Our Latest Fetish: Small Numbers and Simple Steps

Our society is lured by small numbers and simple steps to gather its information. Perhaps as a reaction to the rapidly growing complexity of our culture, we look for simplicity and the brevity of bite-sized numbers. To face the demon of overwhelm, we should, instead consider the bigger numbers and the more complex ways to educate and change ourselves.

I am a freelance writer. Recently I acquired two writing jobs for attorneys on Upwork – one in New York and the other in California – who each hired me to help them compose in-depth promotional information in their respective areas of law. I was a lawyer before I decided to take a large pay cut to sit on my front porch swing and write, as I am now. Almost unconsciously, I suggested to each of them that a good way to go about outlining these projects (one an e-book on estate planning and the other a how-to guide for starting your own business) would be to offer a number of simple steps. “People seem to be addicted to ‘6 simple steps to …’ whatever-type information,” I said. Both of my clients agreed without hesitation.

Three days ago, I went to my dentist. A temporary bridge, holding two fake front teeth together in my mouth broke on a baguette in a Denver restaurant. Before even looking in the mirror in the bathroom that I ran to in a frenzy, I felt mortified. My 20 year-old son seemed to know instantly the nature of my distress. When I returned to our table, I held my hand delicately over my lips, so that when I spoke, the gaping hole next to my left maxillary central incisor would remain hidden. “I’m not a hillbilly,” I blurted out for some reason. My quick-witted kid took note of the flannel shirt I had worn – grabbed from the car, in case in was cold in the cafe – and said, “The shirt doesn’t help your case.” God, I felt old. In the few minutes I had in the waiting area before getting fixed up by the dentist’s assistant, I casually perused the front covers of the vast array of magazines. Sure enough, most of them tried to coax a read with small numbers and simple steps. A trip to a bakery a day later, while ever-so-carefully consuming a ciabatta role, likewise revealed a stack of magazines with small number, simple step instructions to do something or other.

Now, I’m writing an article related to “6 Must-Do Steps to Starting a Business,” which makes sense in the organizational style of lists in preparing for a course of action. “Hair Hacking” even makes some sense. I doubt that the actual “top” ten ways to perform these hair hacks are contained in this beauty mag, but that’s okay, I guess; we’re all used to being lied to now, aren’t we?

But, how about Food & Wine’s insight into “Ruling Summer,” and in no less than 276 ways. “Rule Summer!” There’s  silly call to action.

And People Magazine: now inviting us to consider 100 reasons to love America (exclamation point). One-hundred, huh? Not 532? I didn’t read the article – I just snapped a picture of the cover with my iPhone – but, my guess is that it’s not a thoughtful essay on the virtues of the body politic or a poetic musing of what’s left of this country’s glorious landscape. One clue supporting my conclusion is that just underneath that title is what looks like a hand-written note stating, “Matthew’s No. 1!” with an arrow pointing to his pretty hair. Who could argue that the “No.1!” reason to love America is Matthew McConaughey? I’m intrigued: what could the other 99 reasons be?

Now I’m torn between which magazine cover’s numeric listing is the stupidest. Mind you, these photos were taken as I saw them. In other words, all I was looking for was the numbers to examine my original point. It wasn’t until I got home that I took another look to discover just how absurd these premises were. I’ve got one more to share. Field & Stream. Is it just me or is it kinda comical that the experts recommend 147 tools and skills “to help you survive (and thrive) in the wild”? That seems like a lot to me. Sounds like I could do okay, as long as I can bring my laptop, a generator, my french press and 144 more things with me into the wild.

