The Senility Hypothesis

[sdi]

I'm very tired of the "demonic hypothesis" being bandied about as a means of understanding why America is becoming schizophrenic and tearing itself to pieces right now. (In fairness to JMG, he only proposed it as a tentative hypothesis and does not seem to hold to it very tightly; but at least a significant segment of the Ecosophia community seems to have taken it as gospel.) I thought I might offer an alternative.

In her book Anyone Can See the Light, Dr. Dianne Morrissey talks about her near death experience and the things she learned from it. One of the things she discusses is senility: "I learned from being in the Light that if I continued to judge others as I had been doing, I would become senile before I died again! The Light of God told me that senility was created for those who would have a hard time accepting the reality of Heaven, once they had crossed over. So they are made childlike, and thus able to accept Heaven as it is."

Plotinus says something vaguely concordant in Enneads I ix, about how arguing for suicide as a response to senility is a pointless exercise, since a philosophical life—trying to accept and embrace what is—is prophylactic against senility.

I might suggest that human societies are creatures, just as much as humans are: they exhibit various stages of life, and in the same way they are born (from parent societies, no less), so too do they grow old and die. Some civilizations, for whatever reason, are mature and philosophical and die with grace; others may get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and are murdered before even coming to age. Ours, however, seems to me to be like the judgemental person Morrissey describes—it insists upon forcing its view of the world onto others, and is unable to accept or appreciate the world as it is. Consequently, as it ages, it seems to have grown senile and is too judgmental, too forgetful, too proud to make sense of the world around it any more. So it forgets and is confused and frustrated and flails and rattles apart as a side effect of allowing it a way to transition out of existence.

Consequently, it seems to me that climate change and the "green movement," Trump and the "Resistance," COVID and the anti-vaxxers, the divisive political climate, all are mere symptoms of a deeply flawed worldview which has been stuck in a rut for centuries. Indeed, I might suggest that the "demonic hypothesis" itself is born from that same worldview: one that assigns humans much greater agency than they in fact have, and doesn't recognize that maybe the West's great life is coming to an end exactly as it ought to.

I would urge people to look at the world in such a way that, rather than divide it into camps or try to assign blame, instead accepts that the gods are good and know what they are doing, and gracefully tries to cushion the blow as much as one reasonably can.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

One of the founders of Greenpeace wrote a book called "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom" (still on my to-read list.) The title implies a human rather than a demonic hand. Perhaps these divisive issues are not demonic in nature, but rather the technical way in which our society is ruled. In that case, as boccaderlupo's "demonization hypothesis" suggests, we should not judge before we really understand what's going on.

And the last few years have taught me that I know far less than I thought I did.

[sdi]

Yes—it's like how the vulgar think of death as the worst of evils, but the enlightened see it as the greatest of goods. Why should we believe the death of a society as any worse than the death of a person? Sure, there are pains and troubles as the body breaks down, and we should try to ease them as best we can, but such a stage is merely temporary—and oh, what beauty follows it!