INTO THE ABYSS
Copyright © Jules Dervaes
September 11, 1999
We have a problem. Have you ever in your travels found yourself lost? Collectively, our world–with man in the driver’s seat–has similarly been lost, only we are making great time and seeing wonderful, new sights all along the way. Why would we ever stop? We would not even question our direction because our pride would not let us show any weakness. Wouldn’t a crash en route get our attention? Surely a horrific tragedy would serve to motivate us to check our position for the possibility of any danger confronting us. Today we have been given a rare chance to search within ourselves for the hard answers as to why we stand on the edge of an abyss. Consider, then, the following.
As the human race has marched onward, scaling extreme, dizzying scientific heights, mankind has spiraled downward to greater depths of degeneracy. After six millennia our Human Quotient has fallen to its current nadir. Now life is reduced to just ticks of the clock, marking days of futility. The world’s been narrowed down to ‘I’ and the amassed, trivial objects revolving around me, its parochial star. People’s relationships are abridged to interfaces, with virtually programmed behavior being of minimal substance. All the while, of humanity’s living together in peace, the chance remains absolutely zero.
Our great, modern society is a gross, consuming aberration, existing on earth only with the aid of, and through the support of, machinery. Helplessly hooked up to this artificial life-support, we live at its ‘mercy’ and are subject to its ‘whims’ without appeal and with no hope of pardon. This ruling, alien menace controls a people, now feeble and submissive, who are showered with goods and entertained religiously to induce contentment in this paradoxical bondage.
We got here by traveling the road to ‘the good life.’ Making this journey meant ridding our days of each and every pain because suffering was deemed bad. Thus the old ways, being strenuous, were gleefully discarded along the way for laborsaving improvements. And manic science was bent on creating the tools to finally pull off our great escape from all drudgery, AKA work. No prior creation was kept sacred on this phony providential mission to develop the earth, through reconstruction projects, as the site of our very own paradise now. We trashed what was here because we believed we could do better. And more: we boldly trespassed into inviolate space, challenging the prime, closed order.
Rivaling original perfection was a diabolic scheme born of supreme arrogance, destined to backfire. With the pursuit of happiness as ease, as rest, there has come a hellish existence full of needless suffering–both random and arbitrary. Our grandiose, pet projects have turned against us by raining down ruin upon, and cancerously devouring, their masters. Those wonder inventions and miracle products that carried the promise of deliverance from present toil bore the power of future destruction. Daredevils, we would take the risk and unleash those evils. With all our supernatural, black magic devices, what we have unwittingly created–and still madly champion–is Frankenstein en masse.
To pristine eyes the wake of progress would be a sewer. Only, in the beginning, we embraced deviant, bastard growth; seduced we were by the sensuous wealth it yielded so readily, so freely. When easy riches bred super fortunes, the eternal quest for the most, latest, flashiest of the invented baubles heated up intensely. Carried by advertising, the buying fever quickly spread to the masses. Burning with desire, we ached to have exotic novelties we never needed before. While deliriously dreaming of prosperity, at the expense of posterity, we would come to swallow the toxic offal which spewed forth from the production, use, and disposal of these modern vanities.
Through contamination taking place out of sight, on the other side of town, and in an isolated area, our ideal, maiden home was uneventfully, genteelly–yet catastrophically–lost. Pollution would tempt more pollution and the defiling cycle spun out of control. The illusion that the days go on as before is sustained by the magically disappearing filth, all done with ppm doses. We will accept any abuse, even being poisoned to death, if it happens in incremental stages. It is our perpetual tolerance of small changes over time that ensures our adoption of any new home, no matter how foul the conditions. We don’t mind the putrid stench when we are no longer able to smell it. What smell?
Our senses, which we could have relied upon, at first, to alarm us–saving us as we ‘came to our senses’–now betray us outright. What was our basic, innate guide to personal safety–primitive sensory technology–has been corrupted by increasing exposure to mutant elements and alien states. Presently, it is normal to place ourselves in abnormal danger and to like it. In time we will prefer being in even greater peril. So snared are we in this ever-strengthening chain of perversion that what was previously normal is now felt by us to be silly, stupid, or sick.
Therefore, we must today war against our own bodies to win life. Instead, since still in ourselves we trust, we sophisticatedly go about the daily grind of killing ourselves–at times instantly, but always, always, slowly. This is the frightening reality; but, to kill the pain of any awful, piercing realization, we reach for the quick relief provided by the mental aspirin denial, a real wonder drug for the proud psyche.
