Heaven 2.0 (a.k.a World of Warcraft)
"Since reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays, a substitute for alcohol and the other narcotics, something at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin"
- Aldous Huxley listing technology required to placate a mass of happy servants.
As the economic conditions, the social conditions, and the psychological conditions of a society deteriorate, peoples’ focus will turn more and more towards non-existent alternative realities.
This idea first arose in my mind while studying the history of science. Because history is really just a story, and everyone likes stories, I will tell you a story, the story of science.
Our story begins around 600 BC in ancient Greece, in Miletus, with Thales. Thales suggested that everything is composed of one thing. That one thing happened to be water, but the idea that there was some unified underlying nature to everything proved revolutionary.
This lead to the golden age in which other natural philosophers make other suggestions about what the fundamental nature of the universe might be; fire, air, numbers, every thing is flux, change is an illusion, etc. Philosophy takes off with Plato and Aristotle, and along with them the aspirations for science became palatable. Things were going well, people wanted to unlock the secrets of reality, this world, this life.
Then the Romans overthrow the Greeks; the entire episode seemingly crystallized in the moment that a roman solider, too impatient to let Archimedes finish his math problem in the sand, murders him. The Roman Empire does its thing, all the while the conditions, economic, social, and psychological, are deteriorating, ultimately leading humanity down into the dark ages.
As the conditions worsen the aspirations for science are shelved, and the Salvationist religions, the ones that focused on the afterlife, are sweep into popularity. Of course, it makes sense that the people did not want to concentrate on reality when they could instead direct their miserable lives towards an eternity of comfort in heaven.
Philosophy and science lay stagnating until Copernicus comes along in the 1500's. As conditions begin to improve again, people begin to return their concentration to unlocking the secrets of this world. By the late 1600's Newton has produced a fully fledged science, hurray! And science continues on happily ever after, until now, or something. So much for story telling.
The theory that I am suggesting is that there is a correlation between the quality of life and what people focus on. It makes sense; when this world is crap, we turn to other worlds to fulfil our desires for flourishing, when the conditions in this world are good, we prefer to flourish in this world.
I do not know how many people today manage to make their lives bearable through the promise of a better afterlife, so I'm not going to talk much about that any more. I do however know a great many people who make their lives bearable through immersing themselves in another world, the World of Warcraft. Have we slipped into a new dark age? Yes, if the theory is correct. We should take the mass return to superstition and spirituality, along with the development of better escapist narcotics, videogames, books, etc, as a sign that the times we live in are not that pleasant.
My whole point was going to be that Christianity sucks because it is so concerned with the afterlife, and that I don't see much difference between that and spending your life in a virtual world (of warcraft). Either way, you might as well be dead.
[edit: moved to most recent]
