Get Over It Already!

I don’t think Europeans dealt with the Black Death very well. Imagine the kind of trauma the survivors must have gone through; apart from the very real social and economic consequences of the devastating depopulation the plague left in its wake, I’m pretty sure they were left with the mother and father of all PTSD’s.

The problem is, the environmental factors that lead to Europeans becoming such an ingenious bunch also contributed to the beginnings of a belief in their own superiority:

The basic challenges of survival that their antecedents so inventively overcame helped shape the kind of mentality that is manifest in just about every kind innovation since the renaissance, “okay, so Mother Nature seems to have it in for us, so let’s start applying ourselves to overcoming her and maybe, just maybe, we can avoid ever having to look annihilation in the face again.”

What followed, as the history books will attest, is the systematic and rather effective attempt to place man above the natural order, with Europeans of course getting the credit for doing all the slog work.

The resulting civilisation and modernisation the world has been a reinforcement of their perceived intellectual superiority over not just the elements, but over other races as well. The human rights atrocities committed by the European powers beginning some time during the fifteenth century and carrying on right through to the last one are proof enough of that; you have to have a pretty strong disregard for a people with more melanin than you to consciously set about decimating them in order to lay hands on their natural resources.

I’m sure that most of you reading this have heard of phrenology, biblical rationalisations and all manner of sophistry the contrived to prove the natural supremacy of Caucasians over all other races. And they put these fallacies to good use too, lowering the less advanced peoples they encountered in their expansion to the level of subhuman so they could justify to themselves the wholesale theft of land and life they subsequently committed.

North America, South America, Africa, India, Australasia and South East Asia: everywhere Europeans have gone, they’ve perpetrated the same crimes against humanity in a ruthless, efficient and characteristically creative ways. Murder, rape, forced removals, enslavement, forced labour and brainwashing; at first innocuously and obliquely, then bald facedly and brutally. The diseases they brought with them also did a number on the indigenous peoples they encountered. They essentially became the embodiment of the pandemic that so nearly wiped them out. The White Death?

Cultures that were less technologically progressive have typically been more in sync with nature, it’s rhythms and cycles, and in my opinion, more given to recovering from natural disasters with a minimum amount of psychological trauma. If a crop failed, or a particularly bitter winter set in, or a bout of sickness took out a significant portion of their population, they simply chalked it up to the natural progression of things, made a sacrifice to their chosen deities and moved on with life.

This accepting attitude also made them vulnerable to the machinations of the wily Europeans, who had long since learned to dissemble their intentions until they had no more use of subterfuge. Complex social structures will do that to people, I guess. 

Now I know it might be a stretch to suggest that the Plague put a scar on the racial memory of all Europeans, I don’t think that idea has been proven, but if you look at it from a purely behavioural stand point, there are clear signs of psychosis in every aspect of Western life. 

Capitalism has become, from any angle you look at it, the most pervasive institutionalised expression of this psychosis.

Europeans became too clever for their own good, paid the price when a disease ripped through their overpopulated, unsanitary populations centres, recovered physically from the devastation they endured but not psychologically, and now the rest of the world is being forced to share in the experience of their resulting madness.

Anybody got the number of a really good therapist?