I hate the masses.

I hate the masses.

Really, yes. What tipped you off?

More bellyaching from me? Who coulda guessed? Cyprus wasn't enough, so when I point out that New Zealand, Spain and Italy are considering hopping on the bandwagon, they shrug their shoulders and go back to the televitz.




It seems that for every step forward in humankind supplied by the great thinkers, inventors and movers, the masses have the uncanny ability to take those advances and completely twist them around in the stupidest and most degenerate fashion possible.

*They get dynamite to blow up mountains; dynamite is promptly turned around and used to blow up people. Alfred Nobel is sad, institutes Nobel Prizes. Nobel Prize devolves into a circlejerk popularity contest, especially with regards to the peace prize, which is a complete joke. If we dug up the corpse of Alfred Nobel it'd be spinning so fast, we could hook him up to some wire loops and magnets and turn him into a goddamn generator. He'd provide power to the whole of Eurasia, at the very least.

"Mr. Nobel, the people still living have given a communist imbecile the peace prize before he's ever done anything useful. Oh, and they're still blowing other people up."

"Can I please commit suicide?"

"Mr. Nobel, you're already dead."

"I know, I know. And the worst thing is I don't know if I'm in heaven or hell."

"Purgatory, my friend."

*They get the televitz and the internet, two great forms of mass communication, and then promptly manage to fill it up with daytime talk shows, reality tee-vee, and Facebook. They muck it up to the point where the inventor of the televitz regrets ever having come up with the damned thing. Those moving pictures piped straight into their homes, where folks can see and hear people and places, and the person is some fat talk show host and the place is a gringy studio prettied up to make it look like a suburban home, with an audience packed so tight it'd stink if not for the air-conditioning.

"I would like to watch the travel show that showcases cultures and peoples I will probably never get to see in person and nevertheless interest me deeply."

"Fuck you, the game is on."

*They get antibiotics, miracle drugs that ward off the pestilences of old, and instead of reserving them for their own use they go ahead and pump cows and chickens so full of them they get into the water supply and the environment. Even when they want them for themselves, they use the damn things willy-nilly, believing them panaceas. And of course, no one wants to pay money developing short-term drugs when you could be making high blood pressure drugs that people have to be on for a lifetime, so there haven't been any new classes of antibiotics since 1987. Whoo-ee.

So be it. You want surgery? Be prepared for a massive risk of infection and gangrene. Be prepared to die from Tuberclosis. Let's all go back to the days of aqua vitae, boiled wine and piss, and honey.

"Why are you denying me my antibiotics? I got a right to health care! You hear me? A right!"

"Now, Mr. Brown, you've got Athlete's Foot. That's not treatable with -"

"I got a damn right, and if you don't give me my damn antibiotics I'm going to sue you for malpractice, regardless of whether you are justified or not!"

"Fine, fine." (Under breath) "Cretin."

*They get contraception, something that can finally free them from their rabid need to breed, and god damn do they fuck it up. Once Gandarusa is on the market, for every man and woman fucking each other there can be up to five goddamn layers of contraception. His pill, her pill, his rubber, her rubber, and if you want to go for the overkill you might as well throw an IUD in there for shits and giggles (Sure, all five at once may not be practical, but it is possible). And despite the pill alone having a proven 99% effectiveness rate, despite degenerate schools taking it upon themselves to teach kiddies to place condoms on bananas, despite the stuff being handed out like candy and subsidised to ass and back, we still get millions of oopsies every goddamn year from people who should have known better and had access to at least a packet of Pete's penny-a-pound polymer preventatives.

Well, damn. You can only wonder what went on in ages past:

Melon woman: "Dear, I'd like to have another kid, but I don't think we can afford it right now."

Melon man: "All right, I've got some more slaves coming in on the next barge, I'll put those to work right away. You can butter up the local dignitaries' wives, and we'll see if we can't scheme our way into a bigger homestead in half a year."

Thal woman: "Dear, I'd like to have another kid, but the last few mammoth hunts didn't go so well."

Thal man: "It's all right, we can abstain for a bit. Besides, the cold's coming back, and it's probably not a good time for another mouth in the tribe."

Cro-mag woman: "Wheat no grow. Want kid to add to horde anyway. Last one fell into ravine and broke skull. Bang-bang feel good."

Cro-mag man: "No matter kid die, can make more. Bang-bang good! Bang-bang now!"

*You try to tell them about eating right, about not cramming themselves full of pink slime and horse meat and what not, about giving full saturated fats a try, about avoiding crap such as aspartame, about reducing gluten in one's diet. You tell them that they can give it a go for a couple of months and judge the results for themselves. You tell them they're focusing too much on cardio, that they need to hit the weights a little...

...And then they stare at you because you didn't follow the narrative of the neat little food pyramid everyone was taught in school. And then you pull a few weights, show them what you've achieved yourself as proof that it's worked for you, and it doesn't provoke inspiration, it provokes hatred. You can see it in their eyes, that they loathe that you actually took the time to work out five days a damned week for eleven years while they lazed on the couch and made excuses. How dare you push yourself harder than them.

"But it's Brawndo, damn it! It's got electrolytes in it! And aspartame! And dextrose! And who knows what else! But it's Brawndo! How can you deny the sweet syrupy drip of Brawndo?!"

*They get a credit card, and don't even realise that they can't add up numbers and make one number bigger than the other. They win the lottery, and end up blowing it all on useless crap. If you gave them carte blanche, they'd probably scribble all over the damn thing for what it was worth. They can't budget if their lives depended on it, probably have never seen a balance sheet in their lives, and are living paycheck to paycheck, or even worse, welfare cheque to welfare cheque.

Then you try to explain why socialism isn't going to work at the governmental level, while the familial and small community level where it does work to some extent, things are being deconstructed at an astonishing speed by the very same idiots, lured by a government carrot. They don't even understand the idea of "you can't spend more than you produce".

"We don't have a debt problem."

"But you do. And to make it worse, your deficit is growing by the year. Come on, you have to cut something."

"YOU MONSTER! DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN AND THE OLD AND THE SICK AND THE GARDEN GNOMES?"

***

Everything they touch is falls into ruin, every idea they grasp ahold of is corrupted beyond recognition.

Sleep. Consume. Fuck. Obey.

There's a scene in Terry Pratchett's Jingo where Leonard of Quirm, realising that small-minded men will only use his pedal-powered submarine for warfare, chooses to scuttle the craft and send it to the ocean floor before promptly losing himself in his next great project.

And so the cycle repeats itself.