Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (DVD version) at home on my TV, which is where I see most films these days. Very few inspire me to trek to the theater anymore to overpay for seats and popcorn. Was pleased to enjoy this film quite a bit — at least before turning an analytical eye toward it. Let me provide a fun, glossy assessment before getting bogged down in troublesome detail.

The film introduces and trades heavily on characters from a supposed multiverse (a multitude of parallel universes branching indiscreetly from arbitrary decision points into an infinity of possibilities) “verse-jumping” into our universe to fix and repair damage done in one or more of the others. As plot devices go, this one is now quite commonplace and always (perhaps inevitably, given our preoccupation with ourselves) positions our universe (the only one we know until someone from outside intrudes) at the center of the others and as the linchpin in some grand plan to save the space-time continuum. It’s a worn trope yet allows storytellers immense freedom to conjure anything imaginable. Everything depicts disorienting alternative universes quite well, most of them (for no particular reason beyond having fun, I surmise) absurd variations of the familiar. Indeed, unlike most films where I sit in stone silence no matter what is presented, this one generated laugh-out-loud moments and gestures across the couch to the effect “did you see that?” In short, what that means is the film produced reflexive responses (it goosed me), which is quite unusual considering how most films, despite lots of overwrought action and drama, fail to register more than a checkbox “yup, got it.”

Actors portraying the three or four main characters do well in their respective jobs, playing several versions of themselves from different universes with diverse experiences. Most of the film is chase-and-evade, devolving at times into a familiar martial-arts punchfest that has frankly lost all possibility of making an impact in the era of overpowered, invulnerable superheros and magical unpredictability. Why filmmakers believe audiences want to see more of this drivel is beyond me, but I guess the animal curiosity to find out which make-believe character will prevail in a battle royale never gets old with mouth-breathers. I’m quite over it. The central conflict, however, wasn’t about the strongest punch. Rather, it was about persisting in the face of revealed meaninglessness a/k/a nihilism.

So here’s where hindsight analysis kinda ruined things for me. Although I recognize storytelling as elemental to modern cognition and consciousness, I don’t regard most narrative forms as art. Cinema, because of its financial interests and collaborative nature, rarely rises to the level of art. There are simply too many diverse elements that must be assembled under a unified aesthetic vision for that to occur often. Cinema is thus more entertainment than art, just like sports and games are entertainment, not art. Impressive skill may be demonstrated, which often produces enjoyable results, but I don’t conflate skill or mere craft with artistry. (I also tire of everything that provides moral and epistemological orientation being conflated with religion). So when films introduce super-serious subjects that really trouble me (e.g., overpopulation, institutional corruption, the climate emergency) but treat them lightly, I’m bothered. Everything does that with philosophy.

Coming to grips with nihilism and the absurdity of existence is the central feature of more than one 20th-century philosophy (and their variants). Downstream (or parallel?) are artistic genres that also express the idea, though in far less overt terms. One can easily get lost down a hole, seeking the bottom (alternatively, the root of things) but finding only the abyss. For that very reason, I have acquaintance with philosophical themes but have not truly sunk into them deeply. Nihilism is not something to mess with, even as a thought experiment or intellectual inquiry — especially if one is inclined to connect strongly with those same things. In Everything, the nihilist conclusion (i.e., that nothing matters) manifests absurdly as a giant, black, everything bagel that can literally suck a person into its hole. Well and good enough; probably best not to overexplain that McGuffin. But it demands a conclusion or resolution, which comes in the form of the mother rescuing the daughter. Ironically, it was the mother (from an alternative universe) who had introduced the daughter (also an alternative) to verse-jumping, who then (the daughter) got lost down the hole and threatened to collapse the multiverse into the everything bagel in a final gesture of despair. In effect, the mother had tinkered with powers well beyond her control, unwittingly created the daughter-monster with out-of-control feeling and unexpected powers, and had to clean up her own mess. How does she (the mother) do it? Through the power of love.

