Sometimes I think I’m already living in a post-apocalyptic world, like the worst thing short of death has already befallen us all. The crazies and mutants have already arisen to rule the world. They already bicker violently over the broken remnants of civilization. I’m already dying from one or more of the myriad horrible afflictions that plague the survivors of The Bomb. We all are. Already I toil in the mines, struggling just to subsist in a world without the freedom and luxury I once knew. Already I doubt the wisdom of reproduction for fear of the horror my children would know. Already I crave only surcease, carried forward by survival instinct alone.
Then I go drink more coffee, and everything is fine again.
*Fires-up the MP3 player and drops the needle on Godspeed You Black Emperor! – “The Dead Flag Blues”*
I get that sorta feeling too, most of the time. Dysgenics has become our reality.
“This society is the nightmare we cannot wake from.”
I admit, I had to look up Dysgenics. I don’t think that was quite what I meant, actually. Was more trying to evoke something metaphorical: I don’t doubt that The Howard Creature has the conventional number of toes and fingers. The deformities I’m talking about aren’t necessarily physical.
…but yeah, sometimes I feel like this last decade or so has been part of a long slow descent into hell, like we know why this course (economic, ecological, social, political) is suicidal madness and yet the mindless masses refuse to care enough to stop.
I tend to think the genetic thing is the least of our worries: So, natural selection has been replaced by unnatural selection. Is it necessarily worse? Our definition of ‘fitness’ changes so fast its crazy. Soon enough, we’re probably going to replace it with synthetic selection anyway. If we’re making ourselves infertile and sickly as a race, I can name a multitude of clear, obvious environmental factors that come way before anything evolutionary.
You’re looking for the number one negative influence on global human health? Try AIDS. Try MacDonalds. Try the service economy and the massive swing towards sedentary office jobs that it brings. Better yet, demographically speaking, try starvation, or warfare, or impurity-poisoned, abusive drug use.
Also, just to fill in: If I’m invoking a fall from luxury or easy livin’, it’s not too literal either. I still live in the first world. E and I are still DINKs. We have cable and broadband and more food than we really need.
I sometimes miss being a government subsidised student, or working in the dot-com boom, but I know that both states were less fun at the time than they seem in the rosy glow of hindsight. Sometimes I think depression is very literal: you feel like you’re at the bottom of a hole and everywhere else looks higher up than where you are now. It’s absolutely critical to remember that this is an illusion.