Alan Moore, Oppenheimer, and The Ongoing Psychological Apocalypse
“Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by the world. I don’t think this means the planet or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we’ve erected, that is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist.”
—-Alan Moore (Watchmen, V For Vendetta)
I know, quite a long quote to have the writer of this posting to use as a quasi-intellectual attempt at sounding poetic. But, it’s certainly sensible enough to analyze given how much has changed in the time that those words were uttered. You can look to the YouTube link that directly has the genius making this statement dating the video back to 2010, and yet the original date from which the video took place goes all the way back to 2008, right around the time of the same financial collapse, which in addition to leading many American’s to losing their homes, also set the world onto a more fast-forwarded version of a collision course that had been set decades before in 1971 when Tricky Dick-Nosed Nixon got the U.S. off the very gold standard that couldn’t fund one of the many wars American’s have been fooled into supporting.
The greater irony is that even now that although we aren’t directly involved, the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is just another example of how little things truly change even when they’re in the midst of the sorts of great changes that actively illustrate how the majority of people often misinterpret the apocalypse as the pop culture stereotype we often see in the most popular of disaster films rather than the more re-contextualized psychological notion of a perception that is in a constant state of change in its interaction within an environment they have direct experience with. Essentially, the idea of reimagining the apocalypse as more of a psychological revelation itself is important given that in addition to crushing a dark escapist notion of preparing for the future, it essentially allows the human mind to adopt a far more mentally mature manner of understanding a variety of contradictions that often halt/impede it from fully living and embracing the very uncertainty of life.