The Age of Trivia

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Much as I feel incapable of solving, let alone understanding my specie's self-destructive imperative, apparently I have some useful concepts as we watch the history of this phenomenon unfold.

'The Age of Trivia' is a concept for our current transition into what I call 'The Last Dark Age'. My country, the USA, has already clearly demonstrated exactly why it will become entirely irrelevant in the world. We are now in desperation mode and that isn't going to stop, certainly from what little insight I have into the future. Desperation is actually being used as a tool by our increasingly sociopathic culture. Letting go of desperation as a weapon is outside of any sociopathic culture's comprehension.

With desperation a constant source of loud, screaming noise in the background, the world human culture has already begun to dig its head deep into the dirt to shut it out. To pass the time, to conjure some sort of sense of personal usefulness in the world, to entertain and distract ourselves, we are now specializing in trivial pursuits. It's a classic case of fiddling while our modern 'Rome' burns and shouts at us to make it stop. We have real problems to solve, real human survival, Earth survival at stake. But instead we're off in the ozone playing with trivial garbage. It's classic desperation behavior.

For me, this 'Age of Trivia' began with claims by both scientists and cult loonies to have cloned a human. There is no more dire trivial pursuit amidst my specie's determination to destroy itself and its only home planet, than humans bothering to clone themselves. This trivia began in 2001. Here is a detailed article about the subject from that year:

Baby, It's You! And You, And You...
By Nancy Gibbs Sunday, Feb. 11, 2001, Time Magazine

Last month a well-known infertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of the University of Kentucky, announced that he and Italian researcher Severino Antinori, the man who almost seven years ago helped a 62-year-old woman give birth using donor eggs, were forming a consortium to produce the first human clone. Researchers in South Korea claim they have already created a cloned human embryo, though they destroyed it rather than implanting it in a surrogate mother to develop. . . .

And, as usual, once a dire subject is being discussed in public based upon verified factual information, the loonies come out of the cracks and spew their abstract craziness on the scene, muddying the water. In this case, in 2003 it was a space alien worshiping 'religious' cult called the Raelians who claimed they were the first to birth a human clone. (o_0)It was the entertainment topic of the week, even more diverting than news about the horror of the real thing. Here is one article from 2003 on the subject:

Cult 'clones' a baby! Read (and read) all about it
Regarding Media 
Los Angeles Times/January 1, 2003 
By Tim Rutten

Take, for example, the coverage given last Friday's assertion by the Raelian religious cult that a company founded by its adherents had cloned the first human baby. Consider, for one moment, the objective circumstances: a crackpot cult, whose French founder says he got his marching orders from a space alien, calls a press conference in Miami to announce that a cloned child has been born to an unidentified woman in an unspecified place the day after Christmas. . . .

What inspired me to make this blog post was this new bit of what I consider to be classic Age of Trivia news. Mad scientists on the loose creating something more deadly than what nature can devise. Awesomeness. Total trivia in the face of real ongoing crises:

Scientists plan controversial lab-made bird flu

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
Aug 7, 2:54 PM (ET)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press)

Scientists who sparked an outcry by creating easier-to-spread versions of the bird flu for research purposes want to try such experiments again using a worrisome new strain. This time around, the U.S. government is promising extra scrutiny of such high-stakes research up front. . . .

Right. My government, that has destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution via blanket surveillance of US citizens on US soil, wants me to believe it can sanely scrutinize anything. Instead I entirely expect this bit of trivial pursuit to only add to our ongoing crises. Brilliant stuff, this desperation behavior.

For years I've been attempting to get a handle on the subject of desperation behavior. I've found exactly nothing about it as a formal subject of study. Instead, I've found bits and pieces here and there, mainly within the thought realm of psychology. Some time I expect I'll dare to post a summary of what I have found so far. For now, the best source of learning is simply the daily news.

As ever, when I write about this depressing rubbish, I am lead to remind us that the best cure for all these trivial horrors is humor and offensive positive push against the subject. Living has never been about suffering. Living is about growing. So the simple cure for The Age of Trivia and all the other crap inflicted on us by our own species is to laugh and laugh at it while learning how to be our best selves. That's anti-desperation behavior. I like it!

:-Derek