intensely_human, 1 year ago

Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.

I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.

It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.

It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.