It seems to me that the world is on a general decline overall. Capitalism, thanks lastly to the rapid onset of useless AI and private equity, has driven the entire planet to the brink of disaster. It was always inevitable under such an unsustainable economic system but these choices the bougeroisie have made of late have accelerated its decay.
Beyond that though, there seems to be a general decay of the collective human mind. I’m not sure if it was always there and I never noticed it in my youth or if it was brought about by some global event (possibly the pandemic) but it’s like humanity has just given up its capacity for imagination and the willingness to engage and challenge old ideas.
There’s something deeply wrong with this hibernating human animal, but before it felt like it was at least trying to fix itself. Like it was always actually wrestling with the problem and progress, however slowly, was being made. Now it just feels like we’ve given up and let the decay and rot take over.
The stupidest idiots are in charge and nobody is doing anything about it to any substantial capacity. The worst of humanity’s ideas have been given free reign to fester and germinate unchecked, and for awhile it felt like there were people activity trying to tackle the problem but now nobody bothers anymore. It’s like fixing things isn’t fashionable anymore. Trying is seen as cringe or something. I don’t get it.
The alarm bells should have been blasting for a long time now but the internet has really made the core of the issue so much more obvious. After all, before access to information became so readily available it was easy to delude oneself into thinking that the problem was one of education and access to information. That if the barriers were removed humanity would grow and learn on its own and change course for the better. If anything the exact opposite has happened. The barriers largely have been removed, as much as they can be under this horrendous economic system, and what kind of content has spread like wildfire? Mostly the most insane and idiotic of brainrot; conspiracy theories nobody should have considered seriously flourished and spread like wildfire. Meanwhile the actual demonstrable conspiracies with a paper trail that actually harm us collectively are either disbelieved out of ignorance and an unwillingness to investigate, or (even more disturbingly) with indifference. The collective seems to all be aware just how bad we’re all being screwed for the worst reasons and yet equally disinterested in it; at least not enough to actually do anything significantly substantial about it.
I don’t know what happened exactly. In fact, it could be that nothing actually has happened and humanity has always largely been like this and only my understanding of the scale of time has been distorted by the way we chart, read and and teach our own history. The archaic BC/AD system (or its useless CE/BCE patch) sure doesn’t help things. Humanity isn’t very good at thinking of history backwards except from the exact present moment so putting the overwhelming majority of written human history in the negative was always going to cause problems. Why after the demonstrably superior H.E. system was proposed it wasn’t immediately embraced and adopted widely I will never understand. Then again I live in the country that still insists on using the imperial system of weights and measures for the common everyday things despite the rest of the world having long since switched to metric so you’d think I’d be used to people finding comfort in making things harder on themselves out of habit.
Honestly though, I must say the clinging to bad ideas out of habit is about that only thing I can wrap my head around as to why the elephant in the room hasn’t been long ago been voluntarily shut down and buried; Abrahamic religion. We’ve known for a good while now that the whole thing is a farce. It’s a house of cards built on a lie that’s hidden in plane sight. As soon as the Mesopotamian and Ugaritic texts were translated to the degree that we knew enough to definitely put to bed the notion that monotheism was ever anything other than something developed post-hoc and entirely for political reasons that should have been the end of it. The Vatican should have come out publicly and gave an apology for deceiving so many people for so long, and either let the whole business go, or transitioned towards an adaptation into something in line with the true polytheistic historical origins of their religion. Of course never in human history has anything so hideously destructive ever ended so cleanly. Humanity’s worst vice has always been never admitting when they’re wrong, so why would they start now?
What baffles me most enough is how the farce has gone on so long. It’s one thing for the people making out on the whole deal to want to keep the racket going as long as they can, but why in the world so many other people still play into it is what I don’t get. For that matter why is it that it’s not more well known when it’s not exactly hidden. It’s right there in the history books if you care to look. It’s spelled out in plain English right at the top of the Wikipedia page on El at the time of this writing. Yet somehow I had a casual conversation where I mentioned it today with someone I met in a parking lot who acted like I’d just told her a secret hidden in the depths of the secret passageways of some forgotten pyramid. It doesn’t make any sense to me why people don’t know this basic knowledge about something they base so much of their lives around. It’s absurd, and yet its common and mundane. Despite everything, Abrahamic religion maintains the top position in religion charts globally in every survey. I don’t get it. There’s something deeply wrong with the human animal. We’re ill with a disease which seems to have no easily developed cure.
Why is humanity like this? Why aren’t people more curious and cautious? Why don’t more people seem to care? I don’t have answers for any of this or some clever point to make, I’m mostly just putting into words thoughts I’ve had rooting around in my brain for far too long.
There isn’t a single self respecting historian or lover of human history that doesn’t absolutely hate the Christians for the incalculable amount of priceless artifacts, literature and knowledge that they destroyed in the name of their idiotic religion. From the burning of the library at Alexandria, to the destruction of the overwhelming majority of Aztec writing, to the countless total genocides, Christianity has been the single most destructive force on the face of the planet Earth since the extinction event that wiped out life after the Cambrian explosion. So many pieces of art, literature, culture, and most importantly human lives were obliterated in the name of a character who’s name they can’t even get right. What a waste. It would be a sad and dark chapter with a collective lesson learned we could all move on from like so many others in the dishonestly tidy way we like to teach our history if not for the fact that it’s still ongoing. They’re still doing it, still getting away with it, and in many ways still winning despite being the clear villains. I mean who but the most black hearted evil individuals could look at the complete and utter destruction of all but a tiny handful of manuscripts of literature of one of humanity’s oldest and longest surviving civilizations and not cast the destructive party as the villain of the story, and yet most people don’t even give it a second thought. Why? I mean it’s a small miracle we have any surviving Aztec material to puzzle at at all much less that we can read any of it, and yet it’s barely even touched on in our history books. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. The Vatican owes the indigenous people of mesoamerica a debt they will never ever be able to repay in a million years for what they did to them, but we all know they would never even admit to owing it in the first place despite the obvious injustice.
I’ve known since I was quite young that humanity was effectively a hibernating somnambulist of a species with a dramatic case of collective amnesia, but to my young mind it seemed like a solvable problem. People just needed some magical wake up spell and then we’d be blasted off into the Star Trek future or some such nonsense. Now I fear we’re just circling the drain, and perhaps we always were however slowly, and always will be until the last human finally draws their last breath.
At this point I have a hard time imagining humanity will ever move forward since for the most part nobody seems to even care to try anymore. I mean to really make a damn bit of difference and have any hope of saving this planet from the destructive path the bougeroisie have put it on we’d have to organize and mobilize on a massive scale behind a irreproachable cause and immortal banner, but nobody seems to even want to try. We’d rather watch our precious world slowly be utterly consumed by greed, stupidity and climate change before we’d spend an ounce of effort trying to do anything about it at any scale that mattered. If you wanna know why, ask your local village idiot why they still believe in the Bible and go to church after it was all revealed to be a farce, assuming they’d even bother giving you a straight answer instead of just deciding to resort to pretending to be offended, trying to gaslight you about it, or decking you in the face like the mouth breathing troglodytes they mostly are.
I’m not sure how to close this rambling stream of consciousness so I guess I’ll fall back on the tried and true wonderfully hopeful ending given to almost every chapter of the Myst series;
Perhaps the ending has not yet been written…