“Ah, the twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the great wheel.
It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim prophets of ages past.
I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before.”
-The Vampire Lestat

I love this quote. It almost seems wrong, but completely right at the same time. As though, perhaps, the grim prophets were right…but their settings and emotions were completely wrong. It speaks to me almost as a lie that refuses to be seen. Since when is the world optimistic? And when did we start caring about human life so much? We just keep telling ourselve that we are…that we do…I think we’re wrong.

I love the phrase “Sinless secular morality”. To me it stands for something absolutely great! It tells me that the world doesn’t need somebody to tell them to be good, or how to do it. Instead we just “know” that to be good is the proper way to do things. What a great step for humanity! Throwing away the crutches of dogma! However, this mentality is the source of everything but good, because it also gives us permission to be “bad”. The more people realize that nobody’s telling them how to behave, and what steps need to be taken, the more they begin to behave however they desire…including “badly”. What is “good” or “bad” becomes blurred and confused to the point where all you need is a rational excuse to justify your action. There are more definitions of morality than there are people on this planet! For example, what’s worse…killing thousands of people in a New York building with airplanes? Or killing thousands in Japan with a nuclear bomb? Neither…because both offenders justified to themselves that what they did was “good”.

To me, this new world we live in should be represented not by “sinless secular morality” or “optimism and care for humanity”, but by the simple word, “paradox”. It is represented by both these phrases, and their complete opposite. No, Perhaps “chaos” is a better term, because it contains everything inbetween as well…mixed up so much that nobody knows what is what.

All I know so far is that to make it in this world, you must love yourself and as many people as possible…simply for their humanity…regardless of their failures.

I think this quote touched me so much because it really does seem to reflect what a person might see if they woke up in this day and age after sleeping for a hundred years. But just because that’s what they see, doesn’t mean that it is real!