There’s something very Shakespearian about all that’s happened over the past six months. “Beware the Ides of March”, warns the soothsayer in Julius Caesar. Casca says he has seen lions stalk the streets by night, and men on fire but not affected by the flame.
Here In the real world, In mid-March, and based on little evidence and much fear, our government recklessly flung our priceless social world into the abyss. Chaos and destruction ensued. Locked down, the social world fractured, quaked, and tore itself apart. The class that supported this course of action ignored the effects because, of course, they weren’t effected. The victims of lockdowns were voiceless.
In Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt kills Mercutio under a “boiling sun” during the dog days of late summer. “A plague o’ both your houses!” says Mercutio as he succumbs. Romeo, upon killing Tybalt in murderous vengeance, laments that “I am Fortune’s fool!” Many know the feeling now, and a similar sentiment will be felt by all when we truly understand what’s been forfeited for what is appearing to be an utter lie.
We’ve lived through a summer of death and decay. The lockdowns may have dealt the modern world a mortal wound, we may have fallen below the event horizon, where nothing we can do will bring us out of inevitable collapse. The strangest thing is that it happened so suddenly, which makes one wonder how the human race ever came so far in the first place.
Hellmouths of re-barbarization are venting all over the country. People reverting to their evolutionary programming are stalking the streets. This primitivism is also manifesting in authoritarian Puritanism surrounding the phony pandemic. Far too many people are beginning to take too cancerous an interest in the personal conduct of others, policing each other for signs of non-conformity. The punishment they dole out is severe: violence, public shaming, “cancellation”. The great evil of our primitive nature is awakening in far too many people.
The Kenosha violence is just one example. It will continue. And it’s no coincidence that this violent upheaval has begun only months after the most devastating social policy ever enacted was put into effect.
All of this brings me back to the famous passage in Edmund Burke’s book on the French Revolution:
”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 the Upholsterer mainly, and men wore 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?“
We are witnessing the death of the modern world in real time. Maybe it doesn’t have to be inevitable, maybe it does. But it should be remembered that it wasn’t a natural death. This was murder.
