The fruits of a brief session of private perusal earlier this afternoon, does this not sum up everything about the paradoxical nature of human endeavour and the desperate situation we are all currently in?
As I wrote in my recent post All Hail Progress, we believe that we are so high-tech, that we are living in times so much more advanced than before, forging a future more progressive than we can at this point imagine, that we forget that throughout human history, the human being, as a consequence of believing its own hype for too long, has routinely lulled itself into such a false sense of security that upon waking one morning, quite unprepared, it finds the metaphorical fan of life well and truly covered with some of the foulest faecal abominations in history.
Wars, famines, terrorist attacks and financial meltdowns – not to mention the electing of one of the most odious little brats ever to run for the presidency – can all be counted amongst history’s filthiest wake-up calls and a poke in the ribs of humanity to remind it that history doesn’t necessarily proceed uniformly. We are not living moments progressively towards an historical dénouement in which all the world’s problems and contradictions can be brought under the control of our knowledge and gadgets. Each successive present does not improve consistently upon the last. Rather, as the world’s current crises show, shit, to put it simply, has the rather untimely habit of happening.
The human being, ever the blustering optimist, will never let the lessons of the past stand in the way of their present payoff. Since after all, this was supposed to be the future. Enjoy it while you can; ask questions later.
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Random Vandal: Political Graffiti
