Where We Are Headed (As If You Didn’t Know)
The likelihood that the current pandemic was manufactured in a laboratory, by researchers working under totalitarian rulers but funded by tax dollars from the supposed vanguard of the free world, is a neat little reminder of what should be glaringly obvious to every thinking person in the modern world at all times: We are going to annihilate ourselves with progress. This is not a momentary fear, or the speculation of a bad day. It is, at this point, a self-evident truth, the inescapable trajectory of the human race for at least two hundred years, and readily apparent for at least a hundred.
There is nothing modern man can do that he will not do. He can annihilate himself. Therefore, he will do so. He can resist no suicidal temptation that masquerades as an exciting new chance to test his powers. He cannot stay sober long enough to entertain a second thought about anything.
Our annihilation will most likely come at the hands of double-talking administrative climbers, government experts, career lobbyists, corporate profiteers, careless lab technicians, experimenters who never met an idle curiosity they could resist, and populations too easily mollified by the multifarious pleasures of technological oblivion and nihilistic “self-expression” to notice the extent to which they are already dead. There will be explosions too, of course, thanks to the infinitely myopic opportunism of tyrants and vainglorious demagogues; but these outbursts will likely be more of an afterthought, an extinct species’ pathetic attempt to save face by pretending its demise was about something, or for something. In truth, it will be about nothing, and for nothing. Nothingness was modernity’s calling card, and it will be modernity’s epitaph.
But if you see, in any of the above, a rationalization for entrenching yourself further in this or that preferred style of tribal drumming and chanting (i.e., making noise with an unthinking crowd in order to escape the responsibility of listening and thinking as a free soul, alone), then you have already accepted mankind’s collective fate into your heart. In other words, you have voluntarily reduced yourself to just another atom of the critical mass hurtling toward the void.
Stand apart from the drumming and chanting. Refuse to join a tribe, even if this makes you the hated enemy of all tribes. What can they do to you that they have not already chosen to do to themselves? At least you will have the dignity of not sharing their collective fate by choice. Reject the void, and in that rejection cease to be just another atom.
