At some point in our lives, someone has told us to shut up when we have attempted to speak up about a truth. It happens in childhood all the time. Since young children have not mastered the method of bullshitting, they will blurt out statements that can be embarrassing to their elders. (I have deliberately edited this sentence so that it does not raise the act of bullshitting to an “art,” as it is often described. Art and pretense should have nothing to do with each other except to compare as opposites.). As adults, this poses a different sort of conundrum. Among social forums, there is social decorum, office etiquette and politics, business practices – which are never about the truth – and family rules. So, where and when and how can an individual simply express their ideas or feelings about things – especially really important things – without fear of some manner of persecution? The answer for some of us is: nowhere, for the most part.
When it comes to certain ideas, there really is no safe place for expression out in general society. As Americans, we like to boast about our freedom of speech. This is especially the case when, for example, we look on with horror or sympathy at Islamic cultures, which seem to ban every kind of expression not specifically sanctioned by their society’s interpretation of the Qur’an. The fact is, there are plenty of topics that are not open for discussion and debate in a free and safe environment in our society. The real freedom in our public speech is still in its infancy, where it has been only a few years since we have been able to speak somewhat openly about homosexuality, religion and racism, to name a few topics. And we’re clumsy at it as a community. So clumsy in fact, that we have rules about how to speak about such things, which we call political correctness. The fact that politics has anything to do with the way we communicate individually with one another is telling. Which leads to a topic that we rarely discuss honestly about in American society: the fact that the game of free speech is rigged.
If you have an opinion, there are counter-opinions. Fine. But, one problem is that all of our opinions are so shaped by social influences that they are not actual opinions, based on informed consideration. Therefore, we are left with one team shouting one message promulgated by some interest at another team doing the same thing in opposition. While we may be lulled into believing that this form of argumentation is the free expression of altering opinions, it is not. It is the way people are used as pawns in a game played the big boys. The other serious problem with free speech is that it isn’t free. In other words, the more you spend on it, the more you can use it. If you have something to say that has a particularly unpleasant affect on a powerful entity, your speech will most certainly be silenced. One way or another, your voice will be stifled. America fought a revolution to get the King of England off our backs, which critically involved gaining the precious freedom of saying whatever we wanted about the Crown or anything else. Back-in-the-day, people hated that they were told what they could and couldn’t say by the King or the Kaiser. Today, we have no such singularly known oppressor. That’s because the oppressors are us.
In the HBO series, True Detective, Matthew McConaughey’s character states that “human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution” and goes on to explain that “we are creatures that should not exist according to natural law” and that people are simply programmed to believe that “we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.” Woody Harrelson’s character then replies: “I wouldn’t go around spoutin’ that shit, if I was you. People around here don’t think that way.” The scene takes place in Louisiana in 1995, if that gives it any further context. What difference should it make what a group of people think with respect to what one individual thinks? This is not anecdotal, even if it is based on a fictional storyline. We understand that there are subjects not to be discussed in public. The American public. Today, there is a pink elephant in our society and Rust (the True Detective character, who states the unspeakable) has put his finger on it. This is the subject not to be spoken about because the implications are too horrifying to contemplate and because we are being silenced.
The topic is: we’re done. We’re cooked. We’re fucked, as we say in New York. All of us. The whole human species. Of course, you’ve heard murmurings of this fact for years now from various experts scientifically evaluating our environmental viability as well as knuckleheads, who superstitiously warn that the end is near based upon some nonsense or other. But, given the fact that this is the most tremendous revelation to face humankind, how is it that we are not talking about it 24/7? It is absurd … no, it’s downright crazy. We are all going to die as a species at our own hand and this is not front-page news? This is not the hottest topic in the world? This is not the absolute focus of every group and individual to contribute solutions from around the globe? We know this, don’t we? Yet, we don’t. There are a million distractions preventing us from stopping for a moment, taking a look around at what we have done, and coming together to figure out how to save ourselves from destruction. The media, which pushes consumerism on behalf of business, and the government, which also peddles for its benefactors of business keep us numbed, dumbed and contained. But, they couldn’t do it without our help or as Noam Chomsky says, our “manufactured consent.” We gladly participate in this level of denial; anything so as not to look at what has happened to us as a species.
Here is the source of the problem: First, human history has devastated humanity and taken much of the rest of the natural world along with it. Second, the rate at which we are destroying our world is escalating rapidly and cannot be stopped. And finally, our human family is lost, making any remedial efforts toward the first two points impossible. Human beings have been living on this Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Our species is relatively new, as compared to many others, like the dinosaurs, which lived here for 150 million years. Yet, we have a history of survival, which is at least 100 times the span of modern civilization. In other words, for many millennia, humans lived and thrived without modern technology so successfully that their extinction was never so eminent as it has become in the past 100 years. That this simple fact must come as a reminder to us is a testament to our ancestral amnesia. For many thousands of years, we knew what to do, how to live, who to love, what to watch out for. We worked together and taught one another, generation after generation after generation. We must have. Otherwise, without fangs or fur or speed or any other super power that other animals possess, we would have perished long ago. How about today? Do we know any of those simple survival techniques anymore? Of course we don’t. We’ve been de-programmed and given replacement programming, which is positively antithetical to our survival and wellbeing. The trappings of modernity: religion, technology and culture have placed us on a fast track to destruction. Now we are so accustomed to it, so dependent upon it and so utterly out of touch with what our ancestors fought to give us that there is no turning back. We have lost touch with our own humanity. We are dependent upon machines. We are dependent on companies to feed us and clothe us and shelter us. We are dependent on systems of government to allow us to live where and how it dictates. In fact, the cycle of our own designed existence is so twisted, the description belongs in a dystopian novel. We are now living out the stories in those not-so-old dystopian novels.