As a civilization we’ve managed to evict failure along with our guilt from our collective conscience. Despite our shameful record documenting terrible, generic vices, we obliviously conceive ourselves to be, on a evolutionary plane, rising. The belief of our ascent out of primordial sludge and of our advance surpassing ancestral creatures, all retrograde, enables us to be living proof of a natural progression toward superiority. This self-serving creed nurtures a warped, one-sided perspective, a supremacist view of our destiny, which in turn fuels unilateral expectations of our due. Where once we knew our place and accepted the provisions and obligations of progeny, here was the dawning of the age of naked self-worshipers for whom the world would serve as one colossal amusement park.
The new lords-of-evolution would seek, by way of demand, after the luxury commensurate with sovereignty. Opulent, lavish lifestyles bespeak royalty, with exquisite, upscale surroundings replicating palatial settings. Having a household full of techno-servants attending to needs and providing comforts means living like a star. When there are minions to perform menial work, the elite become delicate. Our societal evolution toward privilege has yielded soft bodies and spoiled spirits in need of extensive pampering. Our giant, ‘noble,’ cultural leap has landed us in a quagmire; for, we now bear the malady of inclusive, ‘blue-blooded’ fragility. What always brings about extinction in a species is fragility.
So far nothing has changed the fact that, acting the prima donnas, we are determined constitutionally to keep and defend our newfound, liberating status. We’ve gotten comfortable; we aim to get more and more comfortable until we die. For, it is the narcotic comfort which we are craving. As conveniences have proliferated, our growing dependence on them has led to an increasing need for better grades and to an insatiable hunger to score with the boulevard’s trendy comfort of choice. Once used, amenities become addictive, as evidenced by the classic withdrawal symptoms caused by just the thought of doing without them: anxiety, trauma, anger, and depression.
When, on the field of battle for subsistence, we were matched against a fitting foe nature, we could contest for superiority. A wholly focused, worthy effort was rewarded with the chance to stand for another round the next season in the never-ending fight to retain the ‘championship.’ Putting out anything less than what nature demanded meant never surviving to ‘answer the bell.’ It was the perfect education: nature with its hardships, the most outstanding teacher of the year and of a lifetime. Daily tasks which tested physical and emotional strengths allowed for no letdown. The result was a strong backbone together with a teachable spirit.
All that changed when we decided that we’d had enough of the unforgiving strictness, the unchangeable standards, and the ‘absolute’ judgment. So, we attacked the teacher; and we began educating ourselves differently. We set out to make the tools necessary to force nature to change and not us. We struck the blow for liberty in our revolution to overthrow the tyrant who would tax our existence without our approval. Heard round the world is the cry to be free, to be our own masters. Casting off all chains that inherently bind us is confirmation of our ambition for supreme power. Intoxicated by deep-seated passions, we’re unable to discern that beneath the proud chimes of freedom toll the sober knells of requiem.
Ever haunted by the primal specter of dearth, we’re obsessed with stockpiling extras upon extras. Excess soothes our fears of want. Large closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, houses–big makes us feel safe. The bigger, the safer; the safer, the happier. Getting more than before feels so naturally good we cannot grasp that, when it is easy and lasting, abundance kills. Scarcity, that old-fashioned, feared harbinger of death, has long ago been replaced in our supermarket world by surplus, the chic twin of a different color.
Today, we go to the grave afflicted by the modern plagues of plenty; but, with stomachs bulging, we go smiling. Corralled and fattened up, we serve as prime choices for slaughter. To avoid panic and prevent revolt among us dumb cattle, our ‘messianic’ medical industry dispenses its bewitching drugs to take the sting out of a cursed, abortive deaths, making them savory for victim and for viewer alike. It’s a ‘kinder, gentler’ holocaust.
Yes, we are heading into an abyss; but, there is a way out. Yet we can not deal with the impersonal, the disconnected, the segmented, or the fragmented. We are who we are, existing in synthesis, forming our integral system; from that there is no escape. Finally, we will not be able to dodge the hard, piercing, painful truth: IT IS US! Mankind is the apocalyptic problem. From the beginning we ourselves have been the flaw, as we have chosen our own way to live. Only, it was to die for. Now, on the verge of reaping the fruits of self-destruction, our only hope is to be retrained first to act in a totally opposite manner.
Therefore, we must not be thinking in terms of surviving, of our getting through any external crisis, but of changing, of our being reborn to a new way founded on the truth of our fundamentally flawed nature. At this juncture we must struggle to make happen an unparalleled, earthshaking event shift away from our unyielding, barren world. Only with pressing travail will the breakthrough occur. What is to be expected is a transformation within each of us so radical that, if one looked in the mirror of his soul, he would see a stranger. It is time.
Revised from a paper published September 11, 1999