All the stories have been told, and all the lessons have been learned.
But we’ve failed to move any closer to the centre of the labyrinth.
Disoriented, we wander aimlessly back and forth at its entrance, failing to make any meaningful progress inward.
Are we fated to repeat the same mistakes for all eternity?
This question makes me claustrophobic.
But as I sit here watching the thirteenth remake of Thor, and listening to sententious academics preach the merits of communism, it’s clear that the answer to my question is yes.
We’re trapped in a perpetual purgatory where there are no new stories, and the only strategy politicians can come up with is to run into the same brick wall, but from a different angle.
I’ve read the history books. I know where that road leads.
And if we really do have a duty to show God the beauty of his creation, then fully utilising our capacity for conscious thought would be a great way to do this. But we’re hindered by our consistent refusal to learn lessons from our past, insisting instead to learn solely through the pain of mistake.
This atavistic tendency explains why Meditations is still relevant after 2,000 years. Unlike our technology, which improves rapidly, our nature is static. We’re in an intellectual and spiritual deadlock.
And the hubris of modern humans means that we’re blind to this tendency. The harsh lessons of the 19th and 20th centuries are eschewed due to perceived irrelevance, and we’re currently engaged in the wholesale destruction of the institutions which underpin our civilisation.
This destruction is purportedly propitiation to new gods with which I’m not familiar.
From what I can gather, there’s a belief that if we appease these new gods, they will free us from some vaguely asserted ‘oppression’ which supposedly characterised our past. They say that once the framework of the Western world has been dismantled, humanity will spontaneously propel forward into a new epoch characterised by morality, virtue, and abundance.
But I don’t buy it.
And from what I can tell, society is atrophying, not excelling.
We haven’t been to the Moon in 50 years.
We don’t fly supersonic on Concorde anymore.
We’re more depressed than ever.
Nobody can buy a house.
There’s a new tax every day.
Censorship is increasing.
Most marriages end in divorce.
Institutions can’t be trusted.
And our words have lost all their meaning.
Everybody is aware of this accelerating degeneration, yet nobody will engage with it in any meaningful way.
Instead, we’re subjected to this inane public discourse, which appears to be more concerned with the obfuscation of issues than their resolution.
I’m tired of being forced to navigate the quagmire of mindless tribalism and disingenuous doublespeak.
And I’m tired of being trapped inside this sterile, brutalist environment which is seemingly designed to disconnect the individual from the divine.
It’s made us lose touch with the universal.
And in the process we’ve been deluded into believing that reality is confined to this mundane, sublunary plane.
I think that’s why we’re lost in this metaphorical labyrinth of existence.
- John Goddard
