Daily details may be shocking; but each new atrocity, and its acceptance by everyone with any power or privilege, has been going on for a long time.

This has been the way we've been heading for a very long time.

On the Beach, oil on canvas

None of this is surprising and neither is the end-game we are rushing towards.

South Park had it right. Fascists are at the root at war with imagination. To them we need never attend to anything we don’t already believe is true.

There is no battleground of ideas. There is simply a market for exploitation and abuse.

Fascism is not something to fear “in the future.” It is here now, everywhere.

Abusers don’t hide their violence. They revel in it and then dare you to challenge them on it. What makes their depredations possible is that we internalize their expectations as our own. There are no limits to what they will do and there are no limits to what we will accept.

The approach of Autumn, its arrival, and the shortening of days bringing us to Winter has always had a profound effect on our emotional states.

Thought is a prison; but what is it preventing us from inhabiting our lives? What is there outside of Thought? Especially when we realize that Thought is actively destroying everything and everybody on this earth. Especially since it contaminates everything thing we do, our perceptions, how we respond or react.

It is difficult to imagine what else there might be. Thought destroys imagination and tries to replace it with fantasy and tries to convince us that imagination is fantasy and that we need to accept this and stop resisting. Stop resisting Thought’s takeover. Stop resisting that imagination might be something other than a meaningless escape into fantasy. Stop resisting that we could possibly do anything other than entertain ourselves as Thought destroys everything.

Thought is a system of programs that short-circuit our capacities as human creatures. It provides a seemingly friction-less substitute for being alive, for responding to our conditions and situations, for arriving at responses that are not already proven to be useless. It stops us from being and habituates us to existing un-dead.

We grasp at continually codifying its atrocities. A Via Negativa, directed at Thought’s errors and dangers often appears to be the only way to navigate the depredations of Thought. Master of the double-bind, Thought convinces us that even when we are totally fed-up and in despair at what Thought has brought us to; even then/now, we cannot not focus on Thought.

Awakening from a dream, a nightmare hidden in wish-fulfillment and fantasy, it’s hard not to focus on the dangers suddenly revealed. Or not so suddenly since everything we are now facing has been visible at least all of my seventy-one years. Reactions are unavoidable. Reactions of horror, of fear, of looking for distractions. Revelation is a violent dynamic. What we were unwilling to see finally appears to us in forms and in a manner that can no longer be ignored. Our habits of Thought, including reaction instead of response; vacillating between denial and insisting that what we fear and how we react to incomplete and deeply mysterious and unknowable forces by demanding fight or flight reactions are our only options; keep us teetering, unable to find any place to stand that is not facing deadly peril.

We are the heirs to thousands of years of cycles of abuse and trauma. As Thought gained control, turning our capacities against life and projecting its fears and violent reactions onto the living world and taking all the wrong lessons. Neo-predatory behavior; misunderstanding what predators do and why and creating a class of human predators preying on everything, including their fellows, including their own vitality; became the default human condition. The profound misunderstanding of what power is and how we can only claim it for our own ends by ignoring the fatal peril this places us in became the model for what we have called civilization. History, the accumulation of particular stories that attempt to make sense of this process from within the shadow of these profound mistakes, has spread Thought’s dominion.

As a child in America in the nineteen fifties, I was, as was everyone else, thrust into a maelstrom of flagrant abuse and violence hidden behind a facade of normalcy. This has most likely been the case for most human children most places and most times throughout history. This is equally true today, outside of places like Gaza where the veneer of normalcy is pulverized daily and brutality dominates without shame or fear.

In the schoolyard we would play “cowboys and Indians.” We would play war, which meant re-enacting whatever WWII battles we’d recently seen depicted in a movie or on TV. The same TV where political assassinations and police-riots against the descendants of slaves in a country not yet reaching a century past the end of its First Civil War punctuated the relentless focus on celebrating greed and appetite and supremacy. It was another fifty years or more before I could begin to entertain the gnawing doubts and concerns that there was nothing about my “culture” that placed it in contrast with any of those we were all being indoctrinated to despise and destroy. The realization that Hitler himself was deeply shocked and dismayed that his role models and heroes turned against him was still decades away. Those who had spent the previous four hundred years or more perfecting what he was simply embracing without doubt or irony turned against him, refusing their most accomplished heir and joining forces with the “common enemy.”

The details of our current situation appear on the surface to be incongruous. How could the victims of the Shoah organize themselves into a society and form a “nation” that is to the finest detail indistinguishable from the Third Reich? How do we digest the fact that our own nation, claiming so loudly to have been founded in freedom and reason, be the greatest perpetrator and facilitator of violence and destruction the world has ever seen?

Suspend Thought’s habitual defensive reactions for even just a moment and allow the power of revelation to sink in. None of this should in any way be surprising. As soon as we suspend our habitual blindness to consequences and our belief that power can be controlled to achieve wishes without drawing down Nemesis. As has happened in every case throughout history. None of this can be found at all surprising. Including the way, as an agglomeration of atomized, traumatized “individuals” we find ourselves incapable of doing anything more meaningful than defending our preferred flavor of Fascism over the ones that offend our tastes.

We can’t pick and choose which lies are OK and which lies we hate. Lies are lies and accepting lies, or “hating” some lies in an act of projected guilt, allies us with fascism. This is what keeps us in the category called “normal,” which has always been used as a cover for acceptable violence and destruction. Acceptable because it is expected that this violence and destruction will always land elsewhere. The only thing maintaining this belief is the lie that there is anywhere and anyone immune or guarded from what is done anywhere.

We’re all playing chicken with forces that will not lose. We secretly ‘pray’ that Nemesis won’t strike until we’re gone. We find from day to day that the lies we need to accept to maintain this belief compound faster than usurious interest. Doubling down, we strengthen Nemesis and ensure our destruction.

Recognizing that our violence cannot be contained to the other, we break the grip of the lie. Refusing to accept the lies that still seem convenient….