcome it.

But one day, one day the man realizes that he’s become hollow - he has a solid, protective (tin) exterior but nothing inside.

There are plenty of good men out there in this position, not realizing how they became hollow, not knowing where they lost their chests.** Most horrific of all is that so many don’t know that there is a (THE) way back, that their hearts aren’t dead, just sleeping. The head isn’t dead because of TV or the internet, its dead because of motivation. The mind is reinvigorated when passion is re-ignited. The mind needs the heart like the heart craves relationship with its maker.
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*Shakespeare by way of Grosse Pointe Blank.
** "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful." -C.S. Lewis