What Are You Going Through

How could I not now also recall the old graffiti “God is dead—Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead—God.”

just read a review of a book about some lab worker who purposely unleashes a pandemic flu virus in the hopes of killing enough humans to save the environment

Keep releasing carbon into the air and sooner or later—and more and more it’s looking like sooner—we’re fucked. And make no mistake, if there is in fact even a sliver of hope it depends on the survival of liberal democracy. Nothing is going to hasten the end of a livable planet faster than the rise of the far right. And behold, here they are, the two specters marching side by side.”

I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe
not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

Othered. Who is more so than the dying?

And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment

Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself

An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves

It was all over, he said. He quoted another writer, translating from the French: Before man, the forest; after him, the desert. Whatever must be done to forestall catastrophe, whatever actions or sacrifices, it was now clear that humankind lacked the will, the collective will, to undertake them. To any intelligent alien, he said, we would appear to be in the grip of a death wish

there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.