We are The Last

We are the ones, every last one of us, we are each individual one, and many, all at the same time. A tiny part of our lives is vested in that of another. A tiny part of their life rests in ours. Day in and day out, our lives intermingle and bounce against each other. We, this body of people and existencies are the brownian particles of history. No rhyme or reason, but still we affect, in our own tiny way, everyone else who ever shall exist. And throughout time, throughout all of existence as we have recorded it, we have watched as the pendulum of thought and control has swung between Augustus to Pelagius and back. We watch, still, as the oscillations diminish and waste away. At last, in the very near future, that pendulum will slow and stop and still, and move no more.

And now, unlike at any other point in human history, we have nothing. No spark, no industry or drive to throw our hand to the pendulum and begin the cycle anew. There is no cleavage here upon which we can depend or hang our hopes. We have not even the indignity and horror of oppression, for even the hope of cruelty and untold suffering can spur us to move. There is nothing, and for that, for once, we are grateful. We stand alone, at this point, khorosho, all well and good, and in a place where neither happiness nor sorrow are matters for concern.

For more time than we can properly comprehend, humanity has acquired the veneer and sheen of what we have come to call civilisation. Throughout all of the centuries, we have strived (Sp?) and sought. Above all else, this is the mark of human endeavour. We suspected, supposed; we had above all the suspicion that there was a heaven, something beyond this. It mattered not whether that heaven was a better role in life than the one that vicissitudes of fate had assigned us, or whether it was a place beyond this life that we could go and there reach some state of bliss that was unknowable on this water covered rock. But in suspecting that heaven we all strove, and held our hands outwards and upwards in hope. Without something to keep that faith and passion alive, like anything else that goes untended in a harsh climate, it has been overpowered. Beaten down by the weight of the information we bury ourselves in. Suffocated by the million different things we have put between ourselves and [lsdknf]. And without that, we have no cause to strive.

Mankind, humanity, all of us. We are on a plateau now, one from which there shall be no movement, no great breakaway. Nothing, no step change, we have come through that phase now, where our ingenuity ran away with us and carried us breathlessly into the sky and deep into the bowels of the earth. Where the forces of political upheaval as people's faith in progress and hopes for themselves, their children, and their greater descendants clashed with those from others all over the world. We fought and argued. We suppressed and oppressed in equal measure, as the ebb and flow of power within countries and around the planet left entire peoples bobbing in the wars and revolutions and movements that follow power as surely as our night still follows day, after eight thousand years of civilisation.


And gradually, so gradually now, the waves of power that washed over humanity have levelled themselves out. The planet is becalmed. There is not so much a peace, as a simple absence of conflict. As the world became smaller and more interconnected, so did wars and conflict and our power grabs. And by degrees, by the tiniest of steps, we have teetered away from the precipice of oblivion, and instead, we are here. This place, where there is nothing, except an endless procession of days stretching into the future, that look far too much like this for any one man to comprehend and not take his own life in the face of such futility. The fury that we should feel in this cultural wasteland is gone. It is the most specific absence in our lives Without our faith in progress, we have no imbalances of power. Without those imbalances of power, we have no great suffering, meaning we have no great men.

Instead of tending to entropy, we have tended to mediocrity, and here we sit now, not the middle children of history, but the last. The last children, for all of those who come after us will be the same. They may have different faces and different names, but this, this is the last chance for them to be different people. Within a generation, we will have lost everything that will let us climb out from here. This is, the end. We are The Last.