An Optimistic View

I've been meaning to write this blog post for quite some time, but like so many things in life, my enthusiasm has contracted a vicious and incurable disease and has gone terminal. The result is that I've really had to go to town looking for a reason to fight mundanity.

Which, neatly, brings me on to my latest doom-spiral. The world is not grim enough. I hear you choke on your Middle Class breakfast cereal. Yes, you, oh conscienced reader! You whom compassionately sees so much horror in the world and wags their head accordingly. Perhaps you even give to charity. Perhaps not.

The fact of the matter is, the world isn't horrible enough. Which is to say not that the world isn't a detestable mire of loathing and pain, but that it has not sank to the heinous depth of embracing the sheer futility of life as we know it. Simply put, it is just not abhorrent. It is, compared to many things, from futuristic dystopias to feudal serfdom, relatively nice. And that is the most terrible thing about life in the West. It is bearable.

A bright future. A shining hope.

Now, you might think this is a bit of a strange thing to say, so let me elaborate before you jab your fingers in your ears eyes and stop reading.

I've read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, as has any privalged young scholar. It is a classic. A portrait of a dystopian universe ruled by oppression and loathing. If you want an image of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. The entire point of Nineteen Eighty Four is that it is not necessarily the opposite of what we have today, but that it is unbearable.

Lately, it may have occurred to you when you woke up this morning that the world isn't exactly a horrendous Orwellian dictatorship. We get social security, the right to vote, and generally are left pretty much alone to run our consumerist lives in a happy bubble of ignorance. And that is what is so annoying. Because the system is so corrupt, so utterly worthless and devoid of any basic level of human decency, it continues, because it just falls off the radar.  It's just that little bit off our consciences. Alright, so the world isn't perfect, but it's pretty good to me. We shake our heads at injustice, and marvel at the amount of people who die from treatable diseases. We'll make jokes about natural disasters and mourn the deaths of celebrities as if god himself had just given up and shuffled off the coil. But nothing really gets to us.

And thus, it continues. Forever.

So, what I propose is an unbearable life of unimaginable fear, suffering and pain. It wouldn't be popular, but we could market it well. Perhaps as the 'Sub-Sarahan experience', where willing protaganists scratch a living out of the ruined earth whilst contracting all sorts of horrible plagues and being shot at with AK's. They then walk five miles to get water, only to have it stolen by an opportunistic camel at the last possible moment. A genuine glimpse of hell. We could do a package deal that includes being involved in an airport bombing en-route, or a Family Ticket, where kids stay-and-play for free, provided they risk abduction by human traffikers.

Not only would this be an act of temporal contrition for those blessed with religious persuasion - purging us of our sin in a Se7enesque scenario - but more importantly it would remind people of the need to change what's going on. At the moment we can have many stand alone experiences of just how utterly meaningless we are. We can get watercannoned, detained without trial, ruled by dubious elections and the interests of people who aren't us, but that's all ok. That's something that happens to people on the news. The watercannons and the detentions, and the bombs, the preventable diseases, and the jobless, hopeless, quagmire of despair. Generally speaking, people only act when something affects them personally.

Then, when it gets too much, it all kicks off.

So here's to our horrifying, pointless future! Long live Orwell, and his vision of our perfect destiny. Lets lose all the pretenses of freedom. We don't need them anymore. Embrace the shackles of a dead world! Revel in the futility of life!