OK, fine. Love (especially unconditional love, as opposed to romantic or familial love) is a universal salve capable of healing all wounds. Except that it’s not. When the film finally depicts the rescue, saving the daughter and multiverse from destruction, it comes across as flat, obvious, and ineffectual (to me at least) and breaks the tone and pacing of the film. Lots of films resort to the power of love to save the day (typically just before the stroke of midnight), but they usually (not always) have better set-ups, which is to say, their film universes cohere and deliver cogent conclusions rather than waving a magic love-wand over everything to solve and resolve. The writers of this film are adept at the enjoyable absurd parts that launch and propel the story but could not stick the landing. Introducing (albeit comically) doomsday philosophy but then failing to treat it seriously enough left me deeply conflicted and dissatisfied. Perhaps it’s a case where my suspension of disbelief was not complete enough. Or maybe I brought too much into the film from outside, but we all have inescapable frames of reference. I wasn’t exactly triggered, merely frustrated. YMMV

Ten Things That Will Disappear

Got one of those chain e-mail messages from who knows who or where, ending with the exhortation to pass it on. My comments follow each of the titular things. Read at your peril. (I could nit-pick the awfulness of the writing of the quoted paragraphs, but I’ll just let that go.) Before commenting, however, let me point out that the anonymous writer behind this listicle assumes that systems will function long enough for predictions to prove out. The last two years have already demonstrated that the world is entering a period of extreme flux where many styles and functions of social organization will break down irreparably. Supply chain difficulties with computer chips (and relatedly, fossil fuels) are just one example of nonlinear change that is making owning and operating a personal vehicle far less affordable (soon impossible for many) than decades past. Impossible to predict when breakdown reaches critical mass, but when it does, all bets are off.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills. 

Despite its popularity among the general public, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS link ends in .com, not .gov) has been under attack for generations already with the ostensible goal of privatizing it. Financial trouble is by design: the USPS is being driven to extinction so that its services can be handed off to for-profit alternatives, jacking up prices in the process. So yeah, it might fail and go away like other cherished American institutions.

Normalizing the Absurd

Most poets in the West believe that some sort of democracy is preferable to any sort of totalitarian state and accept certain political obligations … but I cannot think of a single poet of consequence whose work does not, either directly or by implication, condemn modern civilisation as an irremediable mistake, a bad world which we have to endure because it is there and no one knows how it could be made into a better one, but in which we can only retain our humanity in the degree to which we resist its pressures. — W.H. Auden

A while back, I made an oblique reference (a comment elsewhere, no link) to a famous Krishnamurti quote: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Taken on its face, who would agree to be swept up in the madness and absurdity of any given historical moment? Turns out, almost everyone — even if that means self-destruction. The brief reply to my comment was along the lines of “Why shouldn’t you or I also make mental adjustments to prevailing sickness to obtain peace of mind and tranquility amidst the tumult?” Such an inversion of what seems to me right, proper, and acceptable caused me to reflect and recall the satirical movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The full title is not often given, but the forgotten second part is what’s instructive (e.g., mutually assured destruction: MAD). Events spinning out of control? Nothing any individual can do to restore sanity? Stop squirming and embrace it.

That’s one option when faced with the prospect of futile resistance, I suppose. Give in, succumb, and join the party (more like a rager since the beginning of the Cold War). I also recognize that I’m not special enough to warrant any particular consideration for my intransigence. Yet it feels like self-betrayal to abandon the good character I’ve struggled (with mixed success) to build and maintain over the course of a lifetime. Why chuck all that now? Distinguishing character growth from decay it not always so simple. In addition, given my openness to new ideas and interpretations, established bodies of thought (often cultural consensus) are sometimes upended and destabilized by someone arguing cogently for or against something settled and unexamined for a long time. And then there is the epistemological crisis that has rendered sense-making nearly impossible. That crisis is intensified by a variety of character types acting in bad faith to pollute the public sphere and drive false narratives.

