General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Chris Hedges - We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed (warning - may scare some) [View all]ymetca
(1,182 posts)Hedges' article is thought-provoking, and there is probably a lot of "truthiness" to it. Yet I can't help thinking in terms of the "adolescence of humanity". That this is a stage in our species' planetary dominance wherein we have to come to terms with our decrepit ideologies of hierarchical social control and dominance and submission games.
We can see the lunacy of the Egyptian pyramids, but we cannot see the idiocy of our own skyscrapers. Maybe that's why there is so much "post-apocalyptic" zombie-fication in films these days. We know our old empires are all crumbling, but we as yet have nothing coherent arising from their ruins. No Star Trek future seems just over the horizon. We're just all lost down here at the bottom of a gravity well, stuck in Cthulhu's underworld with no way out. Jungian psychology-wise, that is. Nothing is literal, of course, except my own personal, inevitable demise. It is hard enough for an individual to come to terms with that one, let alone a society built on "I got mine and that is all that matters."
We're living, perhaps, in the fabled Kali-yuga. The lowest ebb of the arc of divine consciousness into matter. Or perhaps we are living in the New Aeon of Horus, as Aleister Crowley once fantasized. Or, as Timothy Leary suggested in his opus The Game of Life, a transition phase between our terrestrial and post-terrestrial existence as a species.
I like to think these things, since I have no way of knowing how it will all turn out. Everyone goes to paradise. Everyone is forgiven in the end. And life ultimately makes certain that nothing is truly lost. I'll try to hold on to these thoughts. I'll try, but I doubt I will always succeed.