But I was feeling agitated today. I am starting to engage with the world, and it feels weird. I allowed myself to disengage after nearly a days good work. I started up Tomb Raider. It starts up nearly immediately with very macabre images, with dead bodies hanging upside down everywhere, corpses and skulls everywhere. I don’t know if this is a feature of this series, but it was a bit disturbing to see the imaginative outputs of some very creative and probably young people.
Then I got to thinking about it. In the game thus far I have seen perhaps 200 bodies, of people who were killed by some sort of sacrificial cult. That may be on the low side. Some of these scenes were quite over the top. We react with horror to sacrificial cults, to human sacrifice.
But we killed some 100,000 Iraqis. The number may be higher, or it may be lower. But it was oceanic compared to even the awful scenes in this game.
And there was a lot of religious imagery, Buddhist and East Asian iconography, and it struck me that most of humanity has been crazy for most of human history. War is craziness, but it has been a feature of human life for all of history. History was CREATED to chronicle a war.
I get sometimes at a state I suppose the Existentialists would call authentic. I feel keenly the shortness of life, the perishability of all relationships, and everything we build, and the constant possibility of the eruption of atavism into the order we think we have built. Our animal natures are unseen by most, and fully tamed by virtually none.
And it struck me what a perfect thing it was that the Buddha came upon a method for NOT being crazy. Very few of us value the knowledge that is handed to us on a silver platter daily.
I can honestly say I take my Kum Nye practice seriously. I do the work. I try to focus. I try to learn the lessons. But I can do better.
And I just threw the game away. The game creators derived far too much pleasure in killing Lara in grotesque ways.
The lesson here, though, is that humanity has always been crazy, at least most of it. It may be that some tribes of people for periods of time have not been crazy. The Australian Aboriginals, and maybe some Native American tribes, and some African tribes, and some Asian Indian tribes, etc: some of them may have been largely sane.
But kings are insane. War and violence are insane. Being stuck in a ritual order is insane. Being other than happy, connected with people, and engaged with life is insane.
And I think about our troops and the wars we have fought. I support our troops, but something in me has popped as far as wanting to emulate them. All wars are tragedies.
We need to secure our borders, harden our grid to an EMP, rationalize our financial markets, develop an effective missile defense system, and vastly increase our HumInt capabilities. And then we need to bring everyone home. I’m fine with the fleets being out there, but everyone else needs to look after themselves. It somebody attacks us, we hit them so hard nobody thinks about it again any time soon.
But particularly once you realize 9/11 was much larger than we have been told, and that beyond any doubt government investigators both suppressed information and outright lied to get the conclusions they did, then much of the past decade makes a whole lot less sense.