What worries me is that the hell we are headed for is deeper than any previous, that the hell we are entering may be the one that swallows every last one us. What if we are descending into a Tenth Circle of Dante’s Inferno? (It will probably be some heretofore unimagined combination of natural cataclysm(s), political upheaval, starvation, ignorance, hubris, hate, Skynet, and nuclear war all rolled into one.)
Virtually all the myths and stories have humans passing through hell to get to (and to appreciate) paradise when (or if) they arrive. Ever since our kind sat around the fire listening to storytellers, we’ve universally enjoyed struggle by the “good” against the “evil.” We need the villain and the hero. We love it best when the hero wins against all odds. But is that a feature of our human intellect or a bug? Might there already be enough accumulated knowledge and wisdom in our collective unconscious to avoid yet another archetypal journey to hell and back?
It all went to pot once mankind started envisioning. For two hundred and some thousand years, humans were content to pretty much just let it be. Then, one day, after discovering the monolith, one of them had a vision and here we are.
What worries me is that the hell we are headed for is deeper than any previous, that the hell we are entering may be the one that swallows every last one us. What if we are descending into a Tenth Circle of Dante’s Inferno? (It will probably be some heretofore unimagined combination of natural cataclysm(s), political upheaval, starvation, ignorance, hubris, hate, Skynet, and nuclear war all rolled into one.)
Virtually all the myths and stories have humans passing through hell to get to (and to appreciate) paradise when (or if) they arrive. Ever since our kind sat around the fire listening to storytellers, we’ve universally enjoyed struggle by the “good” against the “evil.” We need the villain and the hero. We love it best when the hero wins against all odds. But is that a feature of our human intellect or a bug? Might there already be enough accumulated knowledge and wisdom in our collective unconscious to avoid yet another archetypal journey to hell and back?
It all went to pot once mankind started envisioning. For two hundred and some thousand years, humans were content to pretty much just let it be. Then, one day, after discovering the monolith, one of them had a vision and here we are.