bitterness

Looking back at some of my writing this website, I am coming to realise how naive I have been about human nature.  They might sound outlandish, but I really was genuinely imagining future societies with interconnected internet democracy, a secular yet spiritual foundation, and living the fusion of science and art as ‘Plosm’, as ideas that could be meaningful in mapping a future for the human race.  They were idyllic, not fully worked out ideas, sure, but I did always think that they were in a sense practical. I’ve always published here with no expectation of an audience, this website is nothing more than a sort of open notebook–any illusions i had that people would flock to my musings were quenched by website visitor stats long ago–but that didn’t mean that i didn’t write these things sincerely.

Of course now, we in the west seem in the middle of a great crisis..  the irreversible climate heating and other environmental disasters going unresolved, the emergence of personality cults and casual mainstream zealotry, the gathering of power into grim authoritarian structures, the technology to monitor us making these structures unassailable, the sheer ugliness of rule by the lowest and greediest, the achievements of the good enlightenment and democratic revolutions unravelling. But when i look at other parts of the world, or in little pockets of humanity away from the headlines, i can see that elsewhere things are improving, there is life and hope, and i don’t worry so much. The crisis is a necessary revolution, there will be things destroyed, and from the ashes a new world will be born. And maybe there will be time for idyllic visions again, that’s what i hope for. At that moment, it will be good that some of us allowed ourselves to think outside the boundaries of the possible, and so laid a few narrow thought paths into a distant future.

But in the meantime, all I can see is blood, and ruins. I don’t want to get captured by this vision, although no-one really knows whether or not they will, so I’ll just keep quiet about it.

As Lennon sang, ‘The dream is over‘.