One of the stupidest out of mankind's abundant store of stupidities is the self-vaunting, preening, perniciously myopic conceit that by dint of existing today we know better about EVERYTHING than EVERYBODY who lived yesterday.
Being born later and not being dead yet makes us smarter.
Stupefyingly stupid, isn't it? And just think what dangers such stupidity, like all stupidities, exposes mankind to.
C. S. Lewis (somebody who lived yesterday, poor benighted soul) repeatedly commented on this in his writings. It was clearly one of his inner life's sustained motifs. Things that are gratuitously easy and self-exalting should automatically be suspect...like a snake coming along to tell you that you'll be a god if you'll only eat an apple.... Similarly with this view of the past. It is, Lewis in different words conveyed, a repellent sort of no-cost self-gratification to look back at everybody who ever did one particular thing that we don't happen to have done yet--i.e., die--and say:
"What fools. Look at all the mistakes and wrongs they committed, according to this morning's top trending social-justice hot button. We're practically not even the same species as them anymore! We're so much wiser and...HUMAN-ER now."
Yes, we're wonderful now. Why, a regular Master Race, don't you know.
Down with the Evil Past. Time for the Brave New World. Now we KNOW we're right about everything. We see the whole picture, all of it. At last. Don't it feel go-o-o-o-d?
If anybody tells you different, shred him on social media, maybe burn down his business--THAT'LL show him: Victims of the World Unite!
And one character we certainly don't need hanging around to snap and criticize from the back row is The Past, that annoying little creep. So-o-o...unhelpful. So-o-o...hateful. Throw him out of the building, out of our brave, tolerant, wise new world. Terminate him!
And how do we know all this? Duhhh! Because we're alive and haven't DIED, dummy. What more do you need? Let The Past just TRY and defend himself, let him TRY. We've learned how to not listen, or to scream him down if necessary. What more do you NEED?
What?
WHAT did you say?
That "WE'RE the past, with our own blindnesses that the FUTURE will see right through, and all the more so because of OUR stupidity about the past"?!
How dare you! Out with you, you and The Past together! You must be one of his spies! Terminate!
And Reality waits. Laughs...and waits.
We NEVER know better than The Past about "everything."
It's not how life works.
Perhaps the starkest proof of this is those for whom life is manifestly not working: those shrieking most stridently how The Past needs to be liquidated. They're Exhibit A when it comes to how life doesn't work. Because, at the deepest, most vital levels, they don't get it.
They are precisely the most obvious burn-outs, drop-outs, spoiled-rotten full-of-themselves "privileged," self-disfiguring, self-consumed nebbishes and sociopaths, frantically scrambling after delusions of grandeur (to anesthetize the wasteland within) by lying down "heroically" in front of parked backhoes ("Will this be on YouTube? Did you get my tattoo?") in defense of their fatuous tinker-toy paradise--the Utopian CHOP where The Evolved Human is free at last, free at last: to defecate on the sidewalk, fry his brain on heroin (and nobody cares; ain't it wonderful!), and walk into any shop on the street to take whatever he wants (FREE...at LAST!).
Though what happens when the stores are empty, and there's no money for the next fix, and who after all is gonna de-poop the sidewalks ("Uh, Mom?"), they haven't quite thought through: that would be so yesterday, so counter-revolutionary, so...annoying.
The Prime Directive: don't annoy us. (You just know none of these pathetics have children...at least, by all that's holy, you hope not.)
Yes, Reality laughs grimly.
And waits.