For instance, the show trial public hearings just begun regarding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol (or whatever it’s being called, I prefer “Storming of the Capitol”) are commonly understood, at least from one side of the political spectrum, as a deliberate and brazen attempt to brainwash the public. I decline to tune in. But that doesn’t mean my opinions on that topic are secure any more than I know how true and accurate was the 2020 election that preceded and sparked the Jan. 6 attack. Multiple accounts of the election and subsequent attack aim to convert me (opinion-wise) to one exclusive narrative or another, but I have no way to evaluate narrative claims beyond whatever noise reaches me through the mainstream media I try to ignore. Indeed, those in the streets and Capitol building on Jan. 6 were arguably swept into a narrative maelstrom that provoked a fairly radical if ultimately harmless event. No one knew at the time, of course, exactly how it would play out.

So that’s the current state of play. Ridiculous, absurd events, each with competing narratives, have become the new normal. Yours facts and beliefs do daily battle with my facts and beliefs in an ideological battle of all against all — at least until individuals form into tribes declare their political identity and join that absurdity.

Wrong Things Wrong (redux)

Cynics knew it was inevitable: weaponized drones and robots. Axon Enterprises, Inc., maker of police weaponry (euphemistically termed “public safety technologies”), announced its development of taser equipped drones presumed capable of neutralizing an active shooter inside of 60 seconds. Who knows what sorts of operating parameters restrict their functions or if they can be made invulnerable to hacking or disallowed use as offensive weapons?

A sane, civilized society would recognize that, despite bogus memes about an armed society being a polite society, the prospect of everyone being strapped (like the fabled Old American West) and public spaces (schools, churches, post offices, laundromats, etc.) each being outfitted with neutralizing technologies is fixing the wrong problem. But we are no longer a sane society (begging the question whether we ever were). So let me suggest something radical yet obvious: the problem is not technological, it’s cultural. The modern world has made no progress with respect to indifference toward the suffering of others. Dehumanizing attitudes and technologies are no longer, well, medieval, but they’re no less cruel. For instance, people are not put in public stocks or drawn and quartered anymore, but they are shamed, cancelled, tortured, terrorized, propagandized, and abandoned in other ways that allow maniacs to pretend to others and to themselves that they are part of the solution. Hard to believe that one could now feel nostalgia for the days when, in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, calls for gun control were met with inaction (other then empty rhetoric) rather than escalation.

The problem with diagnosing the problem as cultural is that no one is in control. Like water, culture goes where it goes and apparently sinks to its lowest ebb. Attempts to channel, direct, and uplift culture might work on a small scale, but at the level of society — and with distorted incentives freedom is certain to deliver — malefactors are guaranteed to appear. Indeed, anything that contributes to the arms race (now tiny, remote-controlled, networked killing devices rather than giant atomic/nuclear ones) only invites greater harm and is not a solution. Those maniacs (social and technical engineers promising safety) have the wrong things wrong.

Small, insular societies with strict internal codes of conduct may have figured out something that large, free societies have not, namely, that mutual respect, knowable communities, and repudiation of advanced technologies give individuals something and someone to care about, a place to belong, and things to do. When the entire world is thrown open, such as with social media, populations become atomized and anonymized, unable to position or understand themselves within a meaningful social context. Anomie and nihilism are often the rotten fruit. Splintered family units, erosion of community involvement, and dysfunctional institutions add to the rot. Those symptoms of cultural collapse need to be addressed even if they are among the most difficult wrong things to get right.

Pocket Reality, pt. 2

This intended follow-up has been stalled (pt. 1 here) for one simple reason: the premise presented in the embedded YouTube video is (for me at least) easy to dismiss out of hand and I haven’t wanted to revisit it. Nevertheless, here’s the blurb at the top of the comments at the webpage:

Is reality created in our minds, or are the things you can touch and feel all that’s real? Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup holds doctorates in both philosophy and computer science, and has made a name for himself by arguing for metaphysical idealism, the idea that reality is essentially a mental phenomenon.

