A Book for Our Times, Part 2

     Last week I was extolling the book Dialogues with a Modern Mystic by Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek.  Even though it was written over two and a half decades ago, its words seem like they were written for exactly our times.  Here is a quote that seems fitting, I'm sure you'll agree:

Aging narcissists, which is what we're ruled by, are very dangerous people.  As death approaches, their hunger for power and to prove their immortality gets more and more hysterical.  They're willing to sacrifice more and more people on the altar of their own vanity.  It's frightening to look at the majority of politicians and businessmen who rule the world because they are so clearly terrified.  Their terror of losing power, and of death, makes them engines of destruction.  Through this denial, they're even willing to institutionalize the death of the environment.  This is the final paradox of narcissism, that it is willing to go on engineering total destruction in order to keep going and not have to face the shock and pain of truth; it will press the atomic button to keep alive its fiction of invincibility.  It is as mad as that.

    See?  Written for our times.