The World and the Handbasket Are Already in Hell

Since the epidemic of school and other random shootings in the last ten years, I've heard a lot of people commenting on how the world is "going to hell in a handbasket" i.e. that society is sliding further and further downhill. In fact, it seems to be the general consensus that the 20th century was pretty much the turning point in the whole of human history, triggering tighter restrictions on everything from guns on down. I won't say that all of these were bad. Hell thats what laws are for. Sometimes you really do need to limit people for their own good. What I object to is this notion that the decay of society has only recently begun in the industrial age and in concert with decline of organized religion.

*cue dramatic music* Newsflash: people have been doing random crazy shit for thousands of years. This is not new. Look back through history and you will find many legitimate accounts of everything we have today, serial killers, mass murders etc. It's all been done before. The major differences are the speed with which the media can disseminate news of these sorts of things, thereby making them far more common knowledge than in the past, and the advent of weapons that increase body counts exponentially in a single incident. Other than that, nothing has really changed.

Is the way we did things a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago really any different than the way we do things now? Think about it. For a while there, until very recently, everyone thought that we were all so civilized. Now all of a sudden, this is the shittiest that civilization has ever been. Oh really?

You know, once upon time, not so long ago, we had public executions anybody could attend like it was a carnival, bring the kiddies and root the hangman on, take a souvenir.

Over two thousand years ago, it was considered a sport to toss someone in a ring with a lion or other vicious wild animal and watch him die. They built a stadium for it in Rome and thousands of people would come to watch.

Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper, Elizabeth Bathory: These are serial killers from the 15th, 19th and 16th centuries. De Rais killed about a hundred people. Elizabeth Bathory killed roughly 600 over a period of 8 or so years. No serial killer in the last 50 years has come close to that body count.

Slavery: enough said. I'm not just talking about Africans in America, but slavery has been an ongoing theme throughout human history. The Jews by the Egyptians, pretty much everyone by Rome. The Greeks had slaves. Viking peoples had slaves. The list goes on and on. Most of us have pretty much agreed that this is wrong, but it continues to this day, having only gone underground so that it's perpetrators can avoid prosecution.

Anyone ever heard the term pederasty? in ancient Greece, this was a relationship between grown men and adolescent boys outside their families that was often sexual. That's right. Greek men cornered the market on child sexual abuse about 2 millennia before Catholic priests.

Genocide: Europeans tried to do it with indigenous American people and the Nazis tried to do it with Jewish people. There is about 500 years between these two occurrences, which are not by any means the only ones. Both are peppered with incidents of mass murder far outstripping anything we've seen in the last 30 years.

These are just a few examples. If anyone lamenting the woes of contemporary society actually took the time to shut up and read a book, they'd see the things that used to happen are pretty much on par with things that happen now. If people think that human life has no value presently, they should take a look at what rich people and people in power could do to someone considered of no consequence, not only do it, but do it and get away it in many instances.

So the next time someone starts whining about not knowing what the world is coming to I'm going to strangle them. I am so tired of hearing that. The world is coming to the same thing its been coming to for about 5000 years.

Where the hell have these people have been living that any of this comes as a surprise?