We are born. We are told how to live by our parents for only a few years before an institution dictates our behavior (school). Other institutions come into play and we learn as children where the power lies. Parents have little control over the food their child consumes, the water they drink, the air they breathe, etc. because all of our resources and the poisons within them come from corporations. Companies seduce children into desiring things, food and entertainment. Higher education further programs the individual. The child becomes an adult and works for money, but this adult knows little about the world around him/her; about the natural world and natural technology. The adult pays the government a portion of the money made by working, ostensibly to provide services and to protect the individual from harm. Schools, garbage, cops, fuel, utilities, military, roads, environmental protections, etc. The individual cannot escape the messages from their culture, their media, their society and their government, which makes the rules whether they like it or not. The individual can do nothing to change the force of their culture. There is no land unowned. There is no place without rules (laws). There is no real guidance on how to be a real human. There is only a design for the individual to conform to, to one degree or another. In addition, there are ideologies that control us. Even time – that strange human construct – tells us how to live our lives by the second. Thanks to civilization, time supersedes our own natural impulses. We don’t eat when we’re hungry, for example; we eat when it’s time to eat. We have sex and we pee when there’s time to. This is extraordinarily unnatural and yet we have embraced it so well that we demand that our own children follow this disgusting contrivance.
This is not a condemnation of science or religion, but certainly a criticism of our culture which, if used properly, would have taken us all to heaven instead of this hellish place that we all must survive as if we had made no real progress in the past two thousand years. It is a kind of hell; a slow cooking prison of anxiety, displaced values and suicide. With all these tools at our disposal, our world should be a utopia. Many of us feel displaced here in this modern world. Many of us struggle to keep our heads above water, no matter how smart and capable we are. Many of us are just so wounded by the inhumanity surrounding us. I’ve spoken to a number of people who agree that the ones to survive this age well are the scumbags. It’s not a good place for good people. And it’s bringing out the worst in the best of us. No, the picture is not all bleak. There are signs of life and indicators of good and fascinating evolution. We know the list of truly amazing accomplishments, mostly in the arena of science. We are great, having created great things. But, what about the rest of progress? Why aren’t we wiser and more connected to each other? There has been almost no progress by way of understanding one another, bringing us closer to one another and being better loved and nurtured. Now, the big problem is that it is too late to turn this ship around.
So, what should we do? For starters, let’s just talk about it, for God’s sake. Stop “liking” junk on Facebook and stop eating aspartame and watching Fox News and supporting war. You don’t have hundreds of friends on Facebook; acknowledge that these people, most, acquaintances at best, are not your friends and that Facebook has totally bastardized the true meaning of friendship. Stop doing stupid shit for a little while and start having the conversation, using those fine brains that our ancestors gave us to intelligently contemplate in scary aloneless. Rust suggests that “the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand-in-hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” Maybe he’s right. Most people aren’t willing to throw in the towel and that is understandable and part of what has made us such a resilient species. But, we can talk about it, can’t we? This is exactly the kind of “shit” we should be “spoutin’.”
At this level of communication, you won’t go to jail or be tortured or murdered for simply thinking out loud, asking questions, wondering about what’s going on in our culture today. We have representative heroes in our global society who have and are taking those risks on our behalf. They are our Superheroes, protecting us from the bullshit and the extreme destruction, which flows from it. One of these Superheroes is Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat. Horvat understands that the state of our world is “deep shit” and he is completely opposed to naïve optimism. He suggests that we need hope without optimism. This makes sense. There are few signs to indicate that an optimistic future lies ahead. Without hope, however, we really don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Cultivating this kind of mindset requires meeting a great intellectual challenge. I don’t know quite how to do it, otherwise I would certainly share the technique with you. I am certain, however, that friendship is needed. The bonds of true friendship will carry us from day-to-day and then we’ll see what happens next, but in the meantime we can enjoy one another and share what is real and truthful. Let’s take the opportunity before its disappears. Before it disappears because we’ll all be too busy surviving in some great global fall-out or because our rights will be taken from us. This is not at all far-fetched. Your government is already surveilling you with hardly a peep from anyone to stop it. It’s also taking your money and killing people with it and lying to you and making a mess around the world. Speak while you can.
July 1, 2016
Mo McGowan
Your Humanity 