Friday, 23 October 2009

The Twelve Step Road To TRUE PESSIMISM

[leicester, recuperating]

So this is the opening programme for a new support group myself and some colleagues in Edinburgh and Copenhagen are going to be setting up.
The support group is for the endlessly cheerful and incorrigibly happy amongst you and is called

...
OPTIMISTS ANONYMOUS


[and in Canada i would say... i do think we're going to find a fertile market in Canadia ... cos lets face it when it comes to positivity you Canadians can certainly teach us Europeans a thing or two... and in fact, if any of you are considering a big change in your life, you could consider moving to England and starting a new career teaching Positivity As A Foreign Language... but don't try it in Scotland... they will kill you
its a bit unfair on the Scots that bit... cos after a while in Scotland you realise they are, in general, more positive than the English, particularly Londoners... they just don't look it from the expressions on their faces... ]

...

So...

Born with a smile on your face

Adept at seeing the bright side

Feeling happy, full of beans and generally jam-packed with new and better reasons for liking yourself?

You must be ready for…

More than a bit grim…

In fact annihilatingly awful

All other pessimisms are outed as rosy tinted la-las

Because this is

[There are now more people living in poverty than ever before]


THE TWELVE STEP ROAD TO

TRUE PESSIMISM


One

Ten thousand years of culture so we can wander braindead round the mall

Is this what all the long hard struggles for thought and freedom were for?

Just think of all the titanic efforts of mind and body that have created everything we have

And just look what we’re doing with it?

...

[OK, that wasn’t so bad was it?

However, that was Depression Lite

or perhaps Shite Lite

and it is going to get worse]

...

Two

All centuries are born old.

And the Twenty First century was born older than most.

The Twentieth, whose product we are, was the human race’s worst century ever.

Only the Fourteenth comes close

The Twenty-First, can’t be much worse

but we can all die

which is much worse

though ultimately

peaceful


Three

The crux of the twentieth century was that power realised the revolution was not going to happen,

the forces of change could and would be contained,

and it was going to be business as usual from here on.


Four

Our current wealth in the developed world derives from the massive suffering of our crushed forebears who were dispossessed during industrial revolution and slavery, and worked to an early grave

It is their utter immiseration which has legged us up to all we have, and our every luxury and plenty has their blood and suffering shot through it

Of course, one might currently ask, how much current benefit, we are currently deriving, from the current, immiserated labour of hundreds of current, millions


Five

The western world has always progressed gun first

Almost all scientific and technological developments have been generated by the constant drive for new and better weapons


Six

Except perhaps, for gunpowder.

For the Eleventh Century Chinese monks who invented gunpowder were in fact Taoist alchemists, who were trying to discover the secret of eternal life

So there they were, mixing powders, like no-one had ever mixed powders before, trying to concoct an elixir of eternal life

Bit of sulphur...

Bit of charcoal...

Bit of saltpetre...

Lot of saltpetre...

When, whoops, they accidentally invent gunpowder

And whoops, there goes the next twelve hundred years

And whoops, there goes hundreds of millions of lives

...

Could this be described as the greatest failure of all time?

Well... we’re not going to live for ever... but we can blow a lot of people up.


Seven

Robot aircraft... already massacring unarmed civilians

And... coming soon... Robot soldiers!

On sale, around the earth.

Just like the movies, but with added torture facility as an optional extra

Will the hackers of tomorrow be imprisoned in Guantanamao Bays for treasonably hacking morality viruses into military hardware?


Eight

The Missile Defence Shield.

This is that arer thing, a wholly new phenomenon in human history.

Yet its very name is a deception.

For the essential thing is to have the Missile Defence Shield

a-a-and

Intercontinental Ballistic Weapons.

This is the wonderful double-whammy of Total Defence and Total Aggression.

Meaning you can hit them, but they can’t hit you.

You can annihilate them, but they can’t annihilate you.

This is wholly new. Never before has one nation, except perhaps the Mongols, been able to destroy any other with such impunity.

The British could and did bomb your ports with impunity until you signed the trade deal, but that’s some way from total annihilation.

Has all of human history been leading up this sudden cut-off point where suddenly one group of human beings can destroy all and any other without fear of coming to serious harm?


At this point we could wonder if God, yes God, is going to come down and save us

But lets face it…

He hasn’t done so so far

And you know what they say

You can’t teach an old god new tricks


Nine

Global warming.

Obviously, no-one can say how disastrous global warming might be.

Despite this there are, as we know, people on this earth dedicating their entire, well-paid, lives to maintaining current energy policies.

Is it not excruciatingly depressing, that so many of us find it so, excruciatingly depressing, that these people cannot say for certain they are not dedicating their entire, well-paid, lives to ensuring the death of literally billions.


Ten

The main coming alternative to Imperial US Power is Confucian Communist China.

Whose cynical brutality does not well compare with those of their rivals.

Of course there is Europe but, in the light of events, no-one is in a hurry to let Europe have another go at World Domination.


Eleven

Is truth dead?

Well perhaps nothing is BIG T TRUE, but some things are more true than others

And if truth is relative then it is, like democracy, buyable

...

So, is truth dead...?

Nooooh

Truth is alive and well and living in Washington...

Preparing for the move to Beijing


Twelve

Ask yourself.

There are people who deny that any or all of, Auschwitz, the Gulags, the Belgian Congo, the Rape of Nanking, or even Genghis Khan, actually happened.

Ask yourself: did they?

...

We might prefer to live in a world where they didn't

but only a very very few of us get the world we deserve


And one more, for bad luck

Thirteen

By the time the meek have inherited the earth

it will be a dry desert and resourceless husk

and the last of the rich and powerful will be leaving

on the last spaceship


CONGRATULATIONS

you can now consider yourselves graduated

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