[1253] Howl At My Ass

I don’t think I trust democracy. Take a really deep breath, because I can already feel your assumptions overwhelming the many different points I’ll be attempting to make that usually aren’t heard anyway. I certainly don’t trust any authoritarian. What both have in common is my distrust of people.

I don’t meet many people. I, generally, spend my time navigating reactive animals. I don’t meet many individuals. I don’t hear many novel insights. I’m mostly stuck, awake, trying to “survive” the circumstances launched my direction while trying to stay in touch with my own sense of being, values, motivation, and perspective.

That’s a lot packed into 2 little paragraphs already. My first line was shared by the founders of The U.S. A constitutional republic is not democracy. We gloss over this colloquially. Our historical, baseline disposition, is one that was shaped by the horrors of our behavior towards one another. We have good reasons and instincts to hate our neighbors, fear invaders, and protect whatever we’ve established as an adaptation that got us this far.

Widen your lens a bit and think about where trust actually lies. I, more or less, trust processes. I don’t “believe” in them, I get to regularly account for their consequences and add up stats. The process of evolution by natural selection trumps your opinion of what looks or feels best-suited. Scientific processes of concurrent independent verification and falsification are more trust-worthy than vibes. I trust people’s timeless inclinations to be greedy and selfish, so the consequences of capitalist expansion and exploitation are predictable.

I think people understand intuitively they need structure, tyrannical or otherwise. A cell needs a boundary to exist. You’re made of atoms. Your energy is itching to “die” and diffuse everywhere.

Is it unwise to seek a resolution to that tension? When you’re “exhausted” or “overwhelmed” by “politics,” are you just adopting a cliche and fundamentally empty sentiment about the nature of being altogether? What could you trust when you’re fated, in a sense, to be stuck with a fundamentally unreliable, inconsistent, and often extremely dangerous “choice” of who to surrender a meaningful amount of power over your life to?

You need a process. You need a regular exertion of your energy that reconstitutes a reliable enough structure to keep surviving, and hopefully not just so. Part of my process is writing. Another part is creatively expressing through wood work and music. I try to structure my life so it is fundamentally “open” to new experiences and allows me to speak truthfully and consistently to the powers I’m often at the mercy of. 

Have I “failed” in having 20-something odd-jobs over 22 years, working often less than a year at each or not working for months or years at a time between them? The alternative is eating away at what I think it is to be human. I could make excuses. I’m better than “good” at any job I take. I could cash the checks, keep quiet, play along, and then in no uncertain terms I might snap and actually kill myself when I can no longer even see where I exist.

The stakes are pretty high for me. It’s real life. I can come up with all the fun analogies and “game” language about what things are like, but at the end of the day, I respect and fear my power to destroy as much or moreso than I do to build or protect. I’m fundamentally tense and angry. I’m fundamentally exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid. I’m fundamentally and desperately overflowing with hatred for what I know intellectually is akin to millions of dogs barking, but as an individual, refuse to believe they don’t have a choice.

It’s a tyrannical idea that lingers over everything I do or say. I make choices. If I’m going to claim that, I don’t have a choice in whether I believe you have that same capacity. I don’t get a choice if you don’t. I don’t get to dignify and explain my conscious experience if you’re an NPC. The weight is nearly unbearable.

Why? Well, I want to live. I want to live well. I want to live abundantly. I want to create and express and speak the truth. I’m choosing those. When you’re not, I’m literally under attack. I’m drafted into a war I did not choose. I can’t just live like I want. I have to carry the weight and implication of your lies, your policy, your grift, and your mythological story of your power and importance over me and to my life. I have to suffer you whether I want to or not.

I grew up in an abusive household. My mom was the tyrant. Her irrational emotionality ensured I lived in constantly aware fear every single moment. I developed months-long headaches. I spent years in anhedonia. I became an avatar and extension of her cruelty. I wasn’t making choices, I was embodying reactive subjugation. I was at the mercy of forces that are incapable of mercy. I was dressing it up as pride. I was a bully. I was ambivalent to how you felt because I could no longer feel.

