Watching The End Of The World
As we watch reality TV and gawp at social media influencers, our fragile society is falling apart
My birth occurred in a hot humid place covered with sand and reeking of camels. My British parents were uncomfortable expatriates, chain-smoking and drinking themselves to death in order to numb the hollowness of their lives. As I grew up, we moved from country to country, rarely staying anywhere for more than two or three years. It was catastrophic for my formal education but in retrospect I acknowledge it was supremely useful in one precise way: I learned that human beliefs are merely the result of time and place and generally have no basis in reality.
Whether a person believes in a particular invisible magical pixie, the superiority of a given culture, the rectitude of the political Party they support, or even the inevitable dominance of a particular hue of skin, is all decided by the place in which they live. As even today only a tiny percentage of the population moves from the culture of their birth to an entirely different culture (and when they do, they generally regard the new culture as being “wrong”) this means that for the most part people in groups believe and act in uniform ways. People do not make choices: they blindly accept whatever they’re told by the senior members of the group within…
