Ask parents what ambitions they harbor for their child or children and among the most patterned responses is “I just want them to be happy.” I find such an answer thoughtless and disingenuous, and the insertion of the hedge just to make happiness sound like a small ask is a red herring. To begin with, for most kids still in their first decade, happiness and playfulness are relatively effortless and natural so long as a secure, loving environment is provided. Certainly not a default setting, but it’s still quite commonplace. As the dreamy style of childhood cognition is gradually supplanted by supposedly more logical, rational, adult thinking, and as children become acquainted with iniquities of both history and contemporary life, innocence and optimism become impossible to retain. Cue the sullen teenager confronting the yawning chasm between desire and reality. Indeed, few people seem to make the transition into adulthood knowing with much clarity how to be happy in the midst of widespread travail and suffering. Instead, young adults frequently substitute self-destructive, nihilistic hedonism, something learned primarily (says me) from the posturing of movie characters and the celebrities who portray them. (Never understood the trope of criminals hanging at nightclubs, surrounded by drug addicts, nymphos, other unsavory types, and truly awful music, where they can indulge their assholery before everything inevitably goes sideways.)
Many philosophies recommend simplicity, naturalness, and independence as paths to happiness and moral rectitude. Transcendentalism was one such response to social and political complexities that spoil and/or corrupt. Yet two centuries on, the world has only gotten more and more complex, pressing on everyone especially for information processing in volume and sophistication that does not at all come naturally to most and is arguably not part of our evolutionary toolkit. Multiple social issues, if one is to engage them fairly, hinge on legalistic arguments and bewildering wordplay that render them fundamentally intractable. Accordingly, many waive away all nuance and adopt pro forma attitudes. Yet the airwaves, social media, the Internet, and even dinner conversations are suffused by the worst sorts of hypercomplexity and casuistry that confound even those who traffic regularly in such rhetoric. It’s a very long way from “I just want to be happy.”
In the spirit of today’s holiday, let me wish everyone on Earth a bit of peace, albeit temporary. Take a brief respite from the ongoing storm of bad news and propaganda. I know that I throw out that word, propaganda, with too much frequency these days, but it’s nearly always the appropriate term. Leading up to the holiday, folks have been told not to enjoy ourselves, not to celebrate (what to celebrate in this sacred-secular amalgam is highly selective and individual), and to fear and avoid family gatherings because, well, pestilence will invade every hearth and kill all inhabitants. It’s quite ridiculous on even a moment’s consideration. Yet that’s the message of the leading emissaries of official wisdom, many of whom seem to believe they are commandants exercising unlimited power over cities, states, and nations as though running prison camps. They’re spreading Christmas fear rather than Christmas cheer. Near as I can tell, most people are saying, sensibly, “bah, humbug” to cowering alone at home.
Also offering here one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms, which I often find darkly funny:
Coming up next on CBS News, the uplifting story of a little girl who is constantly being kicked in the head by government officials and the small town that raised money to buy her a helmet.
From an otherwise, rambling, clumsy blog post, this portion from an extended analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road caught my attention:
Ideas that cannot be challenged, that cannot bear even the slightest scrutiny, are ideas that can’t evolve. It doesn’t matter whether they are right or wrong.
They are static, mechanical and ultimately devoid of life itself.
This is our world today in the hands of the Woke Left, a world where the destructive and vindictive feminine has been elevated to the point of unimpeachable rightness. But this isn’t any kind of healthy feminine. It’s a Furiosa-like feminine, devoid of nurturing, all implied violence, all sexuality suppressed to the point of masculinity.
Look at Furiosa and tell me it isn’t asking another vital question, “In a dying world, is there any room for fertility while clinging like moss for survival?”
In our world feminism has robbed women of their greatest attribute, the ability to gestate and nurture life itself. Hollywood has spent two generations giving us female action heroes who are ultimately nothing more than Doods with Boobs. It’s the ultimate power fantasy of Third Wave feminism.
It’s not as destructive an archetype as the sluts on Sex in the City, mind you, because at least it can be tied in some ways back to motherhood, i.e. Ripley in James Cameron’s Aliens, but it’s still damaging to the cause of the healthy feminine nonetheless.
Furiosa is what happens when gender roles are maximally out of balance.
