Not much has changed - an essay on the course of history

 

Things change so radically and yet they remain totally the same. All of us are doing our best. Just humans doing our best. However it's worth remembering that the priestly class of the Middle Ages, along with its subjects, thought they were oh so much more intelligent than those Pagan simpletons that came before. It's worth remembering the Pagans themselves would have laughed at those that came before them, too. And now of course the oligarchs that run our world, along with their own subjects, laugh at all such apparently silly and backwards people of yesterday.

Unfortunately then, each generation including our own is doomed to repeat the same mistakes as have always been made because, understandably so, they seem to find it difficult to escape their pride and identify their own bullshit. Each new empire, instead, heralds in the new dawn. Each new age with its new ideas. But the contemptible hubris exposes the weak underbelly.

Our society is simply no different to those that came before. No worse perhaps, but certainly no better. Docility continues to offload responsibility to centralised power structures whose sole claim to apparently justifiable power is that they, eg., have a monopoly on access to 'the science' (whatever the hell that means). This all follows the same all-too-human pattern as when the priestly class of the Middle Ages had a monopoly on access to God (again, whatever the hell that means).

Of course, nothing and nobody has a monopoly on access to truth. Myself included. It seems a righteous system - if one existed - might recognise the naturally fallen state of humanity, each person being capable of doing wrong. It might recognise that power is thus necessarily dispersed over the widest possible surface area. It might recognise that centralising power - in the way we do and the way we have - never provides a monopoly on access to truth but only amplifies evil. Contemporarily, we see this with the tyranny of injection mandates and their widespread moral and social costs, but really this is just one example. Another is reflected in the Marxist push within the culture wars; another in the destructive propaganda we are force fed and beholden to when it comes to the conflict in the Ukraine.

We gotta enjoy the ride when and where we can though. It's even kinda funny sometimes. At least when you can look at it all objectively, even if only for moments at a time.

I mean like, you know, whatever.