The Death Machine

 
Orwell knew.
As did Illich, and Gandhi.
And a few other farsighted in the century prior.
But the rest of us?
The hoi polloi.
Do we know?
 
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That the system we live in.
And celebrate.
This veritable ‘best of all possible worlds’.
Progress, Development, and all the rest of the
self-validating cataract of cliches that sensurround
our senses making us near insensible.
Is a Death Machine.
 
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Just 400 years of it.
And everything around us is dying.
Flora, fauna, all of it.
Habitats dissolving, ecologies dissipating.
The Planet itself, or that part which sustains life, in mortal stress.
 
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And we?
How about us?
Exalted King Vampires astride the top of the food chain.
Masters of the Universe.
How are we doing?
 
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What is left of culture, society, civility , in the
heartlands of where the Great Game originated ?
Sociopaths and psychopaths rule the roost, with societal empathy
derided, disdained, and debauched.
War criminals govern us.
Billionaires buy and sell our fragmenting Republics with brazen impunity.
An Amoral Society (mark the oxymoron) is the latest contribution in the long-drawn saga of EuroModernism (European Modernism).
We live in, and by, dread alone.
And all around us Human Devolution spreads its dissolute wings.
 
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The civilisation-mongers that claim(ed) to be paragpns of reason and liberty are racing, joyously, even tumultously,to raze the world (the same way it began?) with a Big Bang.
Cannon and chicanery had them seize the world, once upon a time.
The very same twin tools now stand put to end it.
Bravo!
 
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What price now the hoary liturgy of liberte?
Freedom?
What a concept!
Yes, we are become ‘free’.
From the prospects of even mere continuity.
In a fact-free , conscience-free ,value-free, world.
We are free: free-wheeling , free-dealing, Zombies run amok.
 
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Unabashedly, Post-Truth, Post-Morals, and Post-Human.
That is the Collective West today.
The First World, no less.
First in a world they have securely ensured will not last.
 
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Yes, they are inveterate, intrepid, fighters for freedom.
Yours and mine, that is: except we are trying to preserve it – from their very onslaughts.
I refer to the real autonomies of life: far more concrete than the sloganised memes of ‘freedom’.
 
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Of course, they can claim no monopoly of barbarism.
They have (had) plenty of competition.
But no Others , in human history, have brought us, insouciantly, to the very edge of Exterminism, all the while preaching a meretricious Litany of Rights.
 
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What is it about EM (European Modernism) that has wrought this?
Its ideology and praxis has deracinated the very roots of our humanity, silting the eternal founts of human affections – viz., family, kindred, and community that keep us sane – with the venal sludge of competitive cupidity, avarice, and accumulation, reducing us to atomised, anomie and angst ridden , solitary, adversarial, asocial individuals ever swirling to higher and higher spirals of mortal alienation from our inherent species-being of Conviviality, Cooperation, and Caring.

In so doing, they morphed a band of convivials into a company of strangers.
Forever lost , lonely, lorn, and disconsolate.
Worse, in metaphor , they almost turned us mammals into reptiles.

The perennial Qualities of Life have been buried, entombed, in the varied avalanches of this misanthropic Age of Quantity.
Madness is the inevitable societal condition of humans when stripped of their baseline affective supports.
We are, and have long gone, mad.
 
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Orwell , Illich, and Gandhi.
Time to read them again, as institutions crumble about us?
And as the Dystopian EM Juggernaut slashes and burns its way onwards , hurtling us all toward a mutually assured extinction.