[943] Little Big Planet

Someone I respect for their reporting is Matt Taibbi. He’s, broadly, an even, detailed voice about things most of us are keen to glean from the headlines. I recently listened to him downplaying the idea that January 6^th was an insurrection attempt. His criticism mostly focuses on the media and the language they use. He points out all of the things that Trump or the republicans don’t have, like control of the military or people generally smart enough to stay organized and persistent. He says coups don’t have selfies and shit smearing if they’re to be taken seriously.

I think, just like anyone I respect who gets something so wrong, he’s missing the mark because his lenses are too focused. Anyone who is otherwise consistent in their ability to offer measured analysis of detailed issues, until they aren’t, commits the same error. When I get myopic about my struggling or misery, I’m usually tired, hungry, need to shit, and in the wake of too many little things that have annoyed me back-to-back. When “smart” people get lost in the weeds of their analysis, the direction of the wind can become wholly obscured.

We live in infinitely complex systems. Not “incredibly” not “vastly,” but infinitely. There is literally no telling what to make of every force working on you, through you, in any given moment. When you pause, you might notice your breath, heartbeat, temperature, hum, an itch, a tightness, a dryness, the lights, and you won’t have even moved on to what it takes to get you up and out and worrying about what you haven’t done with your day.

In that spirit, people can be forgiven for their missteps. This is why we have concepts like forgiveness and accountability. You can’t be blamed for a miscount if no one taught you how. You can’t live in perpetual shame and blame without functionally killing yourself and often many things around you.

Jordan Peterson has been flirting with the same error as Matt Taibbi. He tweeted that Joe Rogan is to be trusted in a way CNN is not. What’s the level of analysis there? CNN and Joe Rogan aren’t even measured at the level of the individual. Is it legacy then? Aggregate truthful statements or apologetic retractions? It’s a generally bizarre and imprecise thing to say. Are all CNN news anchors complicit? Are purported news programs to be measured on the same level of popular MMA comedian pontificators?

I happen to think that we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, big and small. I live in an area where there’s unlikely to be Proud Boys roaming the streets, but they’ll be sourced from my neighbors. I think local governance has been under attack, and it continues, with little to no repercussions. I think small, irrationally motivated groups are all it has ever taken to reshape history. I think I’ve never had good healthcare coverage. I think our financial systems are wholly corrupt. I think my version of an appreciable “middle class” life is as much of a mockery of what I expected to have growing up as anyone else’s who might still be paying off student debt.

Fundamentally, I’m not happy. I’m not content. I’m not in a privileged headspace that can deny my anxiety about what I think and feel is coming. I want to move, I want to build, I want to invest, but I don’t even trust that anything I do in service to those desires will last. I mean, maybe a couple years, but not so far back in my head is still the idea of selling everything and attempting to escape to a different country.

I consider myself lucky that I have so much writing. I can see instantly that, more than my ability to ceaselessly complain, I’ve been identifying or calling out issues that haven’t been resolved for at least a decade. This suggests to me they aren’t going to be resolved and no one is aware, capable, or cares enough to even try. I don’t think there’s a political party that’s clued in and effective. I don’t know of any local or independently organized movement. There’s a few speaking explicitly, Sunrise, Diem25, individuals on the Left, but operating major levers of power? Hardly.

Sometimes, it’s enlightening to read an account from an “average Joe” on the ground during a historical tragedy or genocide. Provided you weren’t in the path, as if you knew, of a roaming violent hoard, you’re basically presented with an off-grid survivalist challenge. You have to get food, have places to hide, and keep your wits about you in who you talked to and about what. You just kind of wait, in relatively extreme discomfort, for the killing to stop. It seems like one would need a fantastic imagination to consider the practical reality of this in an American context.

That’s precisely the pacifying impulse. We have every reason to write-off our dramatic thoughts. That is, except the countervailing evidence. The problem is, we don’t know how to weigh it. There is no objective measure of “insurrection.” There are only modern definitions of words and how many or most use them. We’ve used such hyperbolic language in our media, all the people “slammed” and “eviscerated” for what might be whispered disagreements or passionate-adjacent speeches. So, we sleep. We pacify. We wait to be compelled. We program ourselves to default to a passive environmental selection process that may or may not leave us alone or shuffle us on trains.

I also recently listened to an absolutely brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast with Pat Blanchfield on how to understand politics from a Freudian perspective. Where an initial impulse to see hypocrisy or point out contradictions, you can instead ask yourself, what is it that the belief the hypocrite is holding is serving? Why do Evangelicals like someone who wants to fuck his daughter? Why do pro-democracy Chinese dissidents find themselves incapable of the irony of escaping only to rally for American fascism?

At bottom, there’s just an immense amount of suffering. It isn’t coherently organized. It can’t be approached through some kind of talk therapy or mass psylocibin trip. At every level of our being, something is being violated. You can take a snapshot of any given life and just apply traumatic statistics. Most sexual violence happens from someone you love or who is in your family. Most people are still reeling from child-rearing practices that are almost designed to induce long-term trauma. The U.S. has the 6^th highest divorce rate at 50% in the world. You can flip a coin on your romance narrative. 43 million people have student loans. 31.1 million don’t have insurance, and most of us are familiar with how shitty what’s on offer actually is. Jobs aren’t paying enough. With your master’s or doctorate, you might be able to squeak out a middle-class life if you’re willing to work in what have morphed into human factory farms for addiction, “education,” or ill-defined “services.”

