Historic philosophic religions tended to be of only two types. Either things had always been and always would be the same, or the world has once been much better than it is now. Sometimes there would be an apocalyptic cycle, when all would begin again .
Like many human thoughts, these were based on natural observation. The sun comes up every day. People live, decay, die – as does all life. Such can easily be extrapolated to cosmic visions .
Some of the “golden age” believers went further and extrapolated decline into horrors and dystopia. Some preached that we could hold it back for a while with moral reform. And there was always an audience to listen to how bad things could be, maybe because that made the present more endurable .
Now we seem to be in a golden age of dystopian predictions. Following a brief reversion to “progress”, civilization has returned to the old attitudes. The only question is which of the dueling dystopias will happen. Novelists all assume that we are in the golden age, and the future looks bleak indeed .
But the plain fact remains that life mostly goes on, dreamtime as always, one day after another, endlessly the same, eternally different. The certainty of individual mortal journey is, after all, always bleak .
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 