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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.

I started studying William Linney's Getting Started With Ancient Greek the other day. There's a famous Italian adage, "traduttore, traditore"—in English, we might say "translation is treason"—and the biggest hurdle I've had in studying the classics is that I've had to contend with the biases of translators. Most of them clearly don't understand the material, but even Thomas Taylor—bless him—is so obsessed with Proclus that he reads Proclus, and writes Proclus, into everyone. So being able to bypass such gatekeeping is valuable. But to be honest, I'd content myself with translation if there were translations of everything I wanted to read—but I really want to read Stobæus, and nobody's translated him!

But that's not what this post is about: this post is about blind faith. I was mentioning the above to a friend, who asked, in all seriousness, "Why not just ask ChatGPT to translate him for you?"

I stared, incredulously, for a moment, and answered, "How would I know if it was right?"

He was quite surprised by this and conceded the point.

Now, this seems a very obvious thing to me—the whole point was that I can't trust a translator of any kind, human or robot—but it's not as if my friend is a dummy! Rather, it seems there's something of an insidious meme of the infallibility or inevitability of machine learning which is polluting people's abilities to think clearly about it. I think it's worth bearing in mind that a meme is all it is, and this meme is pushed by people who are neither honest nor have your best interests at heart.

Remember that your highest self is essentially independent. To be your best, think for yourself!

According to my diary, about a decade ago, I was sitting in a cafe and overheard an elderly man ranting to his wife, "Kids these days don't appreciate books!" He said this even as I and many other young people were sitting around him, reading.

I was reminded of this today. I was in the library when I heard two teenagers come upstairs wondering to themselves where to find the Divine Comedy. I happened to know where it was—right next to Plotinus ;)—so I went a few aisles over, pulled it out, came back, and handed it to them. They lit up.