[974] Bloody Needs

I may have lingered a little too long to capture what’s been on my mind, but here we’ll attempt to piece together what’s still floating.

I’ve found myself more capable of “disengaging.” I used to be pretty plugged into the active gobbling up of information. I was ready with details, history, citations, and rehearsed arguments for why “things” “should” look, sound, or operate one way over another. My first bite of it was arguing about the nature of healthy relationships, then I had mounds of religion versus science exchanges. The primary reason I know anything about any philosopher was a manic search for knock-out insights or phrasing for how to conduct life. I didn’t have a specific or parsed understanding of what my problem was. I just knew I needed “more.”

Conversational patterns seem to be the ones I’m most attuned to. I take in so much from TV, books, or news that I can readily recognize when you’re being a parrot verses thinking through something for yourself. A unique, albeit common, perspective literally doesn’t sound like anyone else in an important way. It has a kind of novelty that keeps you hooked when your perspective has that same “more” hunger, and someone is speaking to what’s on your mind in a more individuated and personal way.

A FOX viewer isn’t only “dumb” or “misinformed,” they’re inarticulate about the mess of angry and afraid feelings, so they seek out the confirming narrative to do the work for them. I was drawn to Jordan Peterson not because he was telling me anything necessarily “new,” but he was articulating it in a personal way, imbuing the story with his experience as a clinician and personal struggle trying to understand human depravity. Elon Musk struck me in how he approached acquiring knowledge and the emotional pain of being misunderstood at a fundamental level.

This is why I find criticism akin to, “We’ve heard this all before,” so severely lacking in honesty or depth. If you can so quickly write-off a show because it’s a “cop drama” or a person because they’re “famous for nothing,” you’re making a similar error. This doesn’t mean you have to respect or enjoy those things, but it does mean you’ve handicapped your capacity to understand what draws in other people. Provided you’re still a person, you’re missing a way to tune into yourself.

I think a lot about when I first learned why toddlers watch the same things over and over. Surely the propensity of algorithmic media engagement preys upon that. A movie has demonstrative and predictable patterns, and even still, you can find different emotions or things you missed with each rewatch. This is training. Just like when you remember something, even if .0001% of the memory or retelling changes, it’s not the same each time. Each stroke of a FOX-induced hate-boner is fractionally different and reinforcing. Each chant of a radical mantra or prayer recitation the same thing.

The fact that we have so much to consume information-wise suggests that, whether it be biological or some perfectly obscured mythically epistemological concept, “more” is universal to the human experience. Whether you want more love, sex, or food, it seems extremely rare, if truly in existence at all, that one is just “okay” in or “at peace” in whatever manner they are. I read old blogs and think about how desperately I felt the desire to get power, clean water, air conditioning, a way to communicate from the middle of nowhere, my tools, time to get things done, and the various piles of things I’ve acquired in service to future builds. I couldn’t shut off my “more” valve if I wanted to.

What more do you want when you’re parroting someone else’s script? What if it’s something you can’t get or can’t conceive of how to get? Maybe it’s self-esteem and brainpower. You’re only born with so much brainpower, and maybe you’re surrounded by people who give zero shits how they make you feel. Maybe you can’t begin to understand how to carry a positive conception of yourself independent of their imposing views.

What if you can’t even recognize that you’re running on someone else’s script? This feels like a lot of the tension in generational differences or the thirsty ideologues clinging to post-modern obscurity. A right-wing Christian conservative antagonist should not be able to get so many doctors tripping over their tongue about the question, “What is a woman?” One of the quickest ways you know someone isn’t thinking rationally is circular reasoning. “A woman is however she defines herself.” No. A woman isn’t that, any more than anything is anything because you add more words that still reduce to, “The thing is the thing because it’s the thing.”

An unwillingness to define a “thing,” is a pillar of not thinking. It’s why I hate talking in “ists” and “isms.” You need a PhD in “feminism” to figure out which sect and era’s position you might be speaking from. Do this messily, and you might not even understand if you’re being an advocate or in opposition. That fascist-speak can summarily dismiss “radical feminists” attests to this both, in their irrational fallacious claim, and the in-built weakness of conceiving of your position under the moniker. When you stick to asking questions like, “Do you believe in equal pay” or “Do you hate men?” you figure out the individuated position.

