Preface to Elsewhere Series 4
I have spent the past week and a half focused on various ideas of suffering, discussing the political sides of controversial issues. It has been somewhat liberating and profoundly depressing. All it has proven to me is just how low and broken our social cohesion has become. We truly hate one another, and not in the age old traditional manner (or at least not exclusively). Our hatred has increasingly less to do with race or gender or sexuality. Oh, sure, our religious prejudices and biases have devolved back into the days of the Inquisition (if, that is, they had ever evolved out of it), but the pure loathing we have for each other goes even beyond that superficial reality. No, what we really seem to despise is the thought that people have different ideas on the way the world should be.
This construct has been an ongoing subtext of Recording Editorial History, in many ways the primary theme buried in studies of current events and their historical precidents. And so with the next series of Elsewhere I will focus on the very darkness that has spawned our modern world and study Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the moment when religion itself took over all notions of warfare, and the spread of ideology became more important than the expansion of land or even an increase in riches (although those newly subserviant ambitions would always serve a purpose to the higher evangelical justifications). This will be a six-part series and I suspect that each essay will be rather long. I plan to take 2–3 days between each, giving me plenty of time to organize the research I have undertaken over the past two weeks. The nations of focus will be varied–definately including Italy, England, and France, and their relations with other nearby empires. In the remaining studies I will endeavor to be all-inclusive, discussing revolutions and efforts to escape outside rule and oppression. I will even spend time on countries that no longer exist by name.
The stories themselves will remain comfortably in the past, with obvious allusions to modern times. But there will be no serious discussion of Brexit, no French protests or terrorist attacks of recent years, nor even the overall surge of right-wing populism all over the world. All these problems of today can clearly be reflected in things that have come before.
And so Elsewhere will continue to prove the one point I have been trying to make throughout this whole series: Things do not get worse. Things have always been just as good and just as bad. Human nature is the barbaric constant and we have only ourselves to blame . . .
