The recent hit Daft Punk song “Get Lucky” begins as follows:
Like the legend of the phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planet spinning
The force from the beginning
We’ve come too far to give up who we are
So let’s raise the bar and our cups to the stars
I find this rather apt to the era or rather change of era we are living through. The Eurozone… well not ‘crisis’ but disastrous unravelling, the NSA revelations, the Middle East and others are manifestations of a complete loss of trust in any of the institutions we had built up with pain and hope for a better ordered, fairer and more equitable world. A total breakdown of what used to be values. The very word ‘value’ now only refers to the price of shares and commodities.
Democracy even as “we” used to know it has collapsed. The “enemy” is no longer “the other”, the whatever other, but our own. Our own politicians, our own governments, our own institutions, who are all out to “get us” in the name of nebulous trumped up threats or for the salvation of something supposedly fundamental to our civilization, “the banks”, say.
As a result of this citizens, peoples everywhere across the globe no longer trust any leadership, any leader and institution any more because they know none of these are working for them at all, but only against them and for the nebulous “other”, in short their own personal power and perks.
But like the legend of the phoenix, as the song says, all ends with beginnings. We are indeed at the beginning. The end is the beginning so we should take cheer. But despite that or because of it, this is a painful and dispiriting end of an era. An end reminiscent of Elliot’s prescient:
“This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.”
And as we whimper out in a surge not of evil but arrant idiocy we should remember what the songs says and act on it,
We’ve come too far to give up who we are
And that could well be our new beginning.
