Never knowing how to start, let me tell you about a crazy person. Minding my own business, watching my shows, idling my car in the ClusterTruck lineup waiting for an order, a man comes and knocks on my window. He’s a driver as well, asks how I’m doing, and then asks if I’m into “conspiracy stuff.” The list of things he finds compelling includes 9/11 being an inside job, NASA about to release a statement about finding aliens, the CIA inventing the words “conspiracy theory,” all swirling around a general belief in a god that sent a perfect being down here to show us what we can’t yet see because the corporate masters controlling everything are going to ensure we experience eternal hellfire, which he, of course, fears more than death.
I was happy to escape our interaction with an order that came in. I’ve talked to enough crazies and ideologues to be under no illusions about any “productivity” or “conversation” or “persuasion” that was going on there. I use distractions like that to listen to my own calm heart beat and throw out as many not-quite passive aggressive comments about the other person’s ignorance and stupidity in academically sounding ways. I lay out the case for their emotionality causing them to behave in the absence of evidence and parrot back their words to them substituting my “beliefs” and gods and ask them why they don’t find my words persuasive either.
For the last few days, the word on my mind has been “individual.” Perhaps this individual was introduced into my life so I could start off a blog. Perhaps it was mostly random or a set of probabilities that two people with the same job would interact at some point and it was simply my turn. This question of “intentionality” lies at the base of many an existential question. Did the universe conspire to put us in each others’ lives to “teach us a lesson” or “open a window of opportunity?” Good or bad that’s the most reassuring thing, right? The last thing our consciousness ever wants to deal with is randomness.
The story of how the world looks begins to mold around the running in the opposite direction of random. The consequences of the internet and globalization haven’t been a trend for 40 years, (of course!) it’s the billionaires and politicians meeting in bunkers to make us all poor and act under their control. In fact, let’s stick with this example for a bit because it’s easiest to unpack and illustrate.
One needs a pretty myopic view to think their oppressive circumstances are what “the world” gives a shit about or considers. While your household income is predicted to be less than half of a previous generation, there’s billions of people living on a dollar a day or less. When a huge swath of those peoples’ conditions improve because “slave wage” jobs shipped over there, in total global net gain, you don’t garner any sympathy. At the same time, you exist in a very ignorant and petty environment that has “America! Fuck Yeah’d!” you your entire life. So you are experiencing emotional distress. You aren’t prepared to learn or speak intelligently about your place in history. If and when politicians or billionaires pull particular levers of power, you’re not going to see nuance or introduce a level of balance to your view, “everything” contributes to “all” of your pithy worldview.
In this way, even if you have a fleeting point, you wall off opportunities to fix it in any real way. You’re praying while your child is dying of cancer, instead of taking them to the hospital. You’re knocking on my window peddling bullshit, instead of protecting and building the tools for objective discernment. This is precisely why we will go extinct. It won’t be our anger. It won’t be by accident. It won’t even be greed or pride. It will be the persistent pursuit of anti-thinking in blind dedication to how desperately we feel about things we don’t care to learn how to think about.
The habits of the non-thinker are mimicked in youth. You don’t know how stupid you sound when you’re young. (Unless you have it chronicled like I do.) You don’t appreciate that your brain hasn’t fully formed, and at least for me, the sensitivity to condescension was so unpalatable it’s unimaginable I’d swallow your opinion of me. When you’re engaging with a child, it’s counterproductive to beat them over the head with “facts” and “you’ll sees.” They don’t have the psychological substruct. They don’t have the tools or the experiences. They aren’t bored enough to stop pursuing roads to nowhere.
With our general population of adults, it’s hard to discern the difference, at least again for me, in the modern era. “Adults” behave as intractably as children, except now they are functional enough to get jobs and put their money where their mouths are. We put them behind cars and give them anonymous voices online. We put them in charge of huge budgets and levers of control and influence. I mean, my god people, if you truly cannot appreciate what a colossal fuck up it was to put Hitler 2 in that seat of power, you will never, until the day you die, get the depravity and suicidal nature of the human soul. I will forever and ever argue against the idea that it’s ME who views the world as “negative” when the millions and millions of hate apologists not just usher him in, but refuse to take the necessary steps to fixing anything in a real way.