Most people start from a considerably worse place than what I considered my cohort. Most people are fat, and ugly, and on the losing parts of many a bell curve. Their jobs are stressful. Their kids suck. Their cars are breaking down. Their family incidental or fleetingly familiar with the intimacies that you may regard as constitutive of your being. Why did Trump get elected? Have you ever just looked at and listened to the people who support that? Do we need detailed historical analogies and 24-hour speculative punditry? Why do people believe even one lie, let alone an endless stream shot from a water cannon?

At the top of hierarchies, at the bottom of hierarchies, we all hate to fucking be here. Every unifying narrative is just and only that. It’s a narrative. We’ll rally behind Spider-Man and the Avengers. We’ll light candles and incense for a series that was cancelled too soon. Whether we pick up a liberal narrative about the underlying hatred and racism or a conservative narrative about downplaying the underlying hatred and racism, whatever our mind finds most satisfying is to be believed. Maintaining perpetual doubt is not necessarily conducive to survival, let alone a semblance of happiness or Insta-worthy posts.

In modern times, we talk about inequality in ways that feel dead or inarticulate to me. Not even a hundred years ago, the rich and poor were dying of things like Covid, or considerably more treatable conditions. Even now, we get a vaccine in a year because the rich, connected, and talented are at least selfishly aware of their own mortality in a way that our over-riding cultural narratives might otherwise dismiss. We’re not all in this together in the most important and forward-thinking ways. We’re desperately clambering to insanity-making narratives about our own worth and what we have the power to control.

What else can you do but wait? My feeble and disorganized attempts to rally people to connect and conceive of different ways of living have been feeble and disorganized. People don’t just fail to talk, but the more I do, the more I chase them away from the thought that they should even bother. I’m not in ongoing dialogues gaining perspective from my “friends” at different levels of their social and professional hierarchies lol. I’m just “ranting,” courting likes from my 3-5 fans, as we all watch our respective struggles or indulgences. There’s no shared goal or uniting quality beyond ever-winnowing history.

The crazies have an enemy. The crazies feel at home and like they’re defending something. “Us?” We’re writing op-eds about how leaders are failing us and reporting on the front lines of those patrolling the streets with guns actively campaigning to normalize their behavior. They’re “proud,” we’re scared. They’re lashing out about their powerlessness and confusion; we’re retreating into intellectualized fairy-tales about how bad we really feel as well and how it’s manifesting.

Do I hate “everything?” Is “life” constantly annoying? I grew up in my abusive household with ticks I haven’t completely shaken off. I’ve experienced the repeated “grind” and “burnout” of abusive work-environments. If I don’t choose debt, I can hardly dream, because my goals are not to merely live cheap, alone, in the middle of nowhere. If I don’t resolve myself to endless complicity in systems that destroy people, including my best conception of myself, I court becoming an explicit victim of those systems myself.

Do you pull out and feel guilty and speculative about what you “could” have done? Do you “radicalize” and tie yourself to some movement, moving almost certainly for the sake of it, because you’re psychologically stuck? Do you ignore how you’re perpetuating the abuses and exploitation that molded you? Ask yourself what narrative you’re already perpetuating and why it feels best.

At a conceptional level, what do you do when presented with the infinite? Many pick the “godly” thing, in lieu of the “right” thing. It’s a convenient and familiar narrative that has evolved to morph with what objectively may be a more rational or more right way of existing. It’s confusing, often deliberately. Just like the family member who molests their child. God loves you! He’ll also pretty much ignore the systematic ass-rape of little boys and righteous genocide. Woo! Everything you could ask for and more.

I think there’s a lot to be said about the storm of consequences of unremitting crazy or violence, but the most compelling story is the one actively worked and shaped. It’s why I feel adrift and useless if I’m not “doing something” or able to show you what my effort is manifesting as. It’s why I have to write. I am always looking, always processing, always trying to locate a source of inspiration or thing to incorporate into how I move in the world. I think we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, but not so much that I’ve arranged to sell everything I have and flee.

It takes an infinitely small shift a fraction of a degree to not embody the out-and-out hypocrite moniker invoked from an outside judge. “If you care about babies…why not after they’re born!?” You’re in an entirely different realm of existence, let alone discussion, with a charge and question like that. Even if you hate yourself, you care about yourself first. You care how you feel above all else. So, no, they don’t care about babies. They haven’t figured out how to care for themselves anymore than a baby has. Perhaps you and I barely have. I know every day I’m going to want to eat, and desire to witness some “progress” on one or dozen of my goals. I know I wish I wasn’t haunted by the prospect of abandoning it all to survive.

Most people don’t see things the way I do. The ones who are close are more than an infinitely small degree away from empathizing with my experience. They aren’t feeling the same obligation to move more independently of what the environment dictates. They’re undoubtedly watching my experience, my flail, and figuring their form of carved-out suffering or captured privileges will suffice. And we’ll continue to watch each other on our respective ice drifts. We’ll continue to take seriously that we really know anything about “most people” beyond our shared suffering we’re not interested in addressing proactively. I mean, after all, I’m not suffering, not really, not like them over there.