I’m still a product of that. I’ve, technically, spent more time under that spell than I’ve been an actual adult. I still don’t feel much beyond visceral anger, occasional happiness or joy, or kinda nothing. It’s easier to feel with a few drinks or under a hallucinogen, but whether I’m actually autistic or broken, I’m absolutely something different than a “normal” person. I have distance and dialogue that either interrupts my reactivity or accompanies it in real time. I’m watching. I’m recording. I’m checking. That I’m narrating my experience at all is “weird.” Animals don’t do that.

I trust that if I maintain my sense of truth or honesty and demonstrate it like this, I will have something reliable I can return to when I’m lost. If I wasn’t doing that, this wouldn’t help. If I can’t see the flow and path of where my thoughts are taking me, then I’ll arrive at consequences I probably don’t want and remain confused and upset about what’s happening to me. It’s work. It’s work every day to pay attention and try to dig out a real and persistent answer to “why.” And now you’re bombarded with algorithm assumptions and answers to keep you “engaged” and infinitely disconnected.

My sense of well-being, rightly or wrongly, is often tied to my sense of financial security. Even if people never care to nor develop the capacity to really see or understand me, money talks. Money buys their reliable complicity, silence, or movement in my preferred direction. Any rich person can functionally treat your will like an Uber. That’s why they focus on paying off and forcing NDAs on your “representatives.” You, little one, can kick and scream all you want, but your predictable helpless reactivity is already built into the equation.

This is the threat of violent revolutionary moments. It’s not what anyone prefers, but when all outlets for the expression of power or grievance get blocked, the most truthful underlying process makes itself known. One, or both of us, will die. If you’re chronically under an abusive dynamic, that doesn’t really matter to you. You don’t really care if you live or die because you don’t have the capacity to care anymore. It’s not that you can’t do the math or see the future, it’s that there’s no emotional resonance for either better or worse.

I think culturally we’re in the same space I was growing up. How you felt didn’t matter. What you want was decided upon in an arbitrary or predatory way. Your closest allies or theoretically most trusted friends and family are weaponized against you. Your logic rebuked. Your honesty, or, especially as a child, your inability to regulate criminalized and you’re basically told you deserve to be tortured and every level of suffering that comes with the reactions to your behavior you’ve earned. I think we’re in psychological hell. I think it manifests physically and socially. I think that because I can reliably predict the reactive dismissive nature of basically every online interaction or forgone conclusion sentiment from nearly everyone I ever meet testifies to the extent of the damage thousands of times a day just in my own life.

Maybe I’m lucky that the pain of trying to be human is less than the pain of playing along. My anger at myself and the confusion about how I should best conduct my day pales in comparison to the “I’m going to get arrested” energy I have in response to the absurdity, complacency, and excuses of people I’d otherwise wish to get along with, if only practically. I’m not a forgone conclusion. That’s an important space for me to protect. There’s a real chance I burn down and contradict the things I profess are the most important to me in maintaining my identity as an individual human. I can’t claim to be making choices if that isn’t true.

You, though? Do you feel that in any sense whatsoever? You fit, right? You belong. You know how the bills are getting paid. You know what power you do or don’t have. You know how accessible the irony and detachment can be deployed. What are you if not judge, jury, and executioner? Do you feel attacked by my abstract invoking of “you?” Who do you think I’m talking to?

I don’t think “it” or “things” will “get better.” I don’t know that they’ve been as good as they are often described. I think, objectively, we’ve coasted on the backs of a relative handful of technological breakthroughs and incredible insights of individual thinkers, researchers, or conquerors. I think we live in a kind of runoff space. It think we’re the residue of efforts “we” will never constitute of our own volition. A small sliver might create something that reconstitutes what it takes to survive for the briefest moment, and “the masses” will do as they do.

What’s my individual responsibility to that thought and how it makes me feel? Ride it in a self-justified way until I die? Weaponize it and excuse my capacity to exploit how I know it makes you vulnerable? Sit alone and pretty in my space doing whatever it is I do? All I can do, all I should do, is trust the process. Keep watching myself and seeing if that thought or feeling changes as I inhabit new environments. Keep looking for the words I didn't know I was going to type until I typed them. Keep expressing what anchors to me independent of me feeling like I had any choice in the matter, and then choose to reconstitute my brain matter.

But, my god, there’s just so much fucking barking.