Setting aside the foolishness of these magazine articles, I would like to ponder our latest fetish with small numbers, which are floating like plankton in a sea of information, containing whale-sized facts of exponentially greater significance and prescience. While writing this paragraph, I sought the sage knowledge of Google to explore a colossal metaphor, hoping to read something about say, giant ocean mountains or coral reefs. The first page hit of the search “largest things in the ocean” showed a link entitled: “The 7 Most Terrifyingly Huge Things in the History of Nature.” So, if this article does nothing else, my hope is that it will inspire you to simply stop and think about our little-number obsession. Thanks to my latest search, my brand new focus is this:

The 7 Most Terrifyingly Huge NUMBERS in the History of Nature

1. The Ocean
2. Monsanto
3. Our Brains
4. The American Prison System
5. Our Ancestors
6. Drugs
7. Our Population

The Oceans cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface and 99% of the Earth’s living space is under the Ocean, which contains an estimated (because less than 10% has been explored by humans) 50-80% of all life, 1.5 million species of which have been identified by scientists, while potentially 50 million more species have yet to be known by us because 90% of the Ocean’s volume is in the “deep sea,” which is mostly unexplored because it’s too damn deep. And the longest mountain range is under water. It’s 31,000 miles long. Yes, we know more about space than we do about our watery home and our neighbors, who inhabit it. How’s that hair-hacking workin’ for ya?

Monsanto. Where should I begin? How about Alternet.org’s “5 Most Horrifying Things You Should Know About Monsanto”? It covers an overview of its poisonous chemicals; the laws written specifically to protect their poisons; the lawsuits related to their poisons, including a French court’s ruling against it (Empoisonner!); total monopolization of the seed industry (you can’t, but Monsanto can and does patent seeds); working on controlling our fresh water supply (and you thought God gave it to us for free, silly goose); and just killing the environment. Really, Monsanto is murdering the planet. Seattleorganicrestaurants.com has more to share in “10 Reasons Why Monsanto is Corrupt to Its Core,” adding that Monsanto is putting farmers out of business and joining forces with other massive corporations to, essentially, take over the World. This is a high-ranking topic on your Top 10 Reasons Why It’s The End of the World As We Know It.

Our Brains. The single most complex organism in the universe. The slightest difference in genomic makeup distinguishes us from our monkey cousins. We are talking monkeys, who figured out how to do the impossible in nature, using only our imaginations. And there’s no evolutionary explanation for it. No, Darwin didn’t figure it out. No one has yet. Oh yeah: numbers. Okay. Well, it turns out, there’s more information on the Web about hairdos and celebrities than there is on the human brain. I guess our brains are too complicated for our brains to understand. How about some fun facts, then? Our brains are 75% water; 2% of our total body weight; have no pain receptors (ever see those videos of a guy awake on the operating table with his skull open?); and it has over 100 billion nerves with trillions of connections (synapses). Other than that – beats me.

The American Prison System. Like the oceans and Monsanto, the American prison system if fucking massive. First, let’s talk about our fellow humans, who we now lock up in record numbers. In the past 4o years, the incarceration rate has climbed 700% (check out these crazy charts). We put more people in cages than anywhere else in the World: 2.3 million humans; one in 100 of our population.

One quarter, 25% of the World’s inmates are right here in the U.S. Ho-ly shit. And did you know that we only have 5% of the World’s population? Less than half of the people we imprison are put away for violent crimes. The rest were stripped of all of their rights after being found guilty of property crimes (247,000), drug related crimes (210,000), “public order” (140,000) and “other”(10,000). One in every 14 black kids has a parent in jail. What if 2/3 of all the children in the U.S. had at least one parent in jail? What kind of world would they live in? You can ask any one of the 8.3 million kids in our country, who are black or hispanic. How about the women to raise our kids? Well, 1/3 of the world’s entire population of imprisoned women are locked up here. In state prisons, 3/4 of the women have mental health problems. Huh ….

12 million people pass through the jails every year and over 700,000 are locked up every day. The ridiculous and inhumane “war on drugs” has greatly contributed to the rise in incarceration. And, “we lock people up for life like its not someone’s life;” 160,000 life sentences in 2012. Over 2,500 are for crimes committed as juveniles. Yeah, we lock up kids, too, and at a rate that beats all the other countries. We lock up the poor when they can’t afford bail and the mentally ill because … well, I guess because we don’t know what’s going on with the brain.