Without going into point-by-point discussion, the top-level assertion, if I understand it correctly (not assured), is that material reality comes out of mental experience rather than the reverse. It’s a chicken-and-egg question with materialism and idealism (fancy technical terms not needed) each vying for primacy. The string of conjectures (mental gymnastics, really, briefly impressive until one recognizes how quickly they lose correlation with how most of us think about and experience reality) that inverts the basic relationship of inner experience to outer reality is an example of waaaay overthinking a problem. No doubt quite a lot of erudition can be brought to bear on such questions, but even if those questions were resolved satisfactorily on an intellectual level and an internally coherent structure or system were developed or revealed, it doesn’t matter or lead anywhere. Humans are unavoidably embodied beings. Each individual existence also occupies a tiny sliver of time (the timeline extending in both directions to infinity). Suggesting that mental experience is briefly instantiated in personhood but is actually drawn out of some well of souls, collective consciousness, or panpsychism and rejoins them in heaven, hell, or elsewhere upon expiration is essentially a religious claim. It’s also an attractive supposition, granting each of us not permanence or immortality but rather something somehow better (?) though inscrutable because it lies beyond perception (but not conceptualization). Except for an eternity of torments in hell, I guess, if one deserves that awful fate.

One comment about Kastrup. He presents his perspective (his findings?) with haughty derision of others who can’t see or understand what it so (duh!) obvious. He falls victim to the very same over-intellectualized flim-flam he mentions when dismissing materialists who need miracles and shortcuts to smooth over holes in their scientific/philosophical systems. The very existence of earnest disagreement by those who occupy themselves with such questions might suggest some humility, as in “here’s my explanation, they have theirs, judge for yourself.” But there’s a third option: the great unwashed masses (including nearly all our ancestors) for whom such questions are never even fleeting thoughts. It’s all frankly immaterial (funnily, both the right and wrong word at once). Life is lived and experienced fundamentally on its surface — unless, for instance, one has been incubated too long within the hallowed halls of academia, lost touch with one’s brethren, and become preoccupied with cosmic investigations. Something quite similar happens to politicians and the wealthy, who typically hyperfocus on gathering to themselves power and then exercising that power over others (typically misunderstood as simply pulling the levers and operating the mechanisms of society). No wonder their pocket of reality looks so strikingly different.

Plausible Reality

Let me first restate axioms developed in previous blog posts. Narrative is the essential outward form of consciousness. Cognition has many preverbal and nonverbal subtleties, but the exchange of ideas occurs predominantly through narrative, and the story of self (told to oneself) can be understood as stream of consciousness: ongoing self-narration of sensations and events. The principal characteristic of narrative, at least that which is not pure fantasy, is in-the-moment sufficiency. Snap-judgment heuristics are merely temporary placeholders until, ideally at least, thoughtful reconsideration and revision that take time and discernment can be brought to bear. Stories we tell and are told, however, often do not reflect reality well, partly because our perceptual apparatuses are flawed, partly because individuals are untrained and unskilled in critical thinking (or overtrained and distorted), and partly because stories are polluted with emotions that make clear assessments impossible (to say nothing of malefactors with agendas). Some of us struggle to remove confabulation from narrative (as best we can) whereas others embrace it because it’s emotionally gratifying.

A good example of the reality principle is recognition, similar to the 1970s energy crisis, that energy supplies don’t magically appear by simply digging and drilling more of the stuff out of the ground. Those easy-to-get resources have been plundered already. The term peak oil refers to eventual decline in energy production (harvesting, really) when the easy stuff is more than half gone and undiminished (read: increasing) demand impels energy companies to go in search of more exotic supply (e.g., underwater or embedded in shale). If that reality is dissatisfying, a host of dreamt-up stories offer us deliverance from inevitable decline and reduction of lifestyle prerogatives by positing extravagant resources in renewables, hydrogen fuel cells, fusion (not to be confused with fission), or as-yet unexploited regions such as The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. None of these represent plausible realities (except going into heretofore protected regions and bringing ecological devastation).

The relationship of fictional stories to reality is quite complex. For this blog post, a radically narrow description is that fiction is the imaginary space whereas ideas can be tried out and explored safely in preparation for implementation in reality. Science fiction (i.e., imagining interstellar space travel despite its flat impossibility in Newtonian physics) is a good example. Some believe humans can eventually accomplish what’s depicted in sci-fi, and in certain limited examples we already have. But many sci-fi stories simply don’t present a plausible reality. Taken as vicarious entertainment, they’re AOK superfine with me. But given that Western cultures (I can’t opine on cultures outside the West) have veered dangerously into rank ideation and believing their own hype, too many people believe fervently in aspirational futures that have no hope of ever instantiating. Just like giant pools of oil hidden under the Rocky Mountains (to cite something sent to me just today offering illusory relief from skyrocketing gasoline prices).

