To say that a lot has happened over the past month would be an enormous understatement. What we’ve witnessed is no less than the rapid disintegration of a civilization-shattering religious dogma. The rise and fall of a Heaven’s Gate-esque death cult that has appeared to very nearly drag the modern world into a new demon-haunted Dark Age. It grew so rapidly, and encompassed so many establishment institutions, that most people were never even aware of what had sprung up around them and within their minds. Infecting our local governments, schools, places of employment, nothing was spared from its influence. But it bore all the hallmarks of a primitive, atavistic, superstitious, witch-burning belief system. It’s formulation was perfect. Impending Armageddon, invisible demons floating through the air, specters of the possessed walking among us, forced conversion/punishment of heretics, it all spoke directly to the primeval animal lying dormant within us. That animal answered, in just the same way that we see it spring forth among acolytes of the various cults and splinter religions throughout history. The COVID pandemic response was built upon this sudden eruption of primitive emotions, but could only have done so if the pre-existing dominant culture was sufficiently meaningless, soulless, nihilistic. Those are the same character traits of the acolytes of every other cult, be it the Manson family, Heaven’s Gate, Jim Jones’ followers. They are all adrift, searching for meaning, and easy prey. We were all, in a sense, ripe for the picking. For the past 15 months, Thomas Carlyle’s words never left my mind:
“When the age of Miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible tradition, and even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and Man’s Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no Reality any longer existed but only Phantasms of realities, and God’s Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,–on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me?”
This, in essence, has been our experience. And we better thank our stars that we still stand on ever-solidifying earth, and that rationality is, by slow drips, returning. COVID hysteria is a wake-up call. We, the human race, must evolve or die. We won’t survive another resurgence of primitive drain-circling hysteria as we have just experienced. In our unreasoned fear of COVID, we very nearly brought doomsday upon ourselves. It would have been self-inflicted, a product of our imagination. But COVID-ism, or whatever it could be called, is receding, collapsing. It’s fading, and now we stumble out of a year-long fugue state, and wonder just what we’ve allowed to happen. Most will put it in the past, forget about it, and move on. But it should never be forgotten, because it functions as a warning. Our species is at a crossroads. We cannot go on as we have for the past century. It’s true that we have apocalypse written on our DNA, but we also have much, much more. We have a degree of free will that allows us to reject our programming, to build free institutions, respect the rights of each individual, to build and create. We have the ability to become better, but we must first choose to do so. Our nature seeks to build the Sun-worshipping, virgin-sacrificing, totalitarian State. We will always feel its pull, that voice out of our shadowed past that wishes to return. But we have the ability to reject it, to evolve. And the COVID pandemic has made clear that we must evolve, or we must die.
