As the title of this post suggests, I am not predicting that ‘the end is nigh unless ye repent’; I am saying that it is already too late. Death, famine, pestilence and war are already abroad (the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse) and we are IN an apocalypse. It is happening.
In another post I have talked about POWER, and how a universal addiction to that drug has been the ‘downfall’ of humanity. In the Western World, for example, it is seen as normal that babies should cry. This is not so. Babies should be learning to communicate, and should only use crying to communicate REAL distress. But babies ‘normally’ learn that they can use crying to get attention and manipulate their parents. This is babies tasting power.
If you are observant you will see it happening all the time. For example: walking past the school playground one day a ball few over the fence just in front of me, and a little girl came up and stood and looked out at me, obviously expecting me to return her ball to her. I would have done so had the episode been an accident, but as I had approached along the path I had noticed the little girl ‘noticing’ me, and had noticed her quickly pick up her ball and deliberately throw it over the fence. I did not return it and when I looked back a few moments later the girl was being hugged and consoled by a bevy of little girls over whom she obviously held sway. This is about control and manipulation. This is about power.
Everybody adores little James. He is a charming, chatty little boy. I frequently see him with his mother on the bus. He will always be talking to someone, turning in his seat to talk to the people behind, or stopping on the way off the bus and talking to the driver so that the rest of the passengers have to wait. Everyone smiles and thinks him cute. One day I happen to be behind little James on the bus. “What is that?” he asks, pointing to my umbrella. Little James knows perfectly well what it is. There follows a series of similarly inane and pointless questions, to none of which I respond. He gives it a rest and then tries again, with the same ‘disappointing’ result. He turns back to face the front again, and this time I just catch a glimpse of the expression that crosses his face: it is demonic! Really, his face contorts into such an expression of rage that it literally looks like something out of ‘The Exorcist’! So much for the cute, charming little James!
Not that I actually needed that glimpse to see what little James was about. His conversation was so very clearly not about communicating, but about getting attention. In fact, the old adage that ‘children should be seen and not heard’ is, in fact, true. Children should be interested and curious and wanting to learn about the world, and they do not do that be being the centre of attention; they do it by sitting quietly and observing. Yes, of course they play as well, but at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place. The whole world is exotic and new to a child and it will enjoy just looking and listening and learning – if it is healthy.
And if it is enjoying the taste of power it will not be just looking and listening and learning, and as a consequence, it looses the ability to observe, listen and learn – and hence science comes along to make up the deficiency.
And that, basically, is how to understand our history: we live in the ‘best of all possible worlds’, so that, with humanity on the decline, as it looses more and more of its faculties, the loss is made up by the ‘invention’ of institutions and the like.
So when, due to their addiction to power, people loose the ability and desire to ‘like’ or value things, then money is invented and then everything has a ‘price’, and that is something that power addicts can use.
When people became incapable of being fully independent, ie fully able to understand the world and people without any outside help, then religions came along to give them rules to live by and the support of others who believed the same things as themselves.
But whereas the religions used metaphor and myth to explain and account for the world, when people lost the ability to handle metaphor, and could only deal with symbols, and became very ‘literal’ in their interpretation of the world around them, then science came along.
Science looks after the autistic mind. It offers the support of authority, like a parent, of shared perceptions, offers the security of predictability, and of rules and order. And, of course, it sees the world in very literal terms. It also puts ‘knowledge’ above ‘ability’ and ‘understanding’, and, well, ‘knowledge is power’! Yes, power addicts have no interest in understanding things, but the certainly see lots of value in ‘knowledge’.
As for technology, to quote (approximately) from ‘Harry Potter’: it’s marvellous the things people invent to get by without magic! The implication is the same as I have been making above: that technology is just making up for increasing deficiencies of the human mind, bolstering it, providing a crutch.
But the decline continues, and so you go from walking stick, to crutches to wheel chairs — and what then?
If you think of autism as essentially the place into which the minds of people are descending, and think about what that means in terms of loss of awareness, and loss of abilities, and of what suits the minds of people who are severely autistic, as opposed to those who are less so, then look at the history of human culture, you will find that it is interpretable in the terms I have suggested above: ie the more modern developments are, the more they support the needs of minds that are further gone into autism.