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Observing the Apocalypse

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 3/6/2006

I. The New Politics

Politics, in all its forms, is bankrupt. The notion that we can safely and successfully hand over the management of our daily lives and the setting of priorities to a political class or elite is thoroughly discredited. Politicians cannot be trusted, regardless of the system in which they operate. No set of constraints, checks, and balances, is proved to work and mitigate their unconscionable acts and the pernicious effects these have on our welfare and longevity.

Ideologies - from the benign to the malign and from the divine to the pedestrian - have driven the gullible human race to the verge of annihilation and back. Participatory democracies have degenerated everywhere into venal plutocracies. Socialism and its poisoned fruits - Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism - have wrought misery on a scale unprecedented even by medieval standards. Only Fascism and Nazism compare with them unfavorably. The idea of the nation-state culminated in the Yugoslav succession wars.

People are voting with their feet. Most elections draw to the ballot boxes and the polling stations less than half the electorate.

Three models seem to be emerging as the dominant forms of future politics:

I. Anarchism, both destructive (international terrorism, for example) and constructive (the Internet, for instance).

II. Participatory democracy, both destructive (mob rule and coups) and constructive (people power, especially in Asia and Latin America).

III. In certain countries, mainly in the West, a disenchanted and uninterested citizenry will relegate power and vest it in various oligrachies, forfeiting its decision-making prerogatives altogether and permanently in return for material welfare and personal safety.

One such oligarchy is the Church.

II. The da Vinci Syndrome

"The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest."

(English historian Edward Gibbon on Pope John XXIII)

The history of the Catholic Church reads like the annals of a global crime concern. It gave the world the inquisition, incestuous and murderous popes, religious warfare, pedophiliac sex scandals, idolatry, and the gnawing guilt that comes from embracing life-defying ideals. Its intentional lack of transparency, murky dealings, and refusal to be held accountable for the actions of its adherents and officials have rendered it complicit in the most horrendous events of the last two millennia.

With a modicum of justice it has been accused of anything and everything from collaborating with the Nazi regime (and helping war criminals flee justice) to instigating and perpetrating the more insidious forms of anti-Semitism. Its current head was a willing member of the Nazi youth movement. Its former, long-serving, chief actively spread AIDS throughout the developing world by prohibiting the use of contraceptives.

Hence "The da Vinci Code" and a slew of other anti-Catholic tomes. This genre thrives on the widespread conviction that there is nothing the Catholic Church will refrain from doing or find too abhorrent to further its earthly wealth and might. Alas, history this time is on the side of the conspiracy theorists.

III. The Familar Gone Awry

The Catholic Church is a private case of a larger trend.

In this nightmarish world of ours even the erstwhile comfortingly familiar has gone awry and menacing.

Birds, those soaring symbols of liberty and beauty now carry death and devastation in the form of avian flu.

Airplanes, the reification of overcoming gravity and attaining freedom, these harbingers of the global village, now wreak havoc by slamming into skyscrapers and bombing weddings.

The Internet, this eruption of joyous creativity and boundless interaction, is now a minefield of flame wars, malware, gambling, crime, spam, and child pornography.

The United States, once considered by many the beacon of democracy, the home of the liberal ideal exiled from Europe by wars and genocides - is now a thuggish, brutish, murderous threat to world peace and stability.