Although disinclined to take the optimistic perspective inhabited by bright-siders, I’m nonetheless unable to live in a state of perpetual fear that would to façile thinkers be more fitting for a pessimist. Yet unrelenting fear is the dominant approach, with every major media outlet constantly stoking a toxic combination of fear and hatred, as though activation and ongoing conditioning of the lizard brain (i.e., the amygdala — or maybe not) in everyone were worthy of the endeavor rather than it being a limited instinctual response, leaping to the fore only when immediate threat presents. I can’t guess the motivations of purveyors of constant fear to discern an endgame, but a few of the dynamics are clear enough to observe.
First thing that comes to mind is that the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s was pacifist and isolationist. Recent memory of the Great War was still keenly felt, and with the difficulties of the 1929 Crash and ensuing Great Depression still very must present, the prospect of engaging in a new, unlimited war (even over there) was not at all attractive to the citizenry. Of course, political leaders always regard (not) entering into war somewhat differently, maybe in terms of opportunity cost. Hard to say. Whether by hook or by crook (I don’t actually know whether advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was suppressed), the U.S. was handily drawn into the war, and a variety of world-historical developments followed that promoted the U.S. (and its sprawling, unacknowledged empire) into the global hegemon, at least after the Soviet Union collapsed and before China rose from a predominantly peasant culture into world economic power. A not-so-subtle hindsight lesson was learned, namely, that against widespread public sentiment and at great cost, the war effort could (not would) provide substantial benefits (if ill-gotten and of questionable desirability).
None of the intervening wars (never declared) or Wars for Dummies (e.g., the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on drugs) provided similar benefits except to government agencies and careerist administrators. Nor did the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks or subsequent undeclared wars and bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere provide benefits. All were massive boondoggles with substantial destruction and loss of life. Yet after 9/11, a body of sweeping legislation was enacted without much public debate or scrutiny — “smuggled in under cover of fear” one might say. The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorization Act are among the most notable. The conditioned response by the citizenry to perceived but not actual existential fear was consistent: desperate pleading to keep everyone safe from threat (even if it originates in the U.S. government) and tacit approval to roll back civil liberties (even though the citizenry is not itself the threat). The wisdom of the old Benjamin Franklin quote, borne out of a very different era and now rendered more nearly as a bromide, has long been lost on many Americans.
The newest omnipresent threat, literally made-to-order (at least according to some — who can really know when it comes to conspiracy), is the Covid pandemic. Nearly every talking, squawking head in government and the mainstream media (the latter now practically useless except for obvious propaganda functions) is telling everyone who still watches (video and broadcast being the dominant modes) to cower in fear of each other, reduce or refuse human contact and social function, and most of all, take the vaccine-not-really-a-vaccine followed by what is developing into a ongoing series of boosters to maintain fear and anxiety if not indeed provide medical efficacy (no good way to measure and substantiate that, anyway). The drumbeat is loud and unabated, and a large, unthinking (or spineless) portion of the citizenry, cowed and cowering, has basically joined the drum circle, spreading a social consensus that is very, well, un-American. Opinion as to other nations on similar tracks are not ventured here. Running slightly ahead of the pandemic is the mind virus of wokery and its sufferers who demand, among other things, control over others’ thoughts and speech through threats and intimidation, censorship, and social cancellation — usually in the name of safety but without any evidence how driving independent thought underground or into hiding accomplishes anything worthwhile.
Again, motivations and endgame in all this are unclear, though concentration of power to compel seems to be exhilarating. In effect, regular folks are being told, “stand on one leg; good boy; now bark like a dog; very good boy; now get used to it because this shit is never going to end but will surely escalate to intolerability.” It truly surprises me to see police forces around the world harassing, beating, and terrorizing citizens for failing to do as told, however arbitrary or questionable the order or the underlying justification. Waiting for the moment to dawn on rank-and-file officers that their monopoly on use of force is serving and protecting the wrong constituency. (Not holding my breath.) This is the stuff of dystopic novels, except that it’s not limited to fiction and frankly never was. The hotspot(s) shift in terms of time and place, but totalitarian mind and behavioral control never seems to fade or invalidate itself as one might expect. Covid passports to grant full participation in society (signalling compliance, not health) is the early step already adopted by some countries. My repeated warnings over the years of creeping fascism (more coercive style than form of government) appears to be materializing before our very eyes. I’m afraid of what portends, but with what remains of my intact mind, I can’t live in perpetual fear, come what may.
