The People Who Count Have Been in Charge for a Very Long Time…
Chasing a ledger…
This statement came to me a few evenings ago. It has stuck with me for the tension between the various perceptions of meaning it holds within itself….
“The People Who Count” is usually considered to be a rather blunt way of stating that these are the people who matter. It came to me as a literal statement, the people who rely on numbers.
They have “been in charge for a very long time.” To most of us this just feels like a “natural order of things.”
The whole statement keeps unraveling…. “Charge,” as a way of saying that those this word modifies should be seen as leaders, hold positions of power….
“A long time,” yes, say four thousand years?
What could a counter-statement possibly say? “The people who don’t count?”
“Should?”
“Replace?”
“The people who count?”
I struggle attempting to show how tangled in Thought we are and how an inquiry into a statement like this one might illuminate our Predicament.
It’s hot. In the heat, we lose patience. We find our capacity to tolerate any irritant, even ambiguity, is frayed to a raw edge. Anger is closer to the surface.
Is it any wonder that we are tumbling into Fascism as quickly as the climate unravels?
It is easier, in the heat, to sweep anything that bothers us aside and bury it in a Big Lie….
Heat brings fire. Fire consumes. Not in the anodyne manner we expect consumption to mean as “consumers,” a never-ending supply of new things ordered late at night and miraculously arriving at our door the next morning. “Easy credit!™” and no consequences ever, “Satisfaction Guaranteed!™”. Fire reminds us that to be consumed is to be destroyed….
Our descent into Fascism is consuming us as we choose to deny all that discomfits us as we demand that our wishes matter more than anything….
“The people who count have been in charge for a very long time…”
Why should some people “count?” Does this mean others don’t?
What do we mean by count? That they “matter?” Or that they base their view of the world on quantity?
At the center of my inquiries into meaning has been the realization that life, a living world, is a world built on Quality.
Quality in this case does not mean, fancy, or expensive. Quality means that what matters is how coherent what we perceive appears to be and how any distinguishable “parts” cohere, are inseparably embedded within an indivisible whole. A blunt comparison of Quality to Quantification – Quality is an attribute. Quantification is an attitude…. – would be the difference between a living being and a machine. The “parts” of a living being have no meaningful existence outside of the context of the greater whole they are “parts” of, leading all the way to the entirety of existence. The parts of a machine are discrete sub-assemblies. Living beings are complex. Machines can be simple or complicated. Living beings are not reducible to parts. Machines are the result of a reductive world view that insists complexity is irrelevant and will “fight to the death” any attempts to reign in the Hubris that contains it.
All of us today for at least some of the time are incapable of perceiving quality. We are immersed in a culture steeped in quantification that has warped our perceptions of quality almost out of all recognition. The fact that we think of quality as “expensive,’ “elite,” “rare;” all reflect on this prejudice.
If we take the effort and follow where inquiry leads us we can begin to glimpse that quality has nothing to do with these categories imposed by an attitude that is inimical to life.
A statement like this last one could have been considered hyperbole even as recently as…, last year. I’ve been saying for a long time that one of the vanishingly few “advantages” we have today in the shadow of Our Enormity is that our delusions are becoming increasingly difficult to support unless we are willing to surrender to the Big Lie….
Living on the blade of the hockey-stick means that every attempt to rationalize a “New Normal” is shattered by what happens next. The pace of change accelerating at a rate resembling free fall…. What I did miss for a long time was how this would draw so many into embracing the Big Lie….
But this too is an aide to our disillusionment.
Apocalypse means revelation. The rest of it is a rhetorical ploy to scare us into following somebody’s dogma.
“The People Who Count” have been providing us with quite the show! I’d suggest that what we see with Elon Musk or with Trump. or Biden, or the Supremes…, all of our “leaders";” are revelations into the depth of the bankruptcy of the world view that has brought them into being, brought them to power, and now is leading us all into a profound annihilation.
As I wrote in 2013, Wealth Makes You Stupid. Relative wealth may make you relatively stupid. Extreme wealth is guaranteed to make you extremely stupid. It’s only a goose-stepping hop, skip, and a jump from there to embracing the Big Lie….
What I’m getting at here, it is hot after all…, is that conforming our lives to fit a ledger imposed by people who never fail to reveal their irredeemable idiocy and embrace a death cult belief that whatever they want or wish for is all that matters is…, a big mistake. At this point, arguably already a fatal mistake.
We also equate revelation, apocalypse, with a single tradition, a single belief system. One that is itself deeply mired by the trap Thought has put us in. I would suggest that Apocalypse, Revelation, instead of merely being the title of a block-buster story of guilt and regret at not having followed a particular leader’s precepts; is a mechanism of Nemesis. When we chase Hubris into the Big Lie Nemesis first removes our blinders before finally “putting us in our place.” This is the trajectory of Tragedy.
Tragedy is an object lesson. If we look at the universality of Tragedy instead of locking into any of the traditions that have referred to it and attempted to use it as a method of control we can see that Tragedy is a lesson as well as a balancing of what has been thrown into deadly imbalance. It’s just not necessarily a lesson for those who bring it into force. It is an object lesson for those who might come after….
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow introduce us to a glimpse at a moment in history which has been clouded by willful misunderstanding for far too long. We meet, through a fresh perspective that trusts immediate sources over the rationalizations of those pushing a hegemonic agenda. We meet, we glimpse, an intriguing opening into a world that might have been if the voices of the truly enlightened had been listened to, a possibility of a different end point than the one we now face.
The Native Americans we catch sight of in a few scraps of direct witness were survivors of an Apocalypse. They had received the lessons of Nemesis as the fruits of past Tragedy. They did not simply count.
To the West, they simply did not count.
The ancestors of our Idiots with High IQs grabbed what they wanted to hear. Stold credit for having “discovered” these insights and then subverted them out of all recognition in a race to destroy the world so that they could, “win….”
Moments of Fascism; for that’s what they always turn out to be; every paean to a Thousand Year Reich notwithstanding; is; at the same time as it draws multitudes into its Big Lie; a chance to see what it reveals. The futility of placing wishes ahead of what-is. The dangers, the self-destructive annihilating certainty that this path is in grave error that becomes clear at some point even to its most devoted practitioners; even if it is only in that instant when they must decide between the Luger and the cyanide pill as their castles in the sky crumble above their all to vincible bunkers….
At a time when there are more elephants in the room than exist in the wild, I’ve been dangling the term, The Big Lie, over our heads like the proverbial Albatross….
I have written about it many time before. It’s also used within the wider literature on Fascism. I’m reluctant at this point to attempt too sharp a definition. It seems to be more useful to let each person come to their own realizations of what it is. What it means…. In that way it will effect each of us in the most profound way possible and subvert any attempt to turn these realizations into fodder for some counter-form of agenda-driven power-plays.
What I will say is that it is becoming visible that a potential approach to Apocalypse and Revelation is to relax the hold Hubris has over us and simply take in what is being revealed. Not as “signs and portents that some prophesy is coming true!” This is an attitude mired in the fantasy of control and does nothing to help us. Our “Holy Men!™” are showing us this every day as their bankruptcy of spirit is revealed with every turn towards hatred and every death-worshiping move they make that takes them further and further into the new embodiment of the same cruel forces who persecuted and destroyed their ancestors.
What if we accept that we have been mired in error?
What if we stop defending the indefensible?
What if we simply stop believing the people who count?
Beautiful, nourishing. Thank you. This is written from the heart of the purifying fire.