Why so many prisons and prisoners; is crime going up? Nope, it’s gone down, actually, but the incarceration business is quite lucrative. Businesses get free labor from prisoners. AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft, Revlon, Macy’s and a host of other needy corporations use prison labor to help their businesses! Who wouldn’t want to have a 17-cents-per-hour employee making clothes and electronic parts for them without having to go to poverty-ravaged countries abroad? I say, you go girl!

Our society seems to care an awful lot about money – more so than the people whose lives are affected by profiting from human suffering – so, here are the cost figures. First, 10% of prisons (I’m using this word to describe all forms of “correction” [ha – there’s a misnomer for ya] and incarceration) are owned by private companies, who rake in about $7.5 billion a year. Two of the biggest are Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. The total cost to taxpayers each year is about $40 billion. The cost of incarcerating each human ranges from $14,000 (Indiana) to $60,000 (New York). Keeping with the theme, more information about this subject can be found at “Ten Economic Facts about Crime and Incarceration in the United States” from the Brookings Institution.

Our Ancestors. One day I got curious about who went into making me and I wasted the better part of an afternoon charting the number of people involved in my existence. I went back in time, doubling my grandparent’s grandparents and their parents and grandparents and so on. At some point in my timeline, I calculated about 9 billion people. This number only accounted for people who lived during our historical period of probably less than 10,000 years. Then, there were those folks – who didn’t look significantly different from anyone alive today – who lived for several hundred thousand years before the so-called dawn of civilization. I’m talking about the time after they came down from the trees, but before they began to cultivate a male-dominated, hierarchical society. I don’t know much about my ancestors, with whom I undoubtedly share with whoever is reading this, but I do know that they were hard-working, ingenious, resilient … and good looking. They gave their lives for their children and their children’s children and ultimately me and my two kids and one grandchild so far.

Most of them weren’t christians or muslims or jews; they couldn’t have been for obvious reasons. They lived in cooperative groups and knew what was what. I don’t. Nor do most people I know. Whatever our ancestors did to ensure our survival and whatever great lessons about nature and life and being human they passed down to future generations got lost along the historical highway. Civilization, which has only existed for a fraction of the time we humans have been inhabiting this gorgeous place, is a shitshow. My culture is a manmade illusion, designed to control its own notion of a “public;” a fabricated notion that strips all individuality from humans. Most recently, it is on a suicide mission. My ancestors’ culture was thriving for many millennia. There’s no other way that we got here. If they could see me and you – us, living the way we do, I think they’d be heartbroken. This would be Number One on my Top 10 Reasons Why It’s The End of the World As We Know It.

Drugs. Humans have been using drugs for as long as they have been alive. Every human being uses drugs every day, all day because our brains are comprised of naturally occurring drugs, which slosh around our bodies constantly to keep us conscious and mentally and emotionally balanced. Scientists are still tracking the enormous range of chemicals in our systems, but everyone knows about dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and whatever cocktail of chemicals make you feel incredibly high when you fall in love. Don’t bother doing a Google search on drugs because it’s filled with nonsense and propaganda about drug addiction and “bad” drugs. The kinds of drugs that we can ingest, mainly through plants, have been used as tools for humankind for hundreds of thousands of years. Now, they’re banned. Illegal. You could go to jail for a long time for having a drug, made from a plant or a fungus, that our ancestors used to help them with hunting, collecting food, communing, reproducing, and imagining the universe. Some believe that it was the use of hallucinogens that gave us language (there is no agreed upon scientific explanation for our use of language).

