The half baked drivel that pours from my mind.
When the world ends, and by the world I mean our society, and gives way to one of a million utopias, I like to think it will be the darker emotions that go last. It won't be love, happiness and satisfaction which hold out against the progressivism of society from brutal emotional content to rational intellectualism. No, those will be the first ones to go. Instead it will be the more savage human emotions which have withstood the test of time. Those that have fought against what is "proper" and "right" for years will have built themselves tough outer shells. They will weather the storm as the more pleasant emotions are swept away in the tide.
I am convinced Love will go first. And why not? It is merely a fledgling among the emotions, invented by Jane Austin only two hundred two years ago. And it has already begun to remove itself from society. Divorce rates on the rise (fifty percent in America), younger and more rash people getting together and experiencing it far too early to understand what it is, even the understanding and dissection of the human brain by MRI's and CatScans. It won't be long before we can quantify it, bottle it up, and sell it with a shiny logo. Bye your love potions, only a dollar ninety five at Osco. Of course they'll be intended for personal use but it is obvious what they'll really be used for.
Next will be happiness. Unlike love which shrivels up and dies, happiness will go out with a bang. With work getting easier and free time getting longer, people will devote more and more of the latter to happiness. There in lies the problem. You can have too much of a good thing, and happiness is something that is easy to over do. Too much one way, or too much another and it becomes repetitive, boring. Oh sure it will stick around for a while as there are a plethora of things to entertain ourselves with, but once the amount of time we spend trying to entertain overcomes the amount of resources left, only boredom will be left.
At some point righteousness will follow. I do not mean the sort of righteousness that you find in a southern baptist or papal bull, but rather the kind you get where people defend right from wrong. Its own death can already be seen in the jail houses of America. No it won't be intolerance or some bizarre system which brings it down, but rather moral relativism. Seeing both sides of the equation. When the criminals become just as much victims as those they hurt. It starts with rehabilitation. We stopped killing our criminals so we try to reeducated them, bring them back into the fold. Instead of the rapist we blame the incestuous father. Instead of the murderer we blame the neglectent mother. And when black and white finally fade from our site, the grey that surrounds us will be absolute. Like a picture that has been blurred too much.
And what will be left?
Wrath, Lust, Greed, Pride, and the sort. People will probably think its the end of the world. And it will be, but not because these emotions are dominating our lives. No, it will be because they will be our last bastions of hope against the coming utopian ideals. The last rallying point for the malcontents and nonconformists. When society is the pressure point, angst becomes a form of rebellion. Those who fight will be the teenagers to societies parental advice.
People like to criticize these emotions, but I think of them as our last chance at salvation, before the eternal hell of the utopian idealists. To me, every utopia is a dystopia, and every emotion precious.
taken from: The Colorful Imagery of the Apocalypse, by Jim Tzenes
When the world ends, and by the world I mean our society, and gives way to one of a million utopias, I like to think it will be the darker emotions that go last. It won't be love, happiness and satisfaction which hold out against the progressivism of society from brutal emotional content to rational intellectualism. No, those will be the first ones to go. Instead it will be the more savage human emotions which have withstood the test of time. Those that have fought against what is "proper" and "right" for years will have built themselves tough outer shells. They will weather the storm as the more pleasant emotions are swept away in the tide.
I am convinced Love will go first. And why not? It is merely a fledgling among the emotions, invented by Jane Austin only two hundred two years ago. And it has already begun to remove itself from society. Divorce rates on the rise (fifty percent in America), younger and more rash people getting together and experiencing it far too early to understand what it is, even the understanding and dissection of the human brain by MRI's and CatScans. It won't be long before we can quantify it, bottle it up, and sell it with a shiny logo. Bye your love potions, only a dollar ninety five at Osco. Of course they'll be intended for personal use but it is obvious what they'll really be used for.
Next will be happiness. Unlike love which shrivels up and dies, happiness will go out with a bang. With work getting easier and free time getting longer, people will devote more and more of the latter to happiness. There in lies the problem. You can have too much of a good thing, and happiness is something that is easy to over do. Too much one way, or too much another and it becomes repetitive, boring. Oh sure it will stick around for a while as there are a plethora of things to entertain ourselves with, but once the amount of time we spend trying to entertain overcomes the amount of resources left, only boredom will be left.
At some point righteousness will follow. I do not mean the sort of righteousness that you find in a southern baptist or papal bull, but rather the kind you get where people defend right from wrong. Its own death can already be seen in the jail houses of America. No it won't be intolerance or some bizarre system which brings it down, but rather moral relativism. Seeing both sides of the equation. When the criminals become just as much victims as those they hurt. It starts with rehabilitation. We stopped killing our criminals so we try to reeducated them, bring them back into the fold. Instead of the rapist we blame the incestuous father. Instead of the murderer we blame the neglectent mother. And when black and white finally fade from our site, the grey that surrounds us will be absolute. Like a picture that has been blurred too much.
And what will be left?
Wrath, Lust, Greed, Pride, and the sort. People will probably think its the end of the world. And it will be, but not because these emotions are dominating our lives. No, it will be because they will be our last bastions of hope against the coming utopian ideals. The last rallying point for the malcontents and nonconformists. When society is the pressure point, angst becomes a form of rebellion. Those who fight will be the teenagers to societies parental advice.
People like to criticize these emotions, but I think of them as our last chance at salvation, before the eternal hell of the utopian idealists. To me, every utopia is a dystopia, and every emotion precious.
taken from: The Colorful Imagery of the Apocalypse, by Jim Tzenes
posted by jim at 9/12/2005 04:22:00 PM
2 Comments:
dem0, is death by cancer any less lethal than death by gunshot? Singular or eclectic, it still fades.
Someone read this post and said: "good and evil are just words." And of course they are, and like most words they have meanings. Specifically: Correct and incorrect (morally speaking). For future reference the word you're looking for is "lables," not "words".
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