Closed Doors of Paradise

Expressionism / Gabriele Munter/ Meditation

I think that we are a culture that has managed to disconnect itself from time.

I can’t really say that I know many folks who try to understand the past or the future.  We seem to be of the here and now only.  

Maybe that is what makes us so damn weird.  When we look into the past, we don’t seem to think that they might have thought differently than us.  We judge using the current almost-philosophy of the day and when we look at actions, all we see is our interpretation, we don’t for a moment try to see the motives and beliefs of the time.  We only use our current set of tools and use it to judge the past.  The conditions, technologies, beliefs, and the people who held them are valued only in the sense where they are holding our values and thoughts.

The future is even more absurd.  We can’t for a moment think of a world that doesn’t reflect our current beliefs.  All the imagined futures are either techno-whizzy or apocalyptic, which just depends on your current worldview.

I kinda look at the past in amazement.  I know that it isn’t a Winston Churchill quote, but humanity always chooses the right way, but only after exhausting all the other possibilities.  More and more I am coming to believe that Liebniz was right, we are in the best of all possible worlds.  

Currently mankind is of the opinion that his actions can create a paradise.  For the life of me I can’t understand this way of thinking.  Visions of paradise are nearly always fever dreams.  In my mind, paradise will never exist.  The whole idea is silly.  I realize that this kind of thought is common in the past, but for the most part, historically thinking, people who have tried to create paradise here on this mortal coil have gone down in the “bad guy” column.

Why I worry most about the “woke” movement is that they are displaying a lot of the characteristics that brought us such superstars and Torquemada and Savonarola.  Those kinds of things rarely work out well.  

I am just waiting for the May 16th notification