Alcohol kills and hurts more people than any other drug, but it gets the green light. “Okay,” say the arbitrary powers, which control our society, “we think you’re allowed to have this one.” Why? There are no visions in alcohol; there is no great communal understanding with ceremonial ingestion of alcohol. To the contrary, most often it makes you act like a dick. One thing is clear: if you’re an alcoholic in our society, you can be controlled. But, if you take mushrooms or LSD or marijuana, you might have a great idea and that great idea might be that you’re being controlled by a government and that might lead you to do something about that. Even ecstasy, for God’s sake! The most harmless, warm-and-fuzzy drug around is banned. So, President Nixon and his buddies saw what was happening in the 1960s and shut down the party (i.e., the protestors). Even though our Constitution states that Congress’s powers to ban the drugs we like must be done only after careful findings of danger, the U.S. Government, in one fell swoop, put a list of drugs on the no-no list without any studies or investigation. None. So, essentially, most of the drug laws are against the law. The pharmaceutical companies pay for the privilege of being dope dealers directly to the government. I highly recommend (no pun intended), checking out the lifework of Terrence McKenna, whose godlike powers of articulation will enlighten you further on this topic.

Our Population. Talk about numbers; we’ve got 7.4 billion big ones!  You can actually watch the population grow every second by visiting the world population clock.

And, it’s way too much. The fact is that the planet simply cannot handle the number of people we have. There’s not enough food, not enough energy and very soon, there won’t be enough water to go around.

About 150 years ago, industry allowed for a boom in population, which in turn, created a huge population demanding more from industry, creating a cycle of demand of increasing levels. The demands of an exponentially growing population and increased industrialization intensified agriculture and more energy use; these are the primary causes of environmental heath problems. Industry also brings people into closer contact with one another (urbanization being just one result), which increases the rate of communicable diseases and taxes waste and water systems. Consequently, increased health issues upon an increasing population overburden the health care system, which in turn, creates its own public health problem. A grim prediction by a 2001 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health report states that humans will be using over 90% of all freshwater by 2025, which will leave a mere 10% for plants and animals. We need those plants and animals to eat. It’s a crisis, alright.

Getting back to our small numbers and simple steps fetish: why the hell are we spending so much energy on these trivialities when our world is obviously collapsing around us? As I suggested before, I think that we just can’t take it. I binge watch Orange is the New Black too. Why? Because watching T.V. is one way to give my reeling brain and tired soul a break. I remember the days when I was generally oblivious to such things. Well, I had heard about them, but I didn’t care. It was just a few years ago, while I was working to live out the American dream with my sparkling graduate degree and feeling superior within my refinanced-mortgage house in the suburbs. Yes, I was distrusting of my government, but I didn’t really believe that there was a system out there, out to get me – out to allow my fellow humans to starve to death or to be placed in cages or prisons of debt or killed by cops. I remember hearing the environmentalists’ cries that the sky was falling (that’s how I heard it) and making fun of them for being alarmists. But then, over time, I watched people around me become dumber, more anxious and more hostile. Why was that? Were they being fear-prodded by the so-called news networks or were they just overstressed by the realities surrounding them?

Our numbers are greater than ever before. Naively, I wonder why we can’t just use our numbers to enforce change for our common good. There is a common good, you know. We’re taught to believe that we all have different needs and desires, but that’s not at all true. It is a falsehood accepted by the collective. It is one of so many that prevent us from coming together as we did when we were a smaller family. In closing then, I’m going to pull another list out of my ass, just like I did with the one above.

Top 5 Things To Do For Your Own Good While The End of the World As We Know It Runs Its Course

1. THINK. Just think. Not about what anyone tells you. Just stop and use those incredible mental powers our ancestors gave you.
2. ABANDON THE IDEAS THE CULTURE GAVE YOU. Start leaving behind all of the messages that your society has fed you. All of them: in the garbage. They’re all bullshit. Now, one at a time, dump them. If you see a good idea, think about it and then only embrace it if it makes absolute sense to you.
3. DO WHAT YOU KNOW IS RIGHT. Cultivate a way of doing what’s right that our ancestors probably taught our other ancestors. Think; don’t let modern ideas get in your way; and imagine what you should know. Fucking up is part of the process.
4. KNOW THAT WE’RE ON OUR OWN. We are each on our own to deal with this world. If you’re lucky enough to find truly like-minded, non-dogmatic, non-ideologicial, non-know-it-all people to commune with, share with them. But, know that no one is coming to our rescue.
5. BE BRAVE. It’s going to take a lot of courage to get through this.