Among the many genres of narrative now on offer in fiction, no better example of sought-after-power is the superhero story. Identifying with the technological and financial power of Ironman and Batman or the god-powers of Thor and Wonder Woman is thrilling, perhaps, but again, these are not plausible realities. Yet these superrich, superstrong, superintelligent superheros are everywhere in fiction, attesting to liminal awareness of lack of power and indeed frailty. Many superhero stories are couched as coming-of-age stories for girls, who with grit and determination can fight toe-to-toe with any man and dominate. (Too many BS examples to cite.) Helps, of course, if the girl has magic at her disposal. Gawd, do I tire of these stories, told as origins in suffering, acquisition of skills, and coming into one’s own with the mature ability to force one’s will on others, often in the form of straight-up killing and assassination. Judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one but entirely acceptable vigilantism if done wearing a supersuit and claiming spurious, self-appointed moral authority.

There are better narratives that don’t conflate power with force or lack plausibility in the world we actually inhabit. In a rather complicated article by Adam Tooze entitled “John Mearsheimer and the Dark Origins of Realism” at The New Statesman, after a lengthy historical and geopolitical analysis of competing narratives, a mode of apprehending reality is described:

… adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.

The People’s Convoy

When the Canadian Freedom Convoy appeared out of nowhere over a month ago and managed to bring the Canadian capitol (Ottawa, Ontario) to a grinding halt, the news was reported with a variety of approaches. Witnessing “democracy” in action, even though initiated by a small but important segment of society, became a cause célèbre, some rallying behind the truckers as patriots and other deploring them as terrorists. Lots of onlookers in the middle ground, to be certain, but the extremes tend to define issues these days, dividing people into permafeuding Hatfields and McCoys. The Canadian government stupidly branded the truckers as terrorists, finally dispersing the nonviolent protest with unnecessary force. The Canadian model sparked numerous copycat protests around the globe.

One such copycat protest, rather late to the party, is The People’s Convoy in the U.S., which is still underway. Perhaps the model works only in the first instance, or maybe U.S. truckers learned something from the Canadian example, such as illegal seizure of crowdfunded financial support. Or maybe the prospect of confronting the U.S. military in one of the most heavily garrisoned locations in the world gave pause. (Hard to imagine Ottawa, Ontario, being ringed by military installations like D.C. is.) Either way, The People’s Convoy has not attempted to blockade D.C. Nor has the U.S. convoy been widely reported as was the Canadian version, which was a grass-roots challenge to government handling of the pandemic. Yeah, there’s actually an underlying issue. Protesters are angry about public health mandates and so-called vaccine passports that create a two-tier society. Regular folks must choose between bodily autonomy and freedom of movement on one hand and on the other compliance with mandates that have yet to prove themselves effective against spread of the virus. Quite a few people have already chosen to do as instructed, whether out of earnest belief in the efficacy of mandated approaches or to keep from falling into the lower of the two tiers. So they socially distance, wear masks, take the jab (and follow-up boosters), and provide papers upon demand. Protesters are calling for all those measures to end.

If the Canadian convoy attracted worldwide attention, the U.S. convoy has hardly caused a stir and is scarcely reported outside the foreign press and a few U.S. superpatriot websites. I observed years ago about The Republic of Lakota that the U.S. government essentially stonewalled that attempt at secession. Giving little or no official public attention to the People’s Convoy, especially while attention has turned to war between Russia and Ukraine, has boiled down to “move along, nothing to see.” Timing for the U.S. truckers could not possibly be worse. However, my suspicion is that privately, contingency plans were made to avoid the embarrassment the Canadian government suffered, which must have included instructing the media not to report on the convoy and getting search engines to demote search results that might enable the movement to go viral, so to speak. The conspiracy of silence is remarkable. Yet people line the streets and highways in support of the convoy. Sorta begs the question “what if they threw a protest but no one came?” A better question might be “what if they started a war but no one fought?”

