"The Key To Happiness"
Expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed.
by Radio Far Side
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!”
- "Hamlet," Act I, Scene 2, Shakespeare
"As we widen our scope and look at things like seven members of the AfD in a single state in Germany have all died within weeks of each other, Trump is blowing speed boats out of the (international) water with no apparent evidence, Israel is blatantly committing genocide in Gaza and West Bank and no one will stop them (remember the Great Appeasement and the Holocaust?), and that’s just the top level fun.
The global economic system is crumbling, in part by design but also because the laws of physics don’t allow you to defy gravity without a balancing force in the equation. The insiders are clearly emptying the coffers into their pockets before the masses suddenly catch on to the game. The world, which is typically 50 shades of gray, is clearly deconstructing into hard-edged black-and-white camps. And the thing is, there’s no good guys.
One of my favorite TV series of all time is "I, Claudius," based on the novels by Robert Graves. In the course of 13 brilliantly written and performed hours, we witness generations of Roman leadership collapse into its own intrigue and filth. Another example is Shakespeare’s masterful Macbeth. Everyone is corrupt; no one is sympathetic, and the foundations of empire are disintegrated as we watch.
There is literally no social or public institution that can be trusted. Governments exist only to denude their populations of their wealth and property. Religious institutions have become predatory, preying on the weak and frightened. Corporations create greed and scarcity to generate obscene profits. Health care institutions create illness to generate revenues. Financial institutions serve the rich at the expense of everyone else, by controlling access to wealth.
Even entertainment has been turned into mind-bending propaganda machines, generating conformity over celebrating humanity. The arts have been perverted into hideous celebrations of degradation and filth. Life itself is a commodity, exploited and hoarded for the benefit of a few. There is precious little left that can be trusted and depended on. Our world is founded on contradiction, where debt is wealth, slavery is freedom, deception is reality, and perfidy is truth. The president of peace now has a Department of War.
There is only one way forward, as it always has been. Civilization must collapse in order to be renewed. As Chauncy the gardener noted in "Being There," the world is like a garden that has its seasons. There can be no explosion of life in spring, without the wholesale death of winter. History is full of examples: Sumer, Babylon, Rome, the Mongols Perhaps the only difference is scale, but that doesn’t change the inevitable cycle of death and renewal.
Perhaps those of us trying to drive time backward, to restore dimly remembered days of vino et veritas, we should instead do everything possible to hurry along the collapse. Attempting to hold back the inevitable and postpone reality is a futile endeavor. Just because we refuse to harvest or collect firewood doesn’t mean fall and winter will halt in their tracks, or even reverse into eternal spring and winter.
We cannot return to real wealth until the vast systemic debt has been destroyed. Our institutions cannot be repaired and reformed because society itself is corrupted. Replacing old rotted timbers with new rotted timbers is not an improvement. Rather creating a bonfire with the old will provide essential minerals to spur the growth of the new.
One of my favorite if not most bizarre of Edgar Allan Poe’s works is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. In it, a man dying of tuberculosis is hypnotized at the moment of death, where he remains in a middle state - not dead, not alive. After a year of begging to be released, he is finally “awakened,” whereupon the body begins to rot and putrefy before the witnesses’ horrified eyes.
This is essentially what has happened with our social, religious and financial institutions—they are clearly dead, but we refuse to let them die. It’s time to release their soulless husks so that we can all move on. The longer they linger, the more of our lives and treasure they will consume, until there is nothing left but corpses."
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