They had so lost the feeling that their lives were worthwhile that they were willing to countenance almost anything, even nuclear war. Burden after burden had been placed upon them. Stress after stress had succeeded in messing up their minds to such a degree that almost anything was better than the status quo and the prospect of everything turning ever more rapidly to shit.
Most individuals harkened back to what they considered to be a golden era in their lives with which they measured the present. And the present almost always sucked to almost everyone. Now was the worst of all times and nothing they did or those above them did changed a damn thing except to make it even more shit-ridden than before. As had been the case in recent decades they were primed to shout that “Something must be done!”
Most people wanted things fixed and fast, the more violent, dynamic and drastic the better. Dulled nerves and emotions needed a big blast to enliven them. Movies with plenty of death and destruction went down well among them. The vicarious pleasure involved was transferred from those fantasy scenarios ever more directly to the world about them and the world’s of others ‘over there’.
Primed to have constantly bleeding hearts for someone or other ‘over there’ they demanded a supersized portion of mass death, shuddering explosions and breast-beating patriotism to solve such issues, if not exactly to solve them at least to create a great series of visuals to pump up their flagging heartbeats. But now there was a new ‘something must be done’ scenario created to be cheaper than the previous offerings which had proven too expensive.
In rapidly descending societies where frustration was growing by exponential leaps and bounds along with depression, suicide, drug use, economic decline, viral panic and state violence the longing was for a convenient scapegoat to escape all the suffering going on among their in fact over-privileged throng. This was the ultimate and very ugly irony at the heart of this. These were societies of the long term cosseted and highly privileged where hunger was extremely rare and excessive affluence was not.
One pampered nation, in particular, cried out for someone to pay for all their sorry woes. Every movie they watched had bad guys who wanted to ruin things for the Honest Joes they conceived themselves to be. Weren’t they the conscience and good-hearted white hats who had a duty to gun down the evil-doers, the followers of Satan and any others who upset them in that black and white box of addled memory and nostalgia in their rather thought-challenged heads?
There must be someone or someones to blame for their ever-worsening plight. The myriad heads infected with a simplistic dichotomy of thought where only good and evil, Jesus and the Devil, white right and black wrong “knew” that they only had to identify the bad guys and eliminate them to set the world (and their lives) to rights. So it was that the bad guys were laid out before them with limelight playing constantly all over them for all to see.
These bad guys suited all concerned. Those who had mismanaged economies for decade after decade, who had opened innumerable floodgates to massive wealth for the few to the detriment of the many could create an enormous sign of a hand pointing… you guessed it, ‘over there’. The teeming millions had an answer to their interminable question about why their lives were so incredibly and increasingly shitty. Of course, it was the Russians, those creepy reds with their insane lust for world dominance and destruction of democracy that were to blame. And if it wasn’t them, well the switch could be flicked. It was the Chinese. Or better still, both.
The Russkies and the Chinks were interfering in the greatest society ever known (yes, that same one that had made them feel like shit for decades now). If they could be exterminated all would be well. And the wellspring of that feeling had been carefully nurtured, fine-tuned and laid down in endless layers of “knowledge” as incontrovertible fact on an intense level in recent years. It was obvious. They needed to be ‘dealt with’. The might of their nation could not tolerate the evil that they simply refused to stop displaying. Didn’t almost every headline demonstrate this fact?
So it was that nuclear war against the Russian and Chinese hordes, the “reds” and the “yellow peril” became ever more popular. Weren’t the Russians constantly persecuting the Ukrainians after having outrageously and illegally invaded their country? Weren’t the Chinese threatening the poor innocent Taiwanese making their highly laudable lives a misery? Weren’t these two dragons to put to the sword, two prime candidates for bringing to justice or to the sword for their sins?
That a mistrustful population across the western world that indulged in every conspiracy theory that came down the pike could believe things were so utterly simple was a mystery to many outside its borders. Emotions of simplistic clarity had long taken the place of logical analysis and respect for known facts. The psychologies of mass manipulation had been developed where a kind of group-thought mesmerism had been achieved through the death of semantic neutrality, the overlaying of the required agenda and the targeting of emotion using emotive issues and images.
The next steps would be child's play. The widespread acceptance of nuclear war as an inevitable consequence of the terrifying level of evil now in the world. That evil, which once destroyed, would leave everyone completely at one with themselves again, satisfied with a job well done and justice served with all the bad times they had known now behind them. It was a tasty prospect for minds so addled by fantasy and misdirection that such a thing as reality hardly existed anymore. All was emotion and wants. And they wanted war.
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