We Have Met the Enemy, and He is....
In another forum, some contributors noted what seems to be almost the prophetic prescience of writers like Aldous Huxley and Ayn Rand who many decades ago wrote with such predictive power about what is happening around us today.
In response, my thought was, apart from the necessary story-telling and writing skills, all one needed to produce such works was a thorough understanding of unregenerate human nature.
History, with every new crop of human beings, wipes the slate clean. The rising generation know nothing, and, learning as they go - or not - will unavoidably confront unregenerate human nature - their own and that of their fellow human beings.
Some few - those inclined to learn from history and personal experience - those who see a brighter inner light beckoning them to something of a higher order - will reject and struggle against their unregenerate nature and find their way to varying degrees of regeneration, enlightenment, and, at the highest level, God-driven spiritual rebirth. Among these are they who come to understand the horrors unregenerate human nature has wrought in the past, wreaks now, and will ever wreak in all ages of the world. They can then talk, teach and write about it, as some few have done throughout recorded human history.
Others - the majority, I think - devoid of the vision and will to fight the necessary inner battle, to varying degrees will acquiesce to and come to terms with their inner monster. They will worship at its altar, be manipulated and ruled absolutely by it, and never understand what is happening to them as it leads them carefully down into the abyss.
Like millions upon millions before them, they will suffer the inexorable consequences of being under the dictatorship of what the Bible copiously refers to as the "sin nature" of man, and what King Benjamin, a Book of Mormon prophet (about 124 BC) calls "the natural man":
"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, Mosiah 3:19
Endowed with intelligence beyond that of common animals, the natural man, ungoverned by any moral or spiritual law, is nevertheless a ravening beast who seeks his own self-interest above all else, no matter what the cost to his fellow beings. These monsters wreak havoc upon themselves and upon any society they are a part of. They become mindless cannon fodder or lead others to become such. Without a second thought, they jam their fellow human beings into the great and insatiable meat grinder of blood-soaked human history.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est the meme chose." The more it changes, the more it's the same thing.
Nothing new under the sun.
The natural man has been around since the beginning - even before the beginning of time - and his behavior never changes. Once you figure out how he operates, you know with almost perfect certainty how he will behave and what to expect from him. Then, with a little inspiration, imagination and writing skill, you can produce such works as "1984", "Animal Farm", "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead" - and, of course, the Bible and the Book of Mormon - all springing from an understanding of the beast that is the unregenerate human being.
Or, alternatively, we can set aside all those massive tomes and get right down to the fundamental, simple truth of the matter.
As Pogo so profoundly observed -
Torquemada