Falling in time

Author's name: Emil Cioran

The importance civilized man attaches to so-called backward peoples is what arouses most suspicion. Unable to bear himself any longer, he resorts to venting on those peoples the surplus of diseases that beset him, inviting them to suffer his tragedies, imploring them to face a fate he can no longer disdain alone. He has gone so far as to consider them fortunate not to have "advanced," that he now feels toward them the resentment of a disappointed, unbalanced gambler. By what right do those peoples remain alone, outside the cycle of decadence from which he himself has suffered since time immemorial, with no possibility of escape? Civilization, his work and his madness, seems to him akin to a punishment he has condemned himself to, and which he, in turn, now wishes to inflict on all those who have thus far survived.