The society without heirs

Marcello Veneziani

Let Lingering Sanity offer a frame: Despite bans in some states, more than a million abortions were provided in 2023.

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We are not heirs, we leave no heirs. We inherit nothing from anyone, we will not bequeath anything to anyone. This is, to put it briefly and in a direct and brutal way, the picture of our condition today. Every life is its own thing. The disconnection from before and after affects each of us to varying degrees and at various levels of awareness, in our personal and public and social lives. Even politics avoids or denies legacies. In politics as in commerce, inanimate brands and faded icons remain, but nothing resembling a legacy. For the first time in the history of humanity, or at least in the history known to us, we live in an era without heirs. Or at least it is the first to not recognize any legacy as a value to be preserved and passed on. The first era to warn, like King Louis XV, that the flood will come after us; our world will end with us. After us no one will continue our work, no one will save anything of our inheritance; we will leave no traces, everything will be erased by water and wind. The water of oblivion that erases every footprint and the wind of removal that sweeps everything away. It is the coherent epilogue of a society without a father, which then became a society without children, a parricidal and infanticide society, in the name of elective orphanhood. The society of mutants and non-borns, due to the declining birth rate and abortion. The era of nihilism ultimately keeps the promise: nothing will remain of everything, nothingness after us.

To whom do you leave your assets, your spiritual and real life heritage, your library, your archive of memories, objects and thoughts? To mice and incinerators. At most, their venal and mercantile value will be extracted from that heritage, that is, what has commercial value will be quantified and sold off; if it has no economic value it will be necessary to get rid of it in the quickest and most painless way, it will be a job for emptying cellars or chemical toilets. It will have to vanish without leaving a trace of itself. The status of heirs is valid as long as you are at the notary, or until the testamentary intentions are converted into assets to be used. In every field, what is not inherited and leaves no legacy, what is new, unprecedented or destined to surpass and make us forget all precedents has a positive value. In politics every leader and every movement must present itself as new, must carry out radical restylings which are a periodic shedding of legacies to appear more adequate to the present and less burdened by skeletons in the closet, cumbersome legacies to be erased. New apps await us, it's no longer time to maintain the old ones. The story itself is an unbearable burden. Technology continually directs us towards updating.

In the same way the masters are ignored, because we do not feel like heirs and continuers of their work and their lessons, they have nothing to teach because they come from times behind ours, with decidedly outdated technologies. No inhabitant of the past can guide us into the future or teach us anything appropriate for the world to come.

Only the memory of the victims of the past is saved, however it is not a legacy to be safeguarded and continued, but rather serves as a warning not to repeat those horrors. The memory of the victims is an act of accusation and rejection of the legacy of the executioners.  

How does the end of inheritance manifest itself on a generational level? First of all, we no longer have children; if there are they leave, they leave the house and the familiar city, they change horizons. And if they don't leave, they disinherit themselves, they move away with their mind and heart, they believe that living means emancipating themselves from those who brought them into the world. There is no shortage of exceptions, and they are not even rare; but the general trend, the spirit of the time, is that. No heirs. 

The countries are emptying, there is no replacement, families are on the brink of extinction due to the birth rate and emigration; centuries-old presences will disappear in the space of a few decades; at most a disorientated dissemination will remain dispersed elsewhere. Our contemporaries feel like children of their time more than of their parents or their countries of origin and their teachers. They feel self-produced, they think they are self-created, they believe - even if it is not true - that they make and manage their entire lives themselves.

For the rest of the essay—https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/la-societa-senza-eredi/Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity

DISCLAIMER:   The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication from Old Gold Mountain (Chinese: 旧金山. We are beholden to truth not party.  “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.”