Since the beginning of time we believe we live one step away from the end: discourses on decadence are enjoying an enviable boom.
We are the only animal capable of imagining its death and, by extension, we fantasize about universal catastrophe.
Today germinate here and there apocalyptic of all signs.
In the networks and the media, the prophets of calamity enjoy success and accumulate followers: the algorithms favor the cataclysm and, for some strange reason, the disaster is profitable.
The taste for the hecatomb is ancestral.
Some of the oldest surviving poems are lamentations over the decline of early Mesopotamian and Egyptian cities.
Daniel López Valle cites in his
Extraordinary Stories
of Him a papyrus prior to the glorious age of Ancient Egypt: the
Lament of Ipuur
portrays an evicted country where authority is no longer respected "nor is the well-born distinguished", where "the nephew mistreats his uncle" and, to finish off the job, "everyone has lost their hair" and baldness is rampant in their wide.
In Greece, at the gates of the memorable 5th century BC that would light up the Parthenon and the classical splendours, Theognis wrote poems complaining about a sinking society, where heroic ideals had been lost and the happy times of his parents would never return.
Saint Augustine would say later: "The world has already become old".
It seems unbelievable that, after millennia of degeneration, we still haven't hit rock bottom and we continue to perfect this ability to get worse.
Our Greek and Roman ancestors dreamed backwards, longing for a lost time in which —supposedly— justice, health and abundance reigned.
The words “yours” and “mine” did not exist, since everything was common and money or greed had not been invented —although, paradoxically, they called it the Golden Age—.
Later, the Silver, Bronze and Iron ages followed one another, in a process of unstoppable deterioration that devastated the original Eden and sowed the evils that torment the human being: greed, disease and misery.
Still today, some deplore the Neolithic revolution and reclaim the good old nomadic days.
In reality, every peak epoch belongs to the territories of the imagination rather than to memory.
With the idea of progress, which encouraged us to wait for better times in the future, our fantasies learned to look to the future.
Since then many of our disagreements and disenchantments are born from the place where we locate the utopia.
While some yearn for a golden age of the past - the biblical paradise, the lost empires, the noble savage of Rousseau, uncontaminated nature, the adherents of the Paleolithic diet, or even those bald men who remember more leafy days, as Ipuur would say -, others they have dreamed of their Eden in the future: the resurrection of the flesh, scientific revolutions or progressivism of all stripes.
After years of chained advances and crises, both sides wield their reasons and exaggerations, argue and beat each other up.
Optimists like Steven Pinker emerge, who celebrates the unstoppable statistical advances in health, education, life expectancy, the eradication of poverty and the expansion of human rights.
This vision is opposed by critics of the injustices of capitalism such as Chomsky;
liberals who predict the collapse of the States due to the spiral of debt;
nostalgic who denounce the corruption of values, the forgetting of old certainties and the great replacement of our civilization.
Less coherent, most of us change sides depending on the mood, both rebellious and integrated.
Dickens already said it at the beginning of
A Tale of Two Cities
, "it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, the age of wisdom and also of madness".
Living means growing old and perhaps that is why we tend to think that any past time —and any past smoothness— was happier.
At the same time, even the most doomsayers long for a more prosperous future for their children.
And so, between the nostalgia for a yesterday that never existed and the impatience for an enigmatic tomorrow, we often forget gratitude to those who improve our lives every day: today is all there is.
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