[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.

[788] Information Age of Hysteria

Another day, another round of opinions on Jordan Peterson. I also read a killer piece by Matt Taibbi about the “Russia scandal.” I think maybe the easiest way to start is just to talk about labels.

Briefly, if you don't already know my reticence for the connotation and presumption that goes along with “trigger” words, nothing I write, nor will ever write, is going to register with you. The amount of times I put “truth” in quotes, attempting to discover the process of churning through my thoughts more than proclaiming the surety of my views, is instructive. I pick words that feel hot, and build a narrative around them. This is how we attempt to grasp the world around us. Is a tree a tree? Or is it bark, roots, leaves, etc. How you understand “tree” is going to determine many more things about how you use it or the place it occupies in your life.

How many words do you think we use that are much broader and more confusing than “tree” routinely? I've gone after “feminism” and “privilege.” I don't like when words that used to be pretty deliberate, like rape, become generalized indictments for miscommunication or unwanted and inappropriate attention i.e. “rape culture.” How many things in the news start with “the war on,” as if war is an easily accessible and sustained violent attack you can invoke with impunity about any imperiled topic? “Anti-Leftist,” “alt-right hero/darling,” “pseudo-intellectual,” the “ists” and “isms” of political shades, and general besmirching of character via scorn for alleged followers and “enabling” or “giving a platform.”

You can write, endlessly, using a combination of the same techniques to “critique” literally anyone or anything. Absolutely none of it does you any favors merely because you are able to deliver your “evisceration” with the pompous indignity that could only rise today to parody. There are many things that have contributed to what I'll posit as the “cultural decline in our capacity to speak and think clearly,” but a daily helping of unsubstantiated nonsense from our most popular news and info-tainment options doesn't help.

Even recognizing that we're playing into an ignorant hand becomes impossible, as “fact-checking” becomes a lurid task of retractions and nose-thumping a barrage of insinuations and accusations while the work to suss out truth goes ignored. “Whistle-blowers” and “alt-media” attempt to hijack the ceded space to tout their perspectives (more true because they're tinted with oh-so-justified doses of emotion and “outrage”), virtue signaling and dog-whistling Dixie.

There's such a stark contrast between the “hit piece,” and the methodical breakdown and cited explanation of a topic. There is no opinion piece you will find that casually refers to Jordan Peterson as “alt-right” that will have the examples demonstrating the label. They'll skim a phrase out of context. They'll poo-poo away hours of video expanding on where his grievances lie. They'll latch on to something misspoken or perhaps genuinely worth apology, and then proceed to ignore the apology.

This is the criticism popular thinkers are making of the Left. You can't continue to play judge, jury, and executioner who presides over the entirety of someone's life, and put them into a box of perpetual scorn and dismissal. This generalized habit reflexively dismisses not just what the other person you despise is thinking, but how they got there. If you refuse to attempt to understand how someone thinks, it suggests to me you're unwilling or unable to think for yourself. That's the impetus for free speech. That's surviving the cringe of listening to Ann Coulter or Alex Jones speak.

There are consequences to inciting anger and violence from positions of power. That is different from hearing the attempt to incite, and having a plan or disposition to put it aside. Censorship doesn't protect you from the obligation to learn why you're thinking is incomplete. The broader culture will always figure out a way to spite you, dig up the taboo, or act like it's the protector and purveyor of “unseemly truths,” while the snowflakes melt. This is the heart of my contrarian personality, and a psychological place I think we occupy at large (Trump is fucking president) when we've been fucked with and ignored for too long. The “right” is trending around the world. The self-righteous of every ilk zero in on “guns” or “transgender bathrooms/pronouns” as if those are the real topic.