Gross (even criminal) mismanagement of the pandemic is quickly being shoved down the memory hole as other crises and threats displace a two-year ordeal that resulted in significant loss of life and even greater, widespread loss of livelihoods and financial wellbeing among many people who were already teetering on the edge. Psychological impacts are expected to echo for generations. Frankly, I’m astonished that a far-reaching civil crack-up hasn’t already occurred. Yet despite these foreground tribulations and more besides (e.g., inflation shifting into hyperinflation, food and energy scarcity, the financial system failing every few years, and the epistemological crisis that has made every institution flatly untrustworthy), the background crisis is still the climate emergency. Governments around the world, for all the pomp and circumstance of the IPCC and periodic cheerleading conferences, have stonewalled that issue, too. Some individuals take the climate emergency quite seriously; no government does, at least by their actions. Talk is comparatively cheap. Like foreground and background, near- and far-term prospects just don’t compete. Near-term appetites and desires always win. Psychologists report that deferred gratification (e.g., the marshmallow test) is among the primary predictors of future success for individuals. Institutions, governments, and societies are in aggregate mindless and can’t formulate plans beyond the next election cycle, academic year, or business quarter to execute programs that desperately need doing. This may well be why political theorists observe that liberal democracies are helpless to truly accomplish things, whereas authoritarian regimes centered on an individual (i.e., a despot) can get things done though at extreme costs to members of society.

Offered Without Comment 17

From Barrett Swanson’s article “The Anxiety of Influencers” in the June 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

For the past thirteen years, I’ve taught a course called Living in the Digital Age, which mobilizes the techniques of the humanities—critical thinking, moral contemplation, and information literacy—to interrogate the version of personhood that is being propagated by … social networks. Occasionally, there have been flashes of student insight that rivaled moments from Dead Poets Society—one time a student exclaimed, “Wait, so on social media, it’s almost like I’m the product”—but it increasingly feels like a Sisyphean task, given that I have them for three hours a week and the rest of the time they are marinating in the jacuzzi of personalized algorithms.

As someone who suffers from Churchillian spells of depression, it was easy for me to connect this to the pervasive disquiet on campus. In the past ten years, my email correspondence has been increasingly given over to calming down students who are hyperventilating with anxiety—about grades, about their potential marketability, about their Instagram followings. The previous semester, for instance, during a class on creative non-fiction, twenty-four of my twenty-six students wrote about self-harm or suicidal ideation. Several of them had been hospitalized for anxiety or depression, and my office hours were now less occasions to discuss course concepts—James Baldwin’s narrative persona, say, or Joan Didion’s use of imagery—than they were de facto counseling sessions. Even students who seemed happy and neurologically stable—Abercrombie-clad, toting a pencil case and immaculate planner—nevertheless displayed unsettling in-class behavior: snacking incessantly during lectures, showing Victorian levels of repression. The number of emotional-support service animals had skyrocketed on campus. It seemed like every third person had a Fido in tow, and had you wandered into my lecture hall when we were still holding in-person classes, you might have assumed that my lessons were on obedience training or the virtues of dog-park etiquette. And while it seems clichéd even to mention it, the students were inexorably—compulsively—on their phones.

Railroaded to Rome

The phrase “all roads lead to Rome” is a way of saying that, at its height, Rome was the center of the Western world and multiple paths led to that eventual destination. That’s where the action was. Less obviously, the phrase also suggests that different approaches can lead to an identical outcome. Not all approaches to a given result are equal, however, but who’s splitting those hairs? Not too many, and not nearly enough. Instead, the public has been railroaded into false consensus on a variety of issues, the principal attributes being that the destination is predetermined and all rails lead there. Probably oughta be a new saying about being “railroaded to Rome” but I haven’t hit upon a formulation I like.

