I had a thought implanted in my consciousness yesterday which hasn't waned yet. It's a fairly rare occurrence, and even rarer that it did not stem from outrage at some bullshit media coverage, nor via any recently uncovered truth from the counter-media. This thought was seeded by something that someone close to me said and quickly exploded into a rather odd comparison to something I'd heard decades ago.
Decades ago I befriended a person who claimed to be a Wiccan high priestess. Whether I believe in such things or not (is irrelevant to this story), there were a great many very odd things which would happen in her presence, or within an hour of randomly crossing paths. I won't go into any great details on these odd occurrences as these are not where my point lives.
She did explain once that most 'spells' had a personal cost which acted as a counter balance. For example, a spell for the good fortune of friends or family would often result in her having intense migraines the next day, yet, at the same time, the friend would have good news or apparent good luck. Magic? Coincidence? Subliminal trickery? Doesn't matter. The equation always seemed to play out the same: desired effect + cost = desired result.
Which brings me back to yesterday. Yesterday, a statement was made by somebody I thought was completely asleep (figuratively, that is): "all of these modern technologies, which were meant to make life better, or easier seem to have some hidden cost inherent to them. Power lines cause brain tumours, processed food causes health issues, medications have side-effects, and almost everything can cause cancer... Is life really more easy now than a few hundred years ago?" While I've already seen this correlation for a long time, it really was more who's voice it came from which was startling.
The equation still seems to fit... Modern magic.
Truly it isn't magic in the sense of myth, legend, and unseen energies, but there is certainly unforeseen cost hidden in just about every innovation in the last century or two. Maybe some of the costs were known at the time but calculated to be outweighed by the benefit and maybe the costs were not there but appeared over several generations, though it's likely a mixture of the two. Maybe these costs are inflicted through nature's tendency to seek balance, or through men with power seeking more power, though it's more likely a mixture of the two.
Maybe we simply are not meant to live as long as we already do... Nature used to thin us out by becoming prey, and occasionally we still are, but sabre-toothed tigers don't frequently attack us in the big city these days. So now we fall prey to our innovation or our own stupidity and fewer succumb to time itself. It isn't that there is no conspiracy, but that not the whole of it, is the conspiracy at work.
Yes there are evil forces at play which would seemingly stop at nothing short of the end of us all, but conspiracy was not behind it all from inception. Yes the big picture has its pieces fitting together like clockwork but not every piece was built with that purpose, some simply came to be through error or negligence and have been exploited since. Whether via legalities like copyright and patents, or via policies like outlawing competition, or simply by keeping us distracted while guiding the robber-barons down the fire escape.
Bear in mind that if technology is indeed 'magic', then economics has to be voodoo. Economics routinely creates scarcity where none exists and requires a blood sacrifice in order to produce the desired result... Except that it often doesn't end there, and the desired result never actually occurs either because the blood was impure or not plentiful enough due to a scarcity which actually did exist but was tossed out of the equation for producing an undesirable result. A Ponzi-scheme of unsustainability busily exploiting the big picture attempting to turn blood into wine, which, instead, produces a goblet full of empty, not worth it's weight in mold.
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