I never stop thinking about the fact that, although we may one day totally emerge from this rapid descent into fundamentalist totalitarianism, the people who bought into the prophecy of the Doomsday pathogen will never be the same again. Amidst the chaos and impending doom, their hunter-gatherer, tribal sentiments were stimulated and awakened. They saw, for the first time, the modern world through the eyes of one of our superstition-riddled ancestors. Everything looked so disordered and alien. We must have Authority. We must have Order. A war between My Tribe against the Other Tribe. For these people, modernity itself had become the enemy. Freedom, individual choice, the unrestrained social forces, from it all emanated doom. Although they will never admit it, even to themselves, only a new Dark Age would have satisfied their evolved psychological thirst. This lust for a return to a rigid Puritanism is evident in their words and actions. The masks that they continue to wear are the visible symbol of their faith. They know they don’t work. Their rabid hatred of the unmasked and unafraid signifies their hatred of those who refuse to submit to their new belief system. For a brief moment, these newborn primitives saw a world coming into view, an ancient evil forcing itself onto our plane of existence, and in it they saw their salvation. The virus became their savior, and they became its congregation. A new dawn, the sudden eruption of a societal caldera, the emergence of the total State under the Armaggedon eclipse, to these new primitives it was rapture. You see it in their faces now, the unaknowledged pain of realizing that their god has failed to make good on its promises. They will now be a scattered congregation, always seeking for something to fill the new void within themselves. Let’s hope they never find it.
