Rants

[GaiusIuliusCesar]

Oh Hesiod...

In our own time humans live an existence of toil and misery. Sons dishonor their fathers, daughters their mothers, brother fights with brother and the social contract between guest and host is forgotten. During this age might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. Humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing, in fact they revel in it. Students mock their teachers, and cast dispersion upon the whole of the established institutions. 

What was once called murder, rape, plunder, and desecration is now but a matter of course. The sacred is profane, and the profane sacred. Indeed only those things that are destructive are practiced with enthusiasm. The only trust that can be had is the trust in the inevitable betrayal of all indication of weakness. To be exploited is the only safe assumption for the weak in the presence of the strong. 

We are long past the age of iron, our kingdom now descends to one of rust. 

[anDaibhalsHusair]

Things look much different through time and parchment don't they? It's a bit naive to think that the state of morality was so much better in centuries past. The truth is that a combination of media supersateration, and limitations of what written history is, create the false perception that people were more virtuous in the past.

[mthor]

"I show thee a land turned topsy-turvy...." with essentially the same observations, found on an Egyptian papyrus from, if memory serves me (as it so seldom does), the end of the Old Kingdom, well over a millenium before Hesiod.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[GaiusIuliusCesar]

true enough its a sort of macro level version of the "everything was better when I was 5" mentality. Still its useful to have an idea of what an ideal world would be with which to contrast what we actually have.

[GaiusIuliusCesar]

the old kingdom had a knack for being heady, I remember one legend about a Pharaoh who was told by the gods how long he would have to live and that Egypt would fall into chaos right after. He then doubled his life span by governing at night instead of sleeping. As an insomniac the idea of that appeals to me.

[westpark]

U should get a degree in Italian poetry.

[the_shotgun_rhetoric]

"Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity."

-Ellis, No Country For Old Men