I tend to watch movies on Sundays. I don’t know if that’s by accident, or because as a child we used to go over to my grandparents for lunch/dinner on Sundays and watch a movie afterwards. I’ve been more or less baked into my home for the last 4 days, leaving last night under the impression I was to spend time with a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Instead, I did some grocery shopping and returned to my nest.
I’ve been anchoring to an idea lately. I watched a random short or TikTok where a man described how much conservatives care about your life and body. They care who you marry. They care who you fuck. They care where your immortal soul is going and how to get it there. If you just want to be left alone, you can’t do so in a world where a conservative will make it their mission to introduce you to Jesus or otherwise condemn you to their hell.
I listen to pushing 100 podcasts. The Pod Save America guys dutifully list the atrocious consequences of the continued spiral into the fascist abyss. Why are we cancelling research to save kids with brain cancer? Because. Because, fuck you, that’s why. Because it doesn’t serve the financial interest of those in power, and because hundreds of millions of people can’t be bothered to register their neglectful impact on others.
I’m tempted to say I’m like the man in the TikTok video. I don’t care about what you do “personally.” I don’t think it takes a high I.Q. to understand that if you walk around as a disease vector, that can affect me. If you’re keen to kill people I’m not sure are the enemy, that will blow back on me too. If you’re incapable of defining and carrying out laws and justice, I can’t expect to maintain a certain coherence to my own thoughts, household, and family. You’re not leaving me alone in the same way I’d grant to you.
I asked in my IOP group the other day what made people so confident in their judgment. No surprise, no one had a good answer, but they wield it reflexively all day. They don’t want to be judged by the worst things they’ve done as addicts, but give them a second of unstructured/unfocused time and most sentences start with something like, “That motherfucker,” or “He knows what he did,” or “I’m just being real.” We’ll label, other, mind-read, and circularly “logic” ourselves into compulsive coping cycles.
The religious person is analogous to an addict. All answers resolve to an infinite unearned confidence in how you compulsively cope with the world. What makes it an addiction is your proclivity to do it in spite of the self-destruction. When your god sees fit to burn the latest witch, your hair also being on fire is a feature, not a bug. It’s just god’s warmth lighting your way.
We talk about “extremes” on the Right and Left and how they end up mirroring each other. Despite a whole period of The New Atheists, I don’t think culturally we walked away with a deep enough understanding of ideological capture. I listened to Dan Carlin and Sam Harris talk about how ruminating on modern times and the absolute craziness people are willing to go along with makes the past easier to understand. That we’ve supercharged it with technology is all the more confounding. “We” are captured. I don’t feel like “we,” because I still use my voice, and look for every opportunity to fight the march over the cliff.
I don’t think people wrestle with how much they do, in fact, want to die. They grow up in ridiculously ignorant and abusive households. They consume media that makes it nearly impossible to think clearly or coherently. They’re fat. They’re weird looking. The nice things they try to do for themselves, say a concert, come with huge price tags, people masturbating in the crowd, and some asshole with a sign blocking your view. Paid $20 for popcorn lately, or a single shot?
It’s not like they’re born wanting to die. It’s that they get messages fed to them their entire life that dying’s where it’s at. You’ll get to Heaven. You’ll get to enjoy your enemies in Hell. All that you can’t understand or cope with will be revealed and made perfect. It’s a linguistic drug you feed yourself in every moment you stare a little too long over the cliff’s edge, too curious.
Doubling-down is the name of the game most people are playing. Whatever they say, say it again. So often the words contain less useful information than a baby crying or bird cawing. Never stop. If you stop, you’ll interrupt the road to the true goal of dying. If you stop, you’d have to start working to account for your infinite ignorance. Why do that when you can celebrate and be empowered by it with your claim to your god and its powers? Why can’t you just be left alone to condemn and destroy as you see fit?
Addicts share an immaturity and entitlement. Their development has often been arrested. Who are you, counselor, to tell me anything about how to live my life if you haven’t walked in my shoes? Unless you’ve walked the fine line between “normal” and “meth-induced psychosis,” you certainly can’t be trusted. It’s not their fault, necessarily, but you have to approach subjects as though you’re talking to a child. We pretend like we’re not all fundamentally children in the same way. In addiction, it’s just exacerbated. Why would a third to half of the population in any given moment or era want a “strong man” or “angry daddy?”
I think about this any time someone “intellectual” claims to be a specific religion or believe in a god. I think it’s why we’re doomed regardless. The exercise of self-justification, the double-down, can be dressed up in thousand dollar words, books, and surgically precise sutures to moral postures. The concepts of “good” or “fair” or “justice” or “individuality” or “rights” or anything we’ve trudged up from The Enlightenment will never feel as salient as “my god.” We can’t share in my god. You have to navigate my god. My god is awesome. My god fills in the gaps. My god is all-powerful. My god can do literally anything ever I need him to, except give me genuine peace about how you are living your life.
This is the utility, the joy, the comfort, in self-destruction. Every piece of me that dies is one less I need to suffer. If I break my brain, I can’t think about how you make me feel. If I break my legs, I can’t be expected to stand on my ability to argue. If I break my back, it won’t be expected to be in the fields. If I break my tongue then it’s your fault! for not recognizing the drooling ramblings of the confused and infirm. If I break my eyes and ears I’ll never know how many die, needlessly. If I break my heart, I won’t feel how violently I’m beating my chest.
No comments:
Post a Comment