It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

— Anton Szandor LaVey

#mediocrity #nostalgia #past #retro #satanism