A few thoughts of 2023

Time to start cleaning

“Eschatology” is a word that describes something we all live with and that many of us swim in like fish, unaware that they are wet. This is the textbook definition:

“1: a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind

2: a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind”

Big stuff. Basically, it’s “How does this all end?”, expressed in ancient Greek. Lots and lots of people, apparently, worry about this.

Climate change proponents believe that climate will end us. Others fear intelligent robots, asteroid strikes, a super virus, nuclear war, or a zombie apocalypse. If I had to place a bet today, I’d put my chips on stupidity, but predicting the future is well above my pay grade and far outside of my skill set.

The planet has been around for quite some time. Something like four and a half billion years. I have a two pound brain like everyone else. I can’t imagine a billion of anything. No one can. We use symbols because the concept is too big to hold in our heads. This isn’t because we are stupid. It’s because we lack the requisite horsepower needed to form the image. Try this. Imagine one of something—a tree, a rock, a cloud. See it in your mind. Now imagine ten. Try picturing a hundred. You’ll run out of gas long before you see a thousand. Not your fault. We are what we are.

Life of some sort has been present on the planet, according to the latest scientific proclamations, for about four billion years. Billions. That’s a lot.

On the other hand, humans of some sort have been walking around for (only) about six million years. Still a lot, but just a small sliver of even one billion. One billion is one thousand millions. So, if we picture a billion as being one dollar, six million is .06 cents. Not much. Homo Sapiens, us, have been around for just three hundred thousand years. Not even a single million. Not even half of a million. And for most of that time life was uncomfortable and uncertain, brutal and short. It’s better, now. We have progressed.

What we call civilization, which most social scientists peg to the development of agriculture, is just 6,000 years old. On the geologic scale 6,000 years is less than a rounding error. A piss hole in the snow. Nothing at all.

Which is all just to say, “Chillax. You are not responsible for much at all. Not the weather. Very little, in fact, beyond what you say and what you do.”

Those who are selling today’s eschatology (as opposed to yesterday’s—Montanism, the great London fire of 1666, Millerism, etc.) want to pretend, and encourage everyone else to pretend, that the “experts” have it all figured out. This is nonsense, of course. Those claiming that climate change will be the end of everything have no more credibility than those who claimed that the Mayan calendar was a sure bet. Those claiming that they have figured out The Big Problems (racism, fascism, inequality, sexism, homophobia, etc., etc.) and have The One Way Forward are frauds. They are bozos, no more or less qualified to see the future than you or I or any random row of fans at a NASCAR event. They are, just like me, imperfect people on a planet chock full of imperfect people. They are just louder and more annoying.

But they seem to believe that not only do they know the future, but that they are best qualified to steer humanity where it needs to go whether humanity agrees or not. It’s hubris.

We see this all around us. Forget the Left/Right dichotomy, the liberal/conservative divide. That is a smokescreen and a ruse. There are those who think people should know the truth, and then be left the hell alone to make their choices; and there are those who fear that the great unwashed will reject their grand plans and therefor must be kept in the dark. The latter believe people must be bullied into going in the direction the experts believe best. There is nothing new about this. Aristotle wrote “Politics” more than two thousand years ago. This was true then, it was true in the Middle Ages, and it will probably be true a thousand years from now when Critical Theory is on a dusty shelf beside Lamarkian evolution, phrenology, and the firmament. Humans have always had hair-brained ideas and the desire to force them on everyone else. Gender studies is just a newer model. The Neocon is just tomorrow’s Know Nothing; The Woke, tomorrow’s Bull Moose. These are fads that will fall away like the hoop skirt. Intellectual fedoras. Pick up a copy of Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius some two thousand years ago. How did he ever do this without an Ivy League degree?

What will last is what has always lasted. Family, friends, community, truth. Don’t be fooled by the media. Look out your window. Talk to your neighbors. Visit your friends. History is chock full of boneheads who believed they would usher humanity into Utopia and killed millions in the effort. If someone is telling you that they have no respect for your freedom, your natural rights, and your life? Believe them. And whatever you do, don’t support them.

Which brings me to November. I have not paid attention to politics to the degree I have in the past. In the past the younger me believed that people could be persuaded and that reason might shape the future, but now I think that humanity will continue to stagger around, and by randomly choosing ideas, some silly and some magnificent, eventually, organically, evolve into something better than we are. Things that work to make our lives better will remain, and ideas that make our lives harder will fall aside.

From this perspective I saw, very early in 2021, that the Democratic Party had launched themselves on a disastrous trajectory. Defund the police? Open borders? War on fossil fuels? Censorship? Racism? Insist everyone pretend that the Emperor is finely dressed, that Biden is just fine, and that we’d chosen the Best? It was a castle of lies, an edifice of grubby self-interest and competing narratives, and I said at the time that the result would be nothing positive. Everyone would suffer and no one would see the life they live improved. It didn’t take a Nostradamus to see this coming.

Now the midterms are a few weeks away and it looks very bad for Democrats. It will be interesting to see how the Adam Schiffs and Jerry Nadlers handle being in the minority, when Chairman Jim Jordan heads congressional committees and starts investigating the FBI, Dr. Fauci, the Biden Family, BLM, and on and on and on. I look forward to seeing Chris Wray and Peter Strzok testifying under oath before an unfriendly committee. If the GOP is of the mind, they will be free to conduct bizarre show trials akin the Jan 6th Committee, again and again, using the same rules the Democrats have employed. It will be great theater.

In 2023 we will see the beginning of the long process of a whole lot of really bad behavior and thinking being dragged into the sunlight, and this is something that needs to happen and is long overdue. The world won’t end, despite the wailing and dire predictions I am certain we will hear. We will be told by the desperate that the November election marks the “End of Democracy”. That’s hooey. It will just mark the day that a huge, King Augeas-size stable of bullshit finally begins being purged.

Will we have learned anything? I’m sure we’ll have learned something. Even a paramecium turns away from pain.