I don’t think a lot of us like to recognize how often we’re not thinking, or how often we notice it in the people we’re feigning closeness towards. I’ve experienced people driven together by mutually shared not-thinking narratives regularly. It’s a behavior that’s rewarded and reinforced unironically. The group can’t be a group if you’re popping your head up too often commenting on the unhealthy nature or inadequate capacity of the group.

I challenge you to count how often you say something like, “Because that’s how I feel.” You feel it “because,” or you feel because you feel. The insistence is to respect feelings that, by regular demonstration are not reflected upon, not given to understanding, and often have pretty dramatic and ongoing consequences. If my mom lost her temper, my shit’s getting broken, I’m getting beat, and we’re building in another layer of generational trauma to explore with indefinite therapy. But I need to respect how she felt? My experience is the same as someone in college challenged to think harder about what some “controversial” speaker is “violently” discussing at a podium or on the street?

The landscape feels locked in this word-obscurity and language of feelings. And the march from someone reasonable and healthy towards the high-stakes chaos of “cancellation” and “de-platforming” I think played out like an abusive relationship. If he only yelled at you in a scary way once in a year and a half, hit you just before year 3, and all-along had made seemingly reasonable arguments at the time to chip away at your autonomy, the drift was almost imperceptible.

If you tried to chronicle the shifts in our cultural dialogue as it pertained to individual well-being, happiness, indulgence, capitalizing, or decadent self-expression, and you’re 7-years old a few years after “greed is good” becomes subconsciously instantiated in the cultural milieu, you don’t have a prayer. “You need a college degree” or “middle-class house, wife, etc.” as laws changed to exploit and prey upon you didn’t get noticed. You’re always being supplied a narrative. You’re always being influenced by your biases and ingrained practices. It’s incredibly hard to dig “you” out of all that.

I tend to write people off who I can’t recognize as their own “You.” You have a problem you speak to time and again and refuse to change how you approach it, perhaps. You have a “strong opinion” about something you’re absolutely incapable of hearing conflicting or rounding evidence about. You engage in things like questioning the person you’re talking to’s motivation for bringing something up or asking at all. You find yourself incapable of drawing a conclusion that isn’t the most damning interpretation of what’s been said or flat out ignores or denies there’s anything else often literally in front of both parties.

It gets old. It doesn’t seem to get old for most people as fast as it should. Everyone seems to have some topic in which they’re as quick to circle up their reasoning as the “irrational” or “asshole” over there. All you have to do is poke something they’re insecure about. Getting old, fat, or ugly? Like a flash! Body-positivity narratives wash over conversations about health and beauty standards. Feeling oppressed? Here’s a hashtag drumbeat for shouting down critics. You can lament the number of “phobics.” You can start a campaign to overthrow the “violent” enemies who use their words in ways that did not respect your feelings.

Meanwhile, big portions of reality appear, to me anyways, like they’re trending towards some catastrophic reshuffling of who lives and dies and whether we really continue down a path that nets more freedom, safety, and self-determination. It’s hard to even recount the number of times I’ve been functionally shouted down or isolated for talking, and I’m just an individual example of what we’ve watched in the media on a global scale. I get incredibly frustrated when I watch otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people invite cunts like Kellyanne Conway to spin and spin and waste time like we don’t already know the fascist playbook. We don’t need to reimagine “doublespeak” and invent the straw-man.

As much as I want “more” money, time, or freedom to fuck off and do whatever strikes me in a given moment, I have a deep hunger for time around people who have found themselves, or are making a genuine concerted effort to figure out what parts are missing. I suspect I’ll be typing this same kind of story from an increasingly regal circumstance I occupy in the future. I don’t really believe that the culture I’m plugged into will provide me much beyond more stuff. I’m incredibly thankful I can eek out the friendly individual here and there, but I do, most often, feel the chill on connecting or speaking at all, let alone to what’s really on my mind. I don’t find it valuable or worthy to share with people who can only mindlessly consume and relish in the absurd antagonism of obscurity.