Lets look back, back to 1976, when this type of thing happened before. Here is a post on Gawker about the last swine flu and the government reaction -- it's pretty brilliant.
*spoiler alert* In the end, the government spent a bunch of money on vaccines, and then even more destroying said vaccines because the cure was worse than the disease.
Not saying this is exactly the same scenario, just saying "bold decisive action" can be a load of hogwash and a political maneuver to quell histrionics in the populace incited by the media.
I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.
I also truly, sincerely believe that the majority of people are so deeply desirous of radical change, that they subconsciously lust after catastrophe because it will at least disrupt the stasis in which they find themselves (it's an "inward" problem, but gets projected outward to society and "the world").
Sorry, did I say that in my out loud voice?
Back to your regular programming,
Bp
[thank you cousin Zed for the article, image credit in linked article]
2 comments:
You did say it out loud, but it's spot-on: there is curiously widespread desire for large-scale social change. It takes many forms, so many that it's probably universal.
To me, the only question about it is whether it's more pronounced now than it has been in times past. It certainly isn't new -- religions, for instance, have been about predicting and documenting cataclysmic ends for as long as there have been religions.
Today, it takes so many religious and non-religious forms that I wonder if the current state of things is such that this lust -- and that's the right word, lust -- is stronger than ever.
I could get into a whole treatise about misinterpretations of metaphorical speech in religious literature here -- I.E. "end times" being a metaphor for the feelings one has when undergoing radical inner change or "ego death."
But I won't.
I do agree there have been assertions that we're in the "end times" since religions started, at least "modern" religions, say the last 2000 years or so.
I don't know if it's more prevalent today, in our society, than in other times or not tho. It's an interesting question to ponder, I'll throw it past my room-mate he's very well versed in this stuff.
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