News tickers report "X number of casualties in Y location" every day, treating people as mere statistics. They are indifferent to their names, lives, and how they died. The numbers soar, the tickers roll, and radio and media outlets report. Broadcasters are indifferent. They don't care that these "casualties" were once our friends or family members with whom we shared a love of literature, music, or art. They don't know that the last words of these "casualties" were often a cry for help or protests against death. They became an unknown number, a cold statistic among the million deaths. I don't even know which number my friend is among a million deaths. I don't know which number my beloved is. In the next news broadcast, I could be any number—one that I did not choose. The apathetic broadcaster wouldn't care that I like the number nine and wouldn't bother to assign it to me. But we always find ways to cope. We trick ourselves into believing that all those deaths—of our friends and others—have given birth to a new world.
Worlds collapse, and others rise in their place. Worlds that stood the test of time for ages crumble—loved by those who ruled and shaped them and despised by those on whose backs they rose or fell.
In the wake of its destruction, a world—which could be a place, an era, or any length of time—leaves victims buried under the rubble.
History tells us that for every new world to be born, a horrific price must be paid: the lives of countless victims whose names history will not remember. History celebrates only those who build the new world, marginalizing those on whose backs it was founded. This is history's vicious cycle. We don't know a single name of the millions who built the world in which we live today, which is collapsing. When a new world replaces it, our successors will also say,
We don't know a single name of the millions who built the world in which we live today. What a cruel, vicious cycle history is!
During the subsequent collapse, someone may finally awaken to the truth and the atrocity of their world. They will expose its darkness and may sacrifice themselves for the birth of a gentler, less distorted, and more just world—one that bears no resemblance to what came before.
On the other hand, many will perish in the creation of this new world without realizing it. They will be unknowing sacrifices. Perhaps we were once among those people. Perhaps we still are.
King Lear Lays Bare His World—and Ours
Though Shakespeare tells us that King Lear is set in pagan Britain, we know it reflects the medieval era—an age of darkness, oppression, and sorrow for those who endured it.
The play presents two moments of collapse: one in which Lear reveals the truth of his era and another in which he and his daughter, Cordelia, die as casualties of the fall of their world and the rise of the Renaissance. The storm scene, immortalized in Benjamin West’s painting "Lear in the Storm," is perhaps the play's most famous. It is there that Lear grasps the soul of his time.
In Act 3, Scene 4, Lear cries:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defends
You
From seasons such as these? O, I have taken
Too little care for this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose yourself to feel what wretches feel.
that thou may'st share with them their superfluity
and show the heavens more just.
Later, when Edgar enters the hovel naked, Lear asks the question that still echoes:
Is man no more than this? Consider him well.
He leaves us with this question: Who are the victims? Is man no more than this, or is this merely his shadow?
History tells us that one world rises, while another falls. But who were the victims of those falls? There is no answer. We only see miscounted deaths on news tickers.
Search the web, and you won't find names. Faces remain unknown. The dead are reduced to disappointing figures: Twelve thousand perished here, fifty thousand there, a million somewhere else. In wars, worlds fall and rise, yet we never read the names of those who shaped a new world or witnessed one disintegrate.
Lear died when he finally realized the truth and unmasked his time. He was a victim of his world and the new Renaissance world, which rejected medieval logic, feudal injustice, and the delusion of noble superiority.
Cordelia, his daughter and Shakespeare’s most beloved character for her goodness, did not perceive the truth of her time. She did not unveil it. Yet she, too, died. A free casualty. One of many. Perhaps we are among them. Perhaps we were.
This is the historical pattern of collapse. Feudalism crumbled in 15th-century Europe, giving way to a world of manufacturing, capitalism, and bourgeois order. One world falls, and another rises. History is punctuated with such moments: the end of slave-and-master societies; the collapse of serfdom and aristocracy during the French Revolution; the class war between workers and employers during the rise of industrial capitalism; the caste system in India; colonizers versus indigenous peoples; the Global North versus the Global South; Confucian scholars versus imperial rule in ancient China; the Greek world; the Roman world; the medieval world; the Renaissance; the Age of Reason; and the Enlightenment. Even literature, art, and philosophy have followed these arcs.
Asking about the victims of these collapses seems absurd. We know we will never find their names. But in today’s genocidal age, the question must be asked: What exactly are our friends dying for?
You Must Be Classified
Throughout history, writers, thinkers, and philosophers have examined classification systems. From the invention of writing to the present, classification has been a dominant force in narratives, ideologies, beliefs, freedoms, and every other aspect of the human condition.
In Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Center, Alain Deneault writes, "We must be able to classify you." He also says, "The mediocre have come to power."
The world before mediocrity collapsed, and in its place rose our current mediocre world—a world ruled by the bland. The pre-trend world collapsed, and the age of trends emerged. The pre-camera world fell, and the reign of the captured image and immortalized moment began.
As Milan Kundera explores in both Immortality and Slowness, slowness gave way to speed.
But in today's genocidal world, even victims must be categorized. Sympathy is conditional. It depends on the classification. In this world, the "good victim" is the unseen one who silently adds to the tally, as though they never lived at all.
Yet that victim is our friend, dear world.