I Moved Your Cheese by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Author:Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: I Moved Your Cheese
ISBN: 9781770223080
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

LOSER CHIC

Loser Chic is what I call our modern obsession with celebrating the losers of pre-history. Any hodgepodge of antiquated mysticism is celebrated nowadays, provided it can be attributed to the Incas or the Etruscans or any other culture that has disappeared from the face of the earth with scarcely a trace. I don’t get it. Whatever misty romance these people may offer, the fact of the matter is: they lost. In the big boardgame of history, they threw the losing dice.

Tell me, besides pioneering communal cocaine use and celebrating the social merits of human sacrifice, what can the Inca teach us? How to be invaded by a rag-tag bunch of unshaven Spaniards? If those ancient civilisations were so damned clever, where are they now? Eh? Building pyramids in the jungle is all very well, but they might have found the wheel a touch more useful in the long run.

(I accept, as I must, that history is long and that one day Fortuna’s wheel will turn and Western culture – however you might conceive it – will one day be eclipsed by the resurgent communities of Burundi or Papua New Guinea. I accept that, and when it happens I won’t expect the triumphant Papua New Guineans to write nostalgic books reminiscing about how the early twenty-first-century West invented Reality Television and expressed their aspirations through the artistic career of Christina Aguilera.)

The current Losers du Jour are the Mayans. You can’t drink a cappuccino in your local bookstore these days without spilling your foam on another meaty tome celebrating the arcane knowledge and buried insights of the noble Mayans (or Maya, you might prefer to call them). Ooh, how clever they were, and how communal their lifestyle. What lovely buildings they built. Plus, what sharp timekeepers they were – did you know, they built sundials and they knew the movement of the stars?

Well, of course they knew the movement of the stars! What else are you going to do at night if you’re a Mayan? Watch TV? Read a book?

The Mayans are especially popular at the moment, because the Mayans predicted the world would come to an end on Sunday, 23 December 2012 – coincidentally, precisely the day my endowment policy matures. But enough about me. After the slight disappointment of the year 2000 and Nostradamus and the new millennium and all, and the fact that Table Mountain didn’t reveal itself to be a flat-topped pyramid that was actually a spaceship that would gather together the spiritually enlightened and take them up to Betelgeuse, the spiritual conspiracy-theorists have been casting about for another big occasion.

The Mayans have given us 2012, and so 2012 is already shaping up to be the next big communal boo-hoo and brouhaha. And if the Mayans predicted 2012 – no matter that almost everything else they did failed and crumbled back into the jungle – then the Mayans must be a smart bunch of cookies.

And so we are beset on all sides by chattering voices urging us to reach inside and find the lost wisdom of the Maya, to find the Mayan within.

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