*
I started thinking-out a Watership Down type of fable, about a strain of mutant rabbit which limited its own reproduction in favour of 'industrial' activities that raised the standard of living; and where this disposition was combined with a compulsive altruism; such that the surplus product was shared with any mutant rabbits who cared to come and ask - and how this led to an horrific collapse of the warren...
And so on...
*
It was (obviously!) meant as an allegory of modernity, and how the particular combination of reproductive suppression and altruism was even-more-rapidly self-destroying than either would be on their own.
And how the psychological factors which led to reproductive self suppression were themselves amplified by the consequence of that psychology; how modernity creates more of itself.
*
Then I got to thinking that this could either be explained in terms of natural selection - of the weeding-out of deleterious genes (i.e that moderns are essentially a lower fitness mutant strain); or in terms of divine providence - like those Old Testament stories of wicked societies which get worse and worse yet still refuse to repent, until they are overwhelmed by catastrophe and slaughtered or enslaved.
*
It is weird in the extreme to see this scenario unfolding relentlessly, step by step, and sustained not so much by ignorance as by self-blinding.
It is things like this which seem to require the operation of purposive evil in the world (if we did not already know this from divine revelation).
*
And the greatest triumph of purposive evil is surely that the self-destroying society finds the concept of purposive evil laughable, infantile, embarrassing or itself evil; and regards this attitude as evidence of their enlightenment and intelligence, their superiority over all previous ages.
*
The fires are lit, the fuel is being loaded on them, the conflagration builds, the defenders are bound and gagged, all exits are sealed.
*