It's your fundamental insecurity and lack of personal responsibility. That's the story of humanity. Justify for yourself, and pillory what you don't like or understand. We've psychologically distanced ourselves from accountability writ-large. Anonymous facebook hatred. “Self-taught entrepreneurs” and “influencers” serve to legitimize attention for its own sake. The only thing to learn anymore is how to exploit and brand. You label something “bad” with words that “trend,” or you capitalize on fantasy courting Pyrrhic victory. Who cares if the leaps and inferences you made didn't pan out? Who cares if you say it's “cute” an over-worked waitress needs 3 days on the job to afford your jeans? What's really lost if it gave me more followers, likes, clicks, and traffic?

I grow less tempted to be obnoxious every day because I don't believe there aren't consequences. No matter how you started something, if it was “just for fun,” that fire can get out of control. Just because every one else was doing it, doesn't mean they deserved the reach they got. I'm thinking of tech companies. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should or should be allowed to, the tacit approval of waves of ignorant masses notwithstanding. Here I think of Gavin Newsom suspending the death penalty. I don't care what the majority thinks either if it was my innocent ass on the line about to be executed. I care about wasting money and the grander cultural narrative regarding vengeance and State power, but in the immediacy, fuck all that noise.

I don't see it getting better. I actually see violence and other life-threatening or dramatically altering consequences before we find a “collective” chance at survival. You can't attack the basis for grasping existence and think “everyone” is going to get “wise” about their failed “wokeness” and start to zero in on the words that never bother to give them pause in the first place. When a narrative style becomes embodied, that's colloquial reality. Trump repeats. That's the “magic” of his madness. That's the secret of people slowly growing more and more insane losing the ability to reflect. We retweet, and carry the sentiments onto our “news” and otherwise sources of information. We're suffering a mass psychosis of our own doing by not taking a thousand beats to breath, parse, and prove.

Even with the best information still available, I don't think we'll be saved. Noam Chomsky is still speaking. Matt Taibbi is still writing. Spatterings of comedic and reporter voices are “doing their best” to summarize and explain without stoking insanity flames. So what? Me and the old people with time enough to go to book store reads and lectures will know? Hippies and Bohemians will get to scoff until their safe-spaces are in the crosshairs? We're all breathing the same air. The whole system's immune system is implicated. I'll be doing my best from a field in the middle of nowhere.

[428] Do Or Do Not

I think there's an important distinction between types of people that isn't often talked about. When attempts are made to talk about it we tend to regard people as “optimists” who contrast with the “pessimists.” I think the distinction has less to do with your positive or negative outlook on life. I think the distinction lies in how you are socialized to think about your circumstances. That is, it's the difference between people who “want to live” and those who are “waiting to die.”

I get hung up on old movies, shows, and documentaries about bands and political theater. You get the impression that there is a genuine underlying cultural sensibility and understanding. Regardless of what you can say about misogynistic and civil rights failures, people seemed to “get it” in a way that I absolutely cannot find today. This is surely part media bias and rose colored glasses, but at the same time, I think it's the same reason I tend to get along with older people in general if not old women in particular.

Old women seemed to be socialized to “take care of the family.” A very life affirming, always on the go, navigate a million moving parts including your children's needs, husband's emotional distance, and whatever the neighborhood gossip or family secrets. Men were just expected to work and provide. Being tired at the end of the day and teaching a few life skills was tantamount to good parenting. While I was antiquing the other day, a couple of older women lamented that you can't just get into a fight now-a-days without getting sued or put in jail and, no exaggeration said, “in my day things were different.”

It's often talked about “the simpler times.” When what you knew you knew and what you didn't you didn't. Information wasn't being uploaded to the cloud to be checked and debated endlessly every minute. You didn't have a million TV channels and competing sources for your attention like the 1000 people you follow on twitter or the hundreds of friends and their meme pictures and statuses. I genuinely think from a psychological standpoint, this was a better circumstance than what we have today.

I think this because I consider myself an educated person without a fucking clue as to what I should be doing. I spend so much time “doing everything” and absolutely none of it has felt like the “right” thing to do in anything but philosophical or health terms. That is, I don't want to be a wage slave if I don't have to, and I respect my time to a greater degree than my money. I feel a genuine sense of responsibility towards the world because I chose to adopt a stake in it. How I got to a point of adopting that stake is a long and complicated picture that I don't think the modern era makes clear.