The ongoing epistemological crisis is getting no aid or relief from the chattering classes. Case in point: the Feb. 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine has a special supplement devoted to “Life after Trump,” which divides recent history neatly into reality and unreality commencing from either the announcement of Trump’s candidacy, his unexpected success in the Republican primaries, his even less expected election (and inauguration), or now his removal from office following electoral defeat in Nov. 2020. Take your pick which signals the greatest deflection from history’s “proper” course before being derailed into a false trajectory. Charles Yu and Olivia Laing adopt the reality/unreality dichotomy in their contributions to the special supplement. Yu divides (as do many others) the nation into us and them: supporters of a supposed departure from reality/sanity and those whose clear perception penetrates the illusion. Laing bemoans the inability to distinguish fiction and fantasy from truth, unreality masquerading as your truth, my truth, anyone’s truth given repetition and persuasion sufficient to make it stick. Despite familiarity with these forced, unoriginal metaphors, I don’t believe them for a moment. Worse, they do more to encourage siloed thinking and congratulate the “Resistance” for being on the putative correct side of the glaringly obvious schism in the voting populace. Their arguments support a false binary, perpetuating and reinforcing a distorted and decidedly unhelpful interpretation of recent history. Much better analyses than theirs are available.
So let me state emphatically: like the universe, infinity, and oddly enough consciousness, reality is all-encompassing and unitary. Sure, different aspects can be examined separately, but the whole is nonetheless indivisible. Reality is a complete surround, not something one can opt into or out of. That doesn’t mean one’s mind can’t go elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently, but that does not create or constitute an alternate reality. It’s merely dissociation. Considering the rather extreme limitations of human perceptual apparatuses, it’s frankly inevitable that each of us occupies a unique position, an individual perspective, within a much, much (much, much …) larger reality. Add just a couple more axes to the graph below for time (from nanoseconds to eons) and physical scale (from subatomic to cosmic), and the available portion of reality anyone can grasp is clearly infinitesimally small, yet that tiny, tiny portion is utterly everything for each individual. It’s a weird kind of solipsism.
I get that Harper’s is a literary magazine and that writers/contributors take advantage of the opportunity to flex for whatever diminishing readership has the patience to actually finish their articles. Indeed, in the course of the special supplement, more than a few felicitous concepts and turns of phase appeared. However, despite commonplace protestations, the new chief executive at the helm of the ship of state has not in fact returned the American scene to normal reality after an awful but limited interregnum.
Aside: Citizens are asked to swallow the whopper that the current president, an elder statesman, the so-called leader of the free world, is in full control of this faculties. Funny how his handlers repeatedly erupt like a murder of crows at the first suggestion that a difficult, unvetted question might be posed, inviting the poor fellow to veer even slightly off the teleprompter script. Nope. Lest yet another foot-in-mouth PR disaster occur (too many already to count), he’s whisked away, out of range of cameras and mics before any lasting damage can be done. Everyone is supposed to pretend this charade is somehow normal. On the other hand, considering how many past presidents were plainly puppets, spokespersons, or charlatans (or at least denied the opportunity to enact an agenda), one could argue that the façade is normal. “Pay no attention to the man [or men] behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz!”
With some dismay, I admit that the tiny sliver of reality to which many attend incessantly is an even smaller subset of reality, served up via small, handheld devices that fit neatly in one’s pocket. One could say theirs is a pocket reality, mostly mass media controlled by Silicon Valley platforms and their censorious algorithms. Constrained by all things digital, and despite voluminous ephemera, that reality bears little resemblance to what digital refuseniks experience without the blue glare of screens washing all the color from their faces and their own authentic thoughts out of their heads. Instead, I recommend getting outside, into the open air and under the warm glow of the yellow sun, to experience life as an embodied being, not as a mere processor of yet someone else’s pocket reality. That’s how we all start out as children before getting sucked into the machine.
Weirdly, only when the screen size ramps up to 30 feet tall do consumers grow skeptical and critical of storytelling. At just the moment cinema audiences are invited to suspend disbelief, the Reality Principle and logic are applied to character, dialogue, plotting, and make-believe gadgetry, which often fail to ring true. Why does fiction come under such careful scrutiny while reality skates right on by, allowing the credulous to believe whatever they’re fed?
The Spiral Staircase 