Why end the world

The world took time to build. It's not obvious to everyone, particularly those who want to destroy it. 

I am always caught between the enthusiasm for revolution and allegiance to tradition. I have been lucky to have been born in a time and place where revolutions came mostly peacefully. The greatest of those I personally experienced was the Internet Revolution, which changed lives and ended things but was bloodless. Therefore, I could worship revolution with relative calm. 

It took me time to discover the revolutionaries. I met them and their victims mostly in books. There was some significant absences in my life too, people who disappeared in the midst of a revolution just slightly before my time. But these presences and absences were still romantic, an invitation to escape boredom, as I lived in a largely stable world.

But eventually, I met real revolutionaries. These first-hand meetings were different. These people were not trying to fight against phantom power, Tsars and warlords, they were trying to tear down the very world I grew up in. While I kept myself asset-free not to fall into Churchill's trap ('If you are not a socialist in your twenties, you don't have a heart; if you are not a capitalist in your thirties, you don't have a head'), I still valued the ideas, the common respect, the friendships that surrounded me. These new revolutionaries saw conspiracy everywhere; disrespecting common norms were their way; they cultivated cult loyalties but not gentle friendships which allow two people to have different ideas but sit at the same table. 

These revolutionaries were different. For them, nothing was sacred. In everything, there was some conspiracy. Everyone belonged to some group, often bad ones. Decency was cowardice. Tradition was a vast deception, hiding structures of power. Respect was foolishness. Men are pigs, women were objects, young were foolish, the old are rejects, the poor are lazy, the rich are robbers, people with ideas are snobs, people without them are idiots. Every act of charity had some ulterior motive in it. An hour with any of them and I would wonder what an accident that human society has survived so long!

This modern revolution, it took me time to understand, is not like the old. This is not about seeking justice. While these revolutionaries still use the same catch phrases, they are revolting against the very idea of justice. They are fighting against the presumed loss of privilege, their privilege.

Follow this line of argument and it would also be what this 'privilege' is: It is the right to have a better life than others! It dawned on me much later in life that one can't be rich without others being poor. Once poverty cleansing is done and inconvenient facts such as starvation and violence have been pushed out of our neighbourhoods and screens (replaced instead with incredibly good-looking and healthy people, lifestyle of rich and famous and strange acts on Tiktok), our idea of poverty is really relative. And, yet, without some people feeling deprived that they don't have a Tesla or six bedroom houses, there is no fun in having these things. And, as more people have them, one must strive for more: Longevity is the latest craze that I came across! But not only these have to be achieved, these must be unachievable for the rest of the population. Slight hint that such things, elite college places, beautiful bodies, pristine neighbourhoods, Everest climbing, could be achieved by many people would immediately mean them losing value to those who really want a 'better world', for themselves. And when such spread of access becomes a trend, one must revolt and set the process right. This is the spirit of modern revolution. 

My life's peculiar journey got me to the margins of this world of the beautiful. I was lucky and definitely ambitious, and incredibly naïve. Internet changed me, I wanted to do something useful and believed the idea that the world could be better - in search of it, I left home. It was only later, peering into this world of metropolis from outside its fences, I understood its revolutionary message: This is about ending the world! While I thought the world is unjust, the modern revolutionary thinks that it is too much obsessed with justice, and therefore, unjust. And, therefore, must be ended.