I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. —CHARLES DARWIN, in a letter to a friend, 1861

In 1995, an army veteran named Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City after having spent nine months sourcing the materials. Nine hundred federal agents would work the case … after the bomb went off. Prior to that, the number was zero, despite the fact that McVeigh had spent weeks blabbing about his plan to everyone he knew. Key believed that not much had changed in the decades since.

but what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

Key’s theory, which Patrick had mocked as the “Virgin Apocalypse,” was that all modern hate groups were really just incel grievances in disguise. It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men. The really unpopular part of Key’s theory, the one that had caused a lot of colleagues to stop talking to her in the hallway, was that the smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

The deadliest shooting in American history—the 2017 Las Vegas attack that killed sixty and wounded more than eight hundred—was carried out by a millionaire who believed he’d been treated poorly by casino staff. The deadliest school massacre in American history wasn’t Sandy Hook, it was a bombing in 1927 that leveled a rural Michigan school, killing thirty-eight children and six adults. The culprit was a local farmer, upset that he lost an election for school board treasurer. What they had in common, in Key’s view, was aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe?

The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder.

“How about this: What do you think the world will look like in the future, post-collapse?” Abbott thought for a moment as if picturing it. “Uh, terrified people scrounging for food and running from bandits. Rampant disease, infrastructure breakdown. All the stuff from the movies, I guess.” “No internet?” “I wouldn’t think so.” “No electricity? No running water, no sewage? No hospitals?” “Probably not.” “Got it. So, what I’m about to say isn’t an opinion, it’s not a matter of personal philosophy or politics. It is an objective fact that what you’re describing is how virtually all humans have lived through all of history. Until, that is, about thirty years ago.

“I’m talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I’m talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human’s chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they’ve ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It’s been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks. And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being ‘on fire.’ I think that’s a bizarre mass delusion and that there’s a very specific reason for it: we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people. When I spent those months doing hallucinogens, I didn’t suddenly

I swear if the black box of doom had a slogan etched across its door, it would be, ‘We hate ourselves and will kill anyone who asks us to change.’

Nobody knows who they are until they go out and adversity strips away the phony parts, makes a mockery of all the lies you tell yourself. Inside your little cocoon, you can convince yourself that you can do anything, that you could succeed if you were given the right chances. But that’s all just an illusion until it’s tested.