I hesitate to say we need different words. That is to say, I think the words we have used to do a pretty fine job of explaining things. No matter what’s become of them in the modern era, I still think reasonable people find shared understanding through the dissemination of meaning through a shared language. The universal language is science. Most people don’t cringe like me when someone says they love them. And Nazis should almost certainly die.
People are frequently under the mistaken impression that they are “modern.” Their “advanced” knowledge of the world and the era in which they occupy gives them perfect confidence. “We” will cure cancer. “We” will ride the long arc of history towards racial and sexual justice. With enough sun tan lotion and solar panelled air conditioners, we’ll never be burned off the planet. Modernity as a concept is a mask. It’s an opportunity to hide and play pretend.
Everything about “right now” comes out of the array of possible shared experiences. I can invite anyone on Earth to my dinner table and barring some anomaly with their gut, we can both recognize and eat a life sustaining meal. That’s the easiest kind of thing. No opinion in the world can override your stomach’s desire for food. There is no other way to get on with bothering to experience anything without that in place.
Now imagine that what you’ve sat down to eat isn’t precisely food. That is, you can eat it, you can feel full, but it’s just...off. In fact, you can eat it 3 times a day for years and you won’t notice anything is really wrong until your stomach explodes. On the list of things you would probably complain and ask about would be, “Whose goddamn job was it to label this?” Before your quick and very painful death. Your friend ate it with you. Your family fed it to you. It tasted just beneath store-brand level.
You’ve caught on that this food is all information. How you approach every single second of the message you are putting out there can poison and explode you or keep you nourished and alive. Your brain does this sorting automatically. It knows when something wrong went in and will attempt to puke or shit it out quick. Your mind, on the other hand, can decide for its own self what it thinks of your arbitrary name “food.”
It’s one of the oldest patterns I use to annoy people. Vague piety. When you don’t know something you talk in group identity terms. Nothing about the group is redeeming, no individuals are allowed to be named, and closely following words of condemnation follows your own virtue and capacity to transcend their group. It’s “atheists are immoral” it’s “black people are criminals” it’s “Nazi’s should almost certainly die.” I ask you to name “the” atheist, or black person, or Nazi in question. I ask for their crimes. I ask for what their group says about them. I ask how we’re defining “Nazi” even if I’m happy to be convinced with the definition history has given us already.
It’s been going on for as long as I ever discovered a real position on something to completely disavow the details. We forgo the shared experience. We make words exactly the opposite of what they mean, and then we wake up one day to a KKK and Nazi march and are overwhelmed and confused about how it happened or what it means. As far as the modern era is concerned, it means nothing. They trended for a day, then it’s back to the video games. Or have you heard the newest most anti-American and nonsensical thing Hitler 2 said yet?
I consider shit-talking a kind of artform. To shit talk, you need to be discovering truth in a witty and damaging way. It only qualifies if you get to someone. When you’re acting in a way that doesn’t match your circumstances or words, you deserve to be called out. You’ve set yourself to fail and be embarrassed and go back and correct for something. If you haven’t caught on, a solid reason to wear all of your bullshit on your sleeve is that it makes it incredibly hard for people to shit talk you. If you live in the truth, all you see is limp-wristed flails in your direction about your character or circumstances. Often, they try to make something up or purposely distort something stupid just to fill the air.
A bad shit talker is our president. He’s the child who just repeats the first stupid thing that comes to his head. He hasn’t had a grasp of the truth for untold years so nothing he says sticks but for the insisted effort of the virulent mass. It’s often stated that he’s a symptom. He’s a champion of all those high school pissing matches you never won. He’s overcome the fights with your older siblings that made you feel small. He’s proud of his lies and excuses to not do better and expect more of himself. He’s an endless stream of reality TV catchphrases that culminate in losing even the ability to disavow white supremacy.
And we pretend like we haven’t been encouraging that, big and small, every day of our lives. We got so comfortable writing off the behavior of our friends and family members. We got so comfortable with selfish designs and stories about our contributions to the world. We got so comfortable copying the “smug elites” and their dialogue without ever figuring out how to reach the learned and frustrated place it might have come from. We doubled down in our self-destructive tendencies and turned the truth tellers, the fighters, the struggle, and the work into Hollywood cliches and context-free quotes for our walls. We got so comfortable wasting our words and wasting our time pursuing everything and everyone that let us fall a little further and sleep a little deeper on what it means to achieve The American Dream.
Nothing about you is new. The forces that molded the Nazis aren’t even 2 generations from you, let alone the hundreds of thousands or millions of years old structures that you consist of. You are always breaking down and being built up. You are always changing and fighting and keeping a foot in chaos and a foot in order. You are not above it. You cannot escape. You can’t carry a cliche or cartoon to explain away your position and why it is always and forever at the top. You’ve let your words, your body, degrade into nothing and so have forgotten how to use it. It breaks down when you try. It leaves you feeling scarred and scared and wondering how you ever let it get so bad. But you were doing it every day, with every lie.
I don’t mean “we should negotiate with Nazis” when I say “we should kill Nazis.” I respect and accept that I’m always under threat. My words are, literally, used in the exact opposite way that any other reasonable person trying and caring would find to use them. I’ve been met with the obscure posture and line by line memorized pageantry of a “heated debate.” I’ve been denied respect for every single thing I’ve ever put up as a real world manifestation of my values. I’ll never be justified to some people, I’ll never be convinced to others, and I’m so lost in the woods of my ego I could never crawl out and proclaim anything I saw as “fucking stupid.”
You want another reason people kill themselves? The rest of the world exists on a perpetual opposite day. If you apply a skeptical scientific mind to the mess, if you don’t stay specific, you’ll be completely disoriented. Death is mercy! Meanwhile, in opposite land, where words are exactly wrong, every step taken to end one’s life is heralded as a miracle! What reasonable person would make themselves a target by painting a swastika on their forehead? That’s what you’ve done when you chant genocidal battle cries. Why repeat the abuses of your familial and relationship past? Pain cares! It’s familiar! It’s super comfy to be reminded of, not the only thing I’ve known, but the thing I’m picking as the strongest and best impression of what I will strive for.
You surround yourself with liars. You hold nobody accountable to anything. You smile too often and too hard. You talk plans you can’t carry out. You make excuses for groups and circumstances. You become a caricature. You become a long line of Chinese telephone cliches about some topic or another and you don’t care where it came from, what it means, or what it’s setting you up to fail at in the future. The loudest, heaviest, deadliest, angriest, most afraid lazy liars calling out in piddling fashion every loud, heavy, deadly, angry, most afraid lazy liar that pretends to hold some kind of truth that can speak to them! Ha! Have you heard the fake news?
I just want to remind you that it never gets better. You never get happy. You never fix anything. You never change anything. You never go anywhere. You never grow. You never make peace. All you do is die enough inside so that you can pretend to resemble and to have done the work of the ones who actually looked for and found something. You’ll invite the Nazis in for tea because certainly you’re not the one they’re after. You can’t have their sickness or be guilty of the crimes they seek to punish. Not you, good Christian. Never you, nice girl. No qualms for this family man. So centered and objective and enlightened. So comfortable.