They don’t have the tools, the knowledge, or the experience. They have what they grew up with and the norms of their income level or social group. In post-modernist fashion, by virtue of having an “opinion,” therefore all are equal, just adopt a happier one! Just love! Just share and smile and find the little things! While real organizations who make tangible impacts on the well-being of humanity close their doors, and the heads of departments who grew up caring and trying resign. And we think what? We don’t. Because thinking about it is to acknowledge how beyond terrifying it really is.
I was talking to a friend who got immediately defensive at the idea that he was rich. While we sat drinking a handle of rum, playing a PS4, him not at school nor with a job, living with his parents, with one of those parents making $250,000 a year, he was loud and insistent that was not rich. When even your amazing circumstances can’t be accepted because of some psychological or youthful quirk demonizes the descriptive words and unknown consequences, how are people going to address something actually bad? You’re insecure that even though you’re broke you get expensive machines to play with, leisure activities, and have never known a day of hunger? I complain about being broke all the time, but my worst case scenario is maybe pissing off a friend or acquaintance by spending too much time sleeping on their floor? And provided no one has broken into my shit sitting in the field, I’m in the global 1%.
So my frustration and “negativity” and non-stop bitching is at all of you rich lazy fucks who refuse to be more than self-indulgent children who don’t feel or act like there’s a pull for anything more. Not more stuff. More “us.” More acknowledgment. More work. More cooperation and taking on of responsibility. More writing and burden to create something worth celebrating. That was the power of the party house. I felt compelled to be there with those people not simply partying or being drunk or distracted. I felt it again when Hatsam came to town and the old crew got back together. It’s a real and compelling gravitational phenomenon that happens when the right people are together and focused on the right things.
Moreover, I got a hint of the pull when I started to think about what it would take to drag me out to a tick-ridden field in the middle of nowhere. I already know I have that power. I know what would make the hour drive feel negligible. I know what I’d want accounted for in order to spend the night. I know who I’d want to see and activities I’d want to engage in. And it’s no different than what I did to bring people into my space in the past. I pay attention to my individual to speak to the sense of self in us all. I let as much of the converging world’s smartest opinions act themselves out through me in order to look like “I’m” the one doing anything “special.” I’m just a response and reaction. I’m equally as desperate. But I’m not willing to adopt placating cliches or craziness to quell my bitch-all-the-time mind. It’s not going away.
And as long as you don’t get that, as long as you don’t help, as long as you don’t reach out and play a part or stand up in the same ways about the same things in your life, I, and you, and we will all fail. We will fail harder than we’re failing right now, which is hard to fucking state in its entirety. You’re not undeveloped 20 year olds. You’re not unstable conspiracy theorists. But you are getting older. You are getting complacent. You are getting used to the quasi-stability and habits that have kept your head above water so far. And I’m impressing upon you, not because “they” are out to get us, they are, they tell you about it every fucking day, because you’re not reacting appropriately to it, that’s when the game is over.
Before you go putting your faith and arguments into things you can’t see or never know, just acknowledge the shit in front of you. There are people out there fighting, some dramatically more effectively and efficiently than others. If you can’t tell the difference, they won’t win. There are people who respect their time and money and positions of power for what they’re worth, but if you “hate all politicians,” you may as well swing the axe and scream, “Off with their heads!” There are billionaires who target misinformation to vulnerable idiots at every hour of the day. If you think “the media” is synonymous with bullshit, they beat you again.
The only way you get a survivable collective is the realization of every individual. The only way you get an individual is to comprise one of many other individuals. Right now, most of us, we’re balls of historical consequences and propaganda. We’re talking points and dead-end “reasoning.” We’re excuses and indulgences and uninterested minds. That’s what scares me the most. That I will create something badass that I’ve sacrificed for, invested in, and fought tooth and nail to keep hold of, and even when the invitation is in bright shining letters and includes a red carpet, I’ll be met with the strained “enthusiasm” that I perceive we’re pursuing life with right now.
So what are you learning? What’s your individual effort or focus? Is it nothing? Are you just waiting to die? You just want to do your job and go home? You just want to giggle about the next batshit thing that comes out of the news? The world is your fault. Act like it. Pull us back from the brink and at least chuck rocks at the goliaths destroying everything in their path. It’s not getting better, because you’re not getting better.
