Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.
Which reminds me of something I wrote about Carthaginian baby sacrifice:
The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?
Sometimes, as I have said, I get the sense that humans are capable of only a certain amount of happiness. When things seem on the verge of getting too good, some of us feel compelled to insist that they are actually terrible and then blow the whole thing up.
I think we are.
Thank you, John. I needed the images and the musings today. I shall eschew news until tomorrow or the next day....
ReplyDeleteI mean, have you ever wondered why people won't believe in the moon landings despite millions of pages of evidence? I think their imaginations just can't encompass something so amazing.
ReplyDeleteYou've actually got it completely backwards.
These are people with powerful enough imaginations to imagine all sorts of wild things - and that's their problem. They cling to conspiracies because reality is too mundane for them, and they desperately want to believe in a world that is more exciting and satisfying, on an almost mythical level.
They don't want to believe in the moon landing not because it's too hard to imagine, but rather it's not hard enough for them to imagine. They prefer a grander narrative - one in which there's a secret cabal that rules from the shadows, powerful enough to not only control American media, but global media, and thus they can fool the entire world into believing a clever fabrication, and quash any dissent with their terrible might.
They don't want to live in a world where the moon is a mere rock in space that we are able to reach with rockets and math. They want to live in a world where the moon is not what it seems, and is hiding some huge and awful secret that the wicked rulers of the world don't want us to know about, and thus they faked the moon landings to try to convince us that the otherworldly glowing orb in the sky is just a mere boring hunk of rock with nothing on it, rather than some vital clue to understanding The Truth.
(See also the Flat Earthers, and their insistence that the secret global shadow government is trying to hide the existence of whatever is beyond the supposed "Antarctic Wall".)
And the key is, these people actually pride themselves on their ability to imagine such things. They view other people as lesser beings who are unwilling or unable to handle the deep dark truth, and so on a certain level willingly "allow" the secret shadow cabal to rule over them. The conspiracy nuts imagine themselves to be exceptional individuals, the few brave heroes with the strength of spirit and the mental fortitude to seek out the secrets of the universe that others are too weak or cowardly to accept or understand.
And that's the psychological root of their condition. They desperately want to be special. They desperately want to be the oppressed few champions of truth and justice, victimized by sinister hidden forces. They desperately want to live in a world where they're The Good Guys, as demonstrated by their ability to envision and imagine grander things than this paltry "reality" we are taught to accept.
They're the sort of people who in ages past would have stubbornly insisted on geocentrism, feeling in their very bones that for the earth NOT to be the center of the universe would be unthinkable - for surely humanity MUST be the axis upon which all of creation spins! To accept that we revolve around the sun, rather than all of the cosmos revolving around us, would be to accept that we are not intrinsically special! And we MUST be special! We MUST be here for a reason! It can't POSSIBLY all just be a cosmic accident! They won't accept that! They can't accept that! For them, way lies madness and despair!