If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know. I educate myself, but it’s painful. It’s a long process, detoxing from our culture.

 

 

 

Who I am and Why I’m Here

I am a quitter and a loser. I quit my old life by just walking away from most of it. I quit my job, New York, where I had lived all 50 years of my life, and even some friends because it just wasn’t worth the heartache anymore. I lost so much that I became, to my mind, a loser. Not only could I not keep up with the pace of my life and the brutal work of my former profession – making me a classic loser in the capitalist sense – but I lost or failed in so many of my goals for the past decade or so. Prior to becoming a quitter and a loser, I was an achiever; a high achiever. Then, the achievements became harder and harder to come by. Something in my world was changing. It cost me too much. I got lost in the tumult. I almost died.

Clumsily searching for something to cling to – to keep me from drifting off into some unknown abyss – I made a decision to embark on a spiritual journey. I made some progress; believed in some things that I don’t believe in anymore; and now I drift …. I learned how to stop buying into all the bullshit and I began to listen to my gut and my dreams. I followed up by taking in information. I have learned more in the past couple of years than ever before. Hundreds of articles and Youtube videos and a few books later, I have become privy to the fact that something is falling loose in the foundation of humanity. So, I continue to follow this idea, searching for clues collected at a crime scene and from listening as well as I can to both the witnesses at the scene and the prophets who predicted this event.

I’m here to lend a voice of concern regarding our shared experience as humans in this post-modern world. I believe we are lost. Truly lost. It is 2016. We were lost in 2003, 2001 and in 2000, when our government went nuts in the Middle East and decided to spy on all of us. We were lost in the 1960s in Vietnam and in the 1950s with blacklists. We were lost in the second of our World Wars. (Holy shit!) We were lost when our money went away suddenly; when we treated minorities brutally and women unfairly; when we set about killing each other not long after we had banded together to fight a King; when we slaughtered American families en mass; when we came here to get rich; when we were in Europe, hailing Jesus as King and killing people – on the inside and outside – to remind them; and when we made slaves of our brothers and sisters. It is 2016, where time runs faster, life becomes too complicated to live and computer culture runs the human culture. We have a long history of which we’re ignorant and a future coming up so fast that we can’t even prepare for it. I’m lost. I think many others as well. I want to talk about it. That’s all; I just want to talk about it.

 

Mo McGowan

People are Shitty

 People are shitty; I smell it in the air,

A foulness enclustered

In ostensible kindness care and Exceptionalism rare. Oh, yeah,

Hamburgers in a pair.

One should never dare

Pierce the meat (medium rare) –

As seen on TV, not with real eyes to see –

And call the lifeless “rot” that no one else seems to spot

‘Neathe the garnishes and fries.

Poor enlightened spies,

Gasping – the putrid smell,

Besieged:

Beasts of hell, pretty and shitty

Pretty,

All escaping but we,

The Me, the Thee,

The raping of our Us, of our We …

Pretty.

See? Pretty. Just like on TV.

Pretty fucking shitty.

Smell the pretty shitty shell.

I can hear what you won’t tell and

I can see what you won’t smell.

I love you and I hate you.

I don’t know you and you are like me.

It’s all too complicated. It’s all too foul.

It’s gone too far. It’s all gone so terribly, so shittily far.

I think that I must forget about you as no longer mine–

You shelled human remains of a marvelous ancestral line.

To you, O suffering spies:

I wish you well,

Both armed and incapacitated by your piercing seeing eyes.

I love you dearly,

My lips quiver to say.

(The tears come enfilade every day).

We are shitty too in our way.

Shit-stained, scared shit, feeling shitty all the time and even full of shit when we have to be, just to get through another shitty day.

I wish you well. I wish us well.

Finding our way out of this pretty, shitty hell.

By MC April, 2016

“I Wouldn’t Go Around Spoutin’ That Shit, If I Was You”

 

 

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

Mo McGowan’s Blah Blah Blog