Latter-Day Myths

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

Yes, our post tribal history is replete, with blood curdling repetition.
 
Today, we kill in Ukraine.
Yesterday, in Iraq.
And the Day before, in……..?
 
Go ahead, fill in the blanks, decade by decade, or century by century.
 
And yet we cling to the duly Consecrated Myths of ‘Progress’ and “Civilisation”.
 
Time we broke with that abysmal claptrap.
 
And get real.
 
Enlightenment?
 
That veneer is not even skin deep.
 
We remain , as ever, bloodthirsty neanderthals.
 
*
 
I have said it before: we are inveterate myth-making animals.
 
We scorn, in supercilious, abject, contempt, the myths of our forebears.
 
Whilst worshipping our own delusions, in equally breathless adoration.
 
*
 

Consider our own EM (EuroModernist) myths.
 
Liberty, equality, democracy….etc.
 
These have always been fanciful idylls most of us swear by, than actual endowments.
 
For few things could be further from the truth.
 
We have loyally absorbed political slogans self-proclaiming the high virtue of the system.
 
They are part of what Chomsky once called the ‘manufacture of consent’: today, I would call it machinofacture of the same.
 
And few care to seriously examine their empirical (and theoretical) validity.
 

It never occurs to the many that these might be canny tools of mass control, or weapons of mass deception.
 
The governors can pull back, abrogate , suspend , such ‘rights’, willy nilly.
 
But rights that can be annulled, at will, are not rights, but privileges.
 
And the privileged have always had rights, in all systems.
 
*
 
Few even know that Habeas Corpus , dating back to the Magna Carta, lies suspended.
 
Ask yourself: are we a democracy?
 
Take a look at the Princeton/Northwestern study (https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4 )
 
We appear to have a govt of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.
 
And yet, like hapless turkeys, we still , fervently, vote for Xmas.
 
Or, do we have equality?
 
How many more Afro-ams have to be murdered by the state for us to doubt such slogans?
 
Are we law-governed, in a ‘rules based order‘ ?
 
How many international laws have the US/UK not broken, continuously, in the past 200 years, to this day?
 
It is little short of a travesty.
 
*
 
As I often say it, we are still , in praxis, little better than chimps.
 
Chimps who affect high airs.
 
What a grim parody!
 
The EM governors have affected higher airs than any other on the planet, while looting, scavenging, and ransacking , the resources of others.
 
It is all really quite grotty.
 

*
 
At any rate, as the world crumbles around us, it behooves us to examine some of the many myths that we have taken for granted.
 
We might yet learn something, however late.
 
Could be time to curb your dogma?
 
[© R.Kanth 2023]

 
Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).