Lawyerdamus

Here is a bold prediction you can take to the bank, or stick in your pipe and smoke, as you please: The Lawyer and The Engineer will be mandatory reading in every World Civilization course in every college of liberal arts in each university, the globe over, by the year 2050. If you don't agree with that, just stay alive until then and you will find out that I am right, and you're not.

PhD candidates every where will be defending dissertations on head-scratching and paradigm-quaking entries such as "An Exclusive Interview with The Prince of Darkness," "Brainwashed Students Continue Rioting," and "What Would the Lawyer Do (WWLD)," as well as others yet to be published like, "What my Balls Say About my Self Esteem," "Sensitivity Training for the Complete Douche Bag," and "Why Social Conservatives Hate Homosexuals though Half of them Are."

A bronze statue will be erected and unveiled in honor of The Lawyer and The Engineer in front of The Library at Alexandria. Half the world's children will be named after us, creating an ever greater emphasis on people being addressed by their middle names. It's going to be great!

Pre-posthumous fantasizing aside, people are going to get smarter. I know; you're thinking, 'bullshit.' But hear me out. After all, you are reading the words written by the man who shall be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the year 2086, not for doing much of anything, but rather for being the adroitly compelling voice of a pivotal generation, or some such crap.

I present my own ancestors as a perfect case in point. Caveman Lawyer was good at a few things. Hunting, building fires, getting laid, and avoiding getting eaten, but that was about as far as his expertise reached. Although an idiot, he was the smartest animal alive.

Shaman Lawyer was a crazed genius in comparison. He was a member of a tribe that worshiped the animating spirits of which the environment was composed. Not only was he hunting, but he was a horticulturist, planting things in the ground with a stick to grow and eat. He started domesticating animals. Life expectancy increased from sixteen years old to the rickety old age of twenty something. If you reached thirty, then you became Shaman Lawyer, and no one dared messed with your old ass, except for the rival tribe that, upon considering the matter, decided they were going to take your village, because their spirits told them to do it, and for better soil and easier access to water. So you were likely to get killed, enslaved or eaten by your brother and sister human.

Then, Warrior Lawyer whose implement of progress was metallurgy, and whose ideology was kill-the-bastards-before-they-kill-you. Warrior Lawyer was powerful and rich until one day, while luxuriating in a tangle of legs, butts and breast, being hand fed grapes and having wine poured over his head by his concubines, his power-envy rival's assassin slit his throat to the neck bone. It was a glorious and messy time.

Tired of all that unadulterated chaos and debauchery, Monotheistic Lawyer came on to the scene with some steadfast rules about the right way to live--the only way to live, in fact. If you followed the rules, and obeyed the tenants of the one, true God, then you would be rewarded in the after life, which made sense because this one really sucked. If you didn't follow the rules you got burned at the stake. You have to admire the simplistic elegance of justice in a two-dimensional world of good and evil, right and wrong, where you could be stoned to death for a nuanced suggestion that there may be a gray area in between.

Modern Lawyer burst onto the scene, a little bored with the Lord, and armed with a savvy individualism, weaving and juking to the top of the mountain with the cutting edge mental technologies of reason, analysis and logic. Materially speaking, life got better in every way imaginable. One's hands were freed from the drudgery of labor to pursue mental manipulations and ever greater comfort, wealth and power, often on the aching backs of others.

After that evolved the Existential Lawyer. No longer able sustain lasting satisfaction by his $2,000.00 espresso machine and his state-of-the-art rechargeable nose hair trimmer, he turned inwards for his quest for meaning, and emerged compassionate and less edgy, and a little preachy. He turned to the streets, arm in arm with his brothers and sisters to demand equality for all, awash in the altruistic elixir of mutual tolerance. An egalitarian utopia was in sight.

And then it was not. Information-age Lawyer lost faith in spreading good vibrations, and began to see the world in terms of paradigmatic squabbles between card-carrying members of the aforementioned states of mind on the evolutionary scale towards greater complexity. Before his eyes the world burst into a multidimensional collage of clashing interests, each indefatigably convinced of its superiority over the others, and confusing each for something it isn't. That is the flint spark for every flash point of which there is no lack in the world today.

The real "end of times" is the overcoming, and evolving from the ignorance and narrowness of perspective of the past, and restructuring the collage so that its fit is sustainable, peaceful and mutually beneficial. Wow, how in the hell do you do that? I don't know, but it seems a goal worth aspiring to.

Lawyerdamus' mandate is evolve, damn you. The world is too mysterious and allusive to ever come to the cozy conclusion that this is it, just as you see it, ever before and after. That's silly, of course. What ever the engine of its flow, evolution is with us at every level of existence as we know it: mineral, biological, psychological and spiritual. It happens so slowly that we pass along with it without noticing, and therein lies the illusion of sameness, luring us into a frightful, subconscious existence. Wake up, and have faith, because it is only getting better, if at a little too slow of a pace for most of our taste.

It is through the portal of an open, compassionate and curious mind that evolution whispers its magic. That is the flying carpet that will take us to the next age of humanity. A dogged insistence to keep things just the way they are is stagnation's and decay's whore. The way back is the way to hell.

If you do not believe in evolution, you probably aren't evolving. So, quit being a big wus, hop on the hand-woven Persian, and enjoy the ride into the unexplored territory ahead.