...and a little cockroach shall lead them.

Dear George,

It’s all winding down. Creaks and groans are heard from deep in the machinery as screws pop and rods break. It fills the air with a blue haze and fouls the waters with its effluvia. The great human enterprise is grinding to a halt.

Some claim that man’s ingenuity will save us, and that we will find the technological silver bullet that will allow us to continue to merrily motor from mall to mall.

Hello!

Cosmos to earth!

What in the fuck has technology done for us recently, other than create ecological destruction on a grand scale, slaughter millions and put mankind under the threat of nuclear annihilation? Hell, George, Auschwitz was a shining example of technical innovation.

Add to that the fact that in a corporate society, innovation and profit are so tightly bound together that the idea of technology taking a loss to serve humanity is absurd. As one economist observed, “It may not be profitable to slow decline.”

Then there’s another question: What has humanity done in the last 4,000 year to deserve survival? On the whole, we have a pretty shitty track record. Sure, we’ve made gargantuan advances in medicine, advances so sophisticated that medical treatment is becoming too expensive for an increasing number of people. But, I wonder if we compare the number of people saved by modern medicine with the number slaughtered by increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction which way the scale would tip.

I think we might be in the red.

Religion reassures us that God won’t let us go down the tubes because He gave us dominion over the earth. And that is correct; we did have dominion, briefly. Then Eve went apple picking. If you read God’s curse on Adam and Eve, it’s obvious that we lost our dominion and became just another derivative species. For that matter, it is our deluded belief that we have dominion over nature that has gotten us into this mess.

As I have pointed out in previous letters, there’s no law that says the next Messiah can’t be a cockroach.

Samuel Beckett caught the spirit of our age when he said, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.”

In the face of pending human extinction, there is but one course for the enlightened leader to take—maximize profits. Spreading misery kills time while we wait for the final Fall.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones