Essays From The Master

The myth of the 21^st century
 

As a young child the 21^st century was the realm of Science Fiction the people of the world were promised all sorts of things jet packs, flying cars and most of all a utopian world. Now in the 21^st century we have a great deal of what we have been promised with the internet, cell phones and the like we can communicate at will all over the world much as seen in speculative fiction of people such as Gene Roddenberry. We have not all we were promised but the world has made progress and there are forces that have used “progress” as a concept to manipulate the population of the world. Indeed for the dream of utopia many would be willing to submit to a great deal and history has shown that most prefer security to freedom.

 

As we progress in technology there are those who take this moment in time to attempt to reshape the world much as in France before the Revolution. In the case of France a group of aristocrats who were on the outs with the royal court set about the overthrow of the nobility using the pretense that it was for the poor to produce a society of equals, the result of this revolution was the horror that was Napoleon. Adolf Hitler took advantage of his people in much the same way as was done in France before the revolution. In these and other cases throughout time or rather history we can see how the masses gave themselves over to a movement promised a utopia only to become the tools of tyrants.   Utopia requires conformity which is an element that many representations of the concept leave out unless one ideology is using the concept of a contrived utopia to denigrate another as was done in The Stepford Wives.

 

Today in the name of Utopia we are encouraged to think of ourselves as being “citizens of the world” and while some ethnic pride is pushed among those who are viewed by the “progressive” forces as being downtrodden while any kind of national pride is seen as out of date or is said to be “quaint.” This is a tactic of tyrants to tell each group that they are downtrodden and then set the groups against each other to keep all sides from looking at what the leaders of the “revolution” are doing. I for one am an American of a varied descent and I believe that the USA and our allies are the good guys in terms of the world. Can the nation be better? The answer is yes but not by doing away with what made the USA great in the first place rather the nation must hold to what works and see that our “progress” does not outstrip our maturity as a nation.

 

We are now in times that once were the stuff of myths and we have made some of those myths both good and bad a reality. The 21^st century is not the great utopia of sci-fi nor is it the Big Brother state of Orwell as I could not write this and the many other works I have. I find the 21^st century to be very much in the mold of Japan in the era of the fall of the Samurai. The world has the choice of holding to and improving through the various traditions that have kept it going or casting all aside and moving toward ways of life that work great in theory such as equality for all but only work in practice if all agree on what such terms as equality mean. Utopia requires conformity and thus a body or individual to define what that form or norm is. Let us consider the cost before we invest in the myth of the 21^st century.