Cyclic Redundancy

 “Leisure without study is death—a tomb for the living person.”

Seneca just answered my question.

Bring on Tacitus, who rolled in about 55-117, and was an “intimate” friend of Pliny the Younger (there’s a beer joke there, but I haven’t the energy).  More histories, which are painful to read because there is little to ancient histories other than war and death.  Herodotus was at least somewhat entertaining because the histories were word of mouth by various civilizations, so the absurdity of human perception was still in tact.  

 Thucydides was exactly the opposite: the fighting and death and destruction of the Peloponnesian War; a count so dry that it literally ended with a “. . .” before the war was even close to ending, like he suddenly died of boredom in the writing of it.  Though his exclusion of the “gods’” intervention was refreshing, I kind of enjoy reading about the absurd, romantic accounts of the gods helping, or of mortals achieving higher spiritual status, as completely insane and ignorant as that is.  Ancient histories, in general, are difficult for me to read because they celebrate an aspect of this species that absolutely turns my stomach and makes me not want to be a part of any of this shit, especially when you look around the current choking planet and see that the war mongering is still alive and well, and just as heartless and brutal.

 “Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings.  Freedom and the consulship were established by Lucius Brutus.  Dictatorships were held for a temporary crisis.” — line one;  he then goes on for pages that read like a brief overview of who died and survived to get us here, though I am not quite sure where “here” is yet.

“On the day of the funeral soldiers stood round as a guard [to protect the body from being burned], amid much ridicule from those who had either themselves witnessed or who had heard from their parents of the famous day when slavery was still something fresh, and freedom had been resought in vain, when the slaying of Cæsar, the Dictator, seemed to some the vilest, to others, the most glorious of deeds.”  That’s referencing Augustus; and he was one of the better ones. “…only in a few instances had he resorted to force, simply to secure general tranquility.”  That is, of course, severely relative to the perception and life experience of the individual writing the account, which is another reason why histories are so painful to read.

 “History is written by the victors,” a quote attributed to Churchill, and, slightly reworded, many others, including Orwell and Napoleon, but as a concept has been enforced since the dawn of writing and free thinking, primarily by the church and tyrannical governments (which is redundant).  Throughout an embarrassing chunk of human civilization, the only way to get important texts to survive was to hide them from these mentioned evils.  The mention of slavery also brings up another very important point relevant today, two thousand years later:  We’re all slaves; since people wandered out of their villages and amassed in cities, and the ruling class seized control out of what can only be defined as a retardation of human nature (Good people don’t want to rule. Period.), we have all been slaves.  This clusterfuck of a country is a brimming example of that: A “free” country… of slaves.  While we have recently created “laws” that abolish blatant slavery, we are all slaves to the system, and the ruling class will stop at nothing to keep us running on their hamster wheel.  Once again they are dividing us by race, but the only way to survive is to stand together against the system.  Racists are also slaves, to ignorance and the ill-education of a system that breeds them.

Far more ignorant individuals, however, have been turned and saved by compassion and kindness, than by bitching and protesting.  Your protests only make you look like a fool: you are slaves to a system, bitching and moaning about the system you are a slave to, but the system has you completely distracted by what it wants you to complain about so you don’t even remotely understand the actual problem here.  By all means, though, keep crying.  I just wish all of these “safe-space” whiners would stop “marching” on Washington, and finally just burn it the fuck down.  Alright, so…apparently I needed to rant about that a bit.  Fucking Ancients.  I’m only four pages in and I already want to take out the ruling class, and reset men’s minds by fire, knowing full well that it’s all going to circle around again to this misery and bullshit, because we are the most ridiculous and absurd “intelligent” species that has ever existed in the known universe.