By Tomas Talledo
“Modern historical reality has greatly enlarged the imagination of disaster, and the protagonists – perhaps by the very nature of what is visited upon them — no longer seem wholly innocent.” – Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965)
So our mind replays movie-like scenes of Godzilla, Sodom-and-Gomorrah, zombie apocalypse, the “imagination of disasters” since these cataclysmic happenings simultaneously scare and put us in awe. They feed our inner a-rational desire for the irrational. In a way, we’re feeding our addiction to fantasy as victim or hero or both.
Included herewith is our ambivalence towards established Authority, Law and Order. As we are comfortable with the status quo, we also want it exploded while standing witness to its systemic injustices and inequalities. While we’re worried about the fate of our loved ones, we delight in the coming dire predicament of enemies.
Our actual historical experiences as Filipinos weren’t really of such humongous magnitude in deaths and destructions during WW II Japanese invasion and the subsequent 1945 Liberation that flattened our cities by excessive American forces. There were scenes captured in televisions, the devastations of a super typhoon resulting to unruly crowd’s pandemonium for food. With mud-soaked cadavers littered the once busy streets. The digital images were one of beauteous repulsion.
Yet and yet our gnawing fear paints us an exaggerated picture where the entire civilization being wiped out clean, our long time-evolved human institutions in a snap were gone. The beginning of the end of meta-narrative. Such is our attraction to negative romanticism. We heartily swallow dystopian fiction while remaining ignorant of its conventional trope.
Save ourselves, we should. Thus, we should get into serious self-reflection as individuals and as persons within social institutions. In time like ours, we need to take stock of our inherited mental habits and seriously employ critical and realistic thinking. We must jettison those pernicious subjectivisms that had long governed our dispositions. For what but to survive the scourge hopefully unscathed.
The author is a professor at UP Visayas. He teaches political science, history, and philosophy.