Today, if you can even define “friend,” when you don't like them you click an "x" and add a new one. We'll have more jobs by the time we're 25 than our parents had their entire lives. What does that do for your conception of a relationship? A relationship to your job, your town, neighbors, coworkers, or how you conceive of your work? I used to think the words “union” and “collective bargaining” went hand in hand, but with union membership at like...7? 8? percent, and if you poll people, you'd think 1900-1935ish didn't exist in this country. We've destroyed respect for your effort, time, and health.

I was listening to a Jack White song where he says something like “we're not entitled to a single damn thing.” If that's true, does that mean we don't owe anybody anything? Because surely someone is entitled to my basic respect for their being. Perhaps you only get the idea of entitlement when you subscribe to wanting to be alive in the first place. But what is it to entitle something? You are held in trust. You should be living up to said title or taking responsibility for claiming ownership of something. Do we just overwhelmingly abdicate responsibility and therefore feel like we don't deserve things?

I've been wanting to shit on myself for trying. And I feel like that has way more to do with the overall culture than with me. It's that no matter what you're doing, you're being punished. I got the degree, for an exorbitant amount of money. I'll let you talk to my fellow graduate and friend what it feels like to apply for 100+ jobs, in the same field, and get nothing for it because I skipped that headache and went for opening my own business. There again, punished for not being able to afford a lawyer with better advice, or a lawyer to sue when you were lied to and sunk costs, also by “the terrorists,” often mislabeled as Islamic extremists, who gouge you on insurance, rent, and of any scraps of self-respect you might have left. You're certainly being punished in a minimum wage anything. And now, I'm finding a way to punish myself in the stress of trying to rely on my blood pressure and drug studies to even begin something resembling savings or investment.

And I'm still supposed to remember that by not being in debt and having my bills paid for a year, I'm doing better than nearly everyone on the planet. At such point I'm supposed to what? Bend the knee and thank the gods? It isn't about me.

It's concordantly hard to deal with having, barely, examples of people who “represent me” in the public eye. As far as the political realm there's maybe 4; Warren, Sanders, the Seattle Green chick, and Nader. With celebrities, Michael Moore on a good day and I suppose Russell Brand is a little batty, but he speaks true shit and gets his hands dirty.(edit 2024. Oh, how people change.) Writers like Naomi Klein, Chomsky, Hedges (most of the time), and Taibbi. I can give as much shit about Bill Maher as your fundie uncle, but when he's lucid I can nod along. Mostly, I prefer Jon Stewart or Colbert, and increasingly Oliver if we have to leave real reporting up to comedians. Thankfully, albeit very recently, Vice's HBO show is filling such a massive void their facebook editorials should feel ashamed of sharing the same name.

But each name or organization I could point to feels like a pebble. They belong to the old women, and me, who have the time to read their books and “educated liberals” who can laugh more than cry about what's being reported. It's for the people who can afford HBO or aren't so baffled by technology they can figure out torrenting is easier than Yahoo Mail.

My world feels so small. It's why when I like my friends, I really like my friends, drunk “fuck everything” blogs aside. It's why I'm really sad when one of them gives up or becomes too busy or writes off my genuine concern as “just what Nick P. does or thinks.” I'm pushing a full stop when it comes to existential exploration and the exhaustion that comes with putting yourself out there so often to ill or non-defined ends. I don't want to be Nader publishing a book about all my letters that didn't get answered and call that not giving up.

Literally all I can do is wait and learn more. But even if I figure out something new to try, I feel like I'm going to be doing it alone, and setting myself up for a new punishment. Still none of those personal wins or promises to yourself are gonna matter. If I don't consider it about me, I can't endorse you making it about you. But, I want to choose life. That includes how our culture helps or hurts, even and especially for those who feel like they're stuck waiting around to die.