Ukraine

War drums have been beating for some time now about a hotly desired (by TPTB, who else?) regional war over Ukraine being aligned with Europe or part of Russia. Personal opinions (mine, yours) on whether Ukraine might join NATO or be annexed by Russia don’t really matter. Even a default aversion to war doesn’t matter. Accordingly, every step taken by the Russian government is reported as a provocation, escalation, and/or signal of imminent invasion. And in reverse, no interference, meddling, or manipulation undertaken by Western powers is cause for concern because it’s all good, clean, innocent business. Wasn’t a version of this maneuver executed in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq? (Be honest, it was a preemptive invasion that preempted nothing.) Legacy media have failed entirely (as I understand their reporting, anyway) to ask the right questions or conceive of any outcome that isn’t war with Russia. (Similar moves are being made regarding the China-Taiwan controversy.) After all, that’s where the action is.

Vaccines

Many observers were surprised at how quickly vaccines appeared after the current pandemic circled the world. Vaccines normally take many years to achieve sufficient safety and effectiveness to be approved for general use. However, Covid vaccines were apparently in development well before the pandemic hit because medical labs had been monkeying with the virus for years along with possible treatments. No matter that vaccine safety and effectiveness were never fully realized. The rush to market was a predetermined outcome that required emergency use authorization, redefinition of the term vaccine, and active suppression of other drug protocols. Mandates that everyone (EVERYONE!) be vaccinated and boosted (and now boosted again every few months to keep current) are in clear conflict with a host of rules, codes, and medical ethics, to say nothing of common sense. Creation of two-tier societies based on vaccination status (three-tier if RightThink is added) to force the unvaccinated into compliance is outright tyranny. This coercion lends false legitimacy to an emerging biosecurity state with wide application for the supposedly clean (vaccinated but not necessarily healthy) and unclean (unvaccinated but not necessarily unhealthy). After all, that’s where the action is.

Free Thought and Free Speech

The constant thrum of fearmongering legacy media has turned a large percentage of the public into cowering fools lest something turn out to be even mildly upsetting or give offense. “Save me, mommy! Protect me, daddy! Allow no one to introduce or discuss a fact or idea that conflicts with my cherished innocence. Words are violence!” Well, sorry, snowflake. The big, bad world is not set up to keep you safe, nor is history a series of nice, tidy affairs without disturbing incidents or periodic social madness. Moreover, governments, media, and scientists cannot rightfully claim to be final arbiters of truth. Truth seeking and truth telling are decidedly messy and have been throughout modern history. Despite attempts, no one can command or suppress thought in any but the most banal fashion (e.g., don’t think about polka-dot elephants); that’s not how cognition works except perhaps under extraordinary circumstances. Similarly, the scientific method doesn’t work without free, open scrutiny and reevaluation of scientific claims. Yet the risible notion that people can or should be railroaded into approved thought/speech via censorship and/or cancellation is back with a vengeance. Were lessons of the past (or the present in some regimes) never learned? Indeed, I must admit to being flabbergasted how otherwise normal thinkers (no disability or brain damage) — especially reflexive rule-followers (sheeple?) who shrink from all forms of conflict — have accepted rather easily others quite literally telling them what to think/say/do. To resolve cognitive dissonance lurking beneath consciousness, rationalizations are sought to explain away the inability to think for oneself with integrity. Adoption of routine DoubleThink just floors me. But hey, that’s where the action is.

Addendum

Apologies or citing George Orwell as often as I do. Orwell got so much correct in his depiction of a dystopic future. Regrettably, and as others have pointed out, TPTB have mistaken 1984 (Orwell’s novel) as a playbook rather than a dire warning.

Offered Without Comment 16

By a substack author going by the pseudonym Moneycircus, describing the cult of paranoid preparedness (a subset of safetyism?), unnecessary paragraph breaks removed:

We should be alert to the suffering of children. For they are the most delicate in society, the point at which the bough breaks. Children should experience life one bright day at a time, bursting with colours, tastes and sounds. It is an experience so complete that they only have time for the present. Yet talking to children during the pandemic I see their time accelerates. They are already falling into remembrance. They ask questions that only adults should ask, and later in life: “Do you remember when … such and such? What was that place where …?” This means they are experiencing life at one remove. This is cruelty beyond measure.