What's Missing?
Struggling to cope.
Differentiating between the desire for a “return to normalcy” and visceral shock at the level of depravity that is burying any possibility of health.
What does health mean?
What if we took it to express a balance of forces and factors acting upon the elements of a biosphere?
In a time of radical atomization when every public act revels in an active refusal to even admit to the interconnected nature of…, well, everything; this view of health appears to be falling off the edge of a flat-earth.
As the Big Lie swallows the world it’s no surprise that health at every level would be its primary victim.
Imagine the internal violence that must continually erupt and lash out and wash over any “self” who insists that the Big Lie is all that matters. There is a radical self-hatred and self-destructive impulse at the decomposing heart of anyone aligning themselves with the spectacle of hate.
While many appear ready to balk at accepting this tyranny over one’s self; not many seem to connect the ways in which we; and I say this as someone who has masked since the beginning of the ongoing pandemic; continue to refuse to distinguish between the desire for “normalcy” and the reality of a genocide we are all, as a society, inflicting upon our selves and each other.
One of the most difficult illusions to disabuse has been that people make decisions and that they do so based on evidence and that; therefore, it’s possible to inform people and “change their minds.”
At the heart of this moment is the way this illusion fuels the gigantic dumpster-fire we call life today. When we ache for “normalcy” this is at the foundations of what we wish to return to.
“Make A… Great Again!” May seem easy enough to dismiss as a delusion; but “Make It All Reasonable Again!” Isn’t really any more realistic. Any construction that starts with Make: the desire to compel an action to gain a desired result; and ends with Again: a fuzzy sense of return to a delusional state of nostalgia; is bound to be destructive.
Yet our every day reality continually shows us that outside the silos of shared victim-hood; a category we are all destined to enter into in one form or another as this progresses; we refuse to accept that we are unable to decouple, extricate, untangle; our desire to simply live as beings; from the fact that every aspect of the way our lives are organized not only makes us complicit in genocides abroad, or increasingly at the center of this crumbling empire. We are active participants.
If you’re wondering “What difficult time?” It’s still not impossible to educate yourself. The information is out there. Even as every authority scrambles to dismantle our capacities to distinguish between manic desire and realities that stretch wider than anecdote might notice we cannot not see that pretending a pandemic is “over” has led to what will soon be unavoidable: the collapse of health for people of all ages all over the world.
“What’s the point?” We cry out. Submitting to desperation and, well, succumbing to the Big Lie.
It’s perhaps my deepest motivation; borne of a childhood where it felt at the time and has only become increasingly evident in retrospection; that all I asked for and all that was always denied was for there to just be a simple acceptance and declaration that everything was not OK. Sure it would have been great if the grip of double-binds could have loosened just a little bit. Or that, for a moment, some awareness of guilt and complicity could have flashed across the visages of the “adults in the room.” But barring all of that; it would have been tremendous to just have a fleeting acknowledgement that none of it was OK.
As I’ve discovered that my own private Hell has always been just the way our mutual Hell expressed itself in my experience. I keep falling back on this one last, and perhaps non-negotiable request. What’s worse than participating in a violent and broken reality is the refusal to admit that it is violent and broken. This is where the Big Lie has us all.
In this time of revelations; and, most of them revolve around the fact that the malignantly wealthy have driven themselves into such delusions of grandeur and belief in their totally undeserved self “worth;” that they are doing everything they can to “offload” the rest of us who are inconveniently blocking their route to God-hood and Singularity. It should be no surprise that however the current pandemic began it has been embraced by them as the ultimate weapon and Final Solution to their little problem. Sure, there’s plenty of money to be made in active killing via “kinetic means;” but nothing beats a “silent” killer that doesn’t have any financial “downside.”
Their pathetic refusal to admit that their whole, all of it, is based on the fundamental lie that any individual can break “free” of mutuality and interconnection; is why they are incapable of seeing that they are doing everything they can to hasten their own destruction. The violence they have done to themselves and continue to do with each doubling-down insistence that their fantasies trump reality is tremendous. I feel compassion for their countless victims but no more than pitiful disgust at what they do to destroy themselves.
But then I look at the rest of us….
I’ve long written about the way our situation is not one of being immersed in a set of problems that might be solved ad hoc, in some piecemeal fashion; but that we are in a Predicament without solution. What our revelations are making clear is that this is at the core of our Predicament. We refuse to recognize that every proposed “solution” to a Predicament is a refusal to acknowledge the reality of Predicament. Techné, the search for solutions; the refusal to see that life is not a series of problems to be solved; but a flow of vitality to be nurtured while it lasts and valued for what it is; holds us in its grip even as its efficacy collapses around us. Enshittification is not a “problem.” It’s the natural outcome of a failed attempt to misperceive what it means to be alive.
There is no “solution” to this pandemic or the next one; or any of the aspects of what I’ve called Our Enormity. This does not mean its OK to just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Misery and suffering.
I’ve attempted to distinguish between two aspects of life that we tend to blur together. Misery is what happens to fragile and mortal creatures that brings pain and limits our capacities and abilities. Psychological suffering is not necessarily an outcome of misery. It is an added layer of anguish we refuse to admit as self-inflicted and that then infects everything we do in its wake. It is a prime initiator of the descent into the Big Lie. “I hurt! Someone’s to blame! They will pay!”
Unless we actively decouple suffering from misery we perpetuate both and by increasing suffering we increase misery which, left unexamined, initiates further lashing out, unleashing further suffering, leading to yet more misery.
Pandemic is the place where we can address this vicious cycle most directly. We can’t personally stop every bomber or feed every starving person; but we can take steps to slow the grind of pandemic and share our concern in each others health.
Masks don’t “solve a problem.” If only they could. Although there are simple approaches to physical hygiene that could be implemented that would minimize misery and ease suffering.
It’s just that, caught in complete refusal to admit reality we are unable to accomplish the simplest tasks to help our selves and each other.
None of this requires “Calling or writing your representatives!”
Predicament could be seen as Nemesis’ way of showing us how we could break our allegiance to Hubris. Every aspect of our Predicament is an opportunity to confront our own refusals and break the cycle.
The biggest difficulty that open performative Fascism brings us is that it feeds off our fears and insecurities. This can have the effect of pushing us into refusing to acknowledge that which is truly fearful and to admit that we are not secure. This road leads us inexorably into the maw of the Big Lie.
We are frightened. We are not secure. We are not going to be rescued by anyone who sees themselves as being “in charge.” The hideous self-destructive leap off the cliff of reality into intentional cruelty and unbridled abuse will not be stopped by appeasements or any contortions of “bi-partisanship.” Even as they will only be fed by any “strategy” intended to herd us into in-groups and out-groups of any kind no matter how laudable-sounding the presumed goal may appear.
As our world is consumed by this fugue into hatred and destruction we do have opportunities to go a different way.
One of the most powerful aspects of art is that it brings us to places where we have no choice. The reason this is important is because this is the way we need to understand what it is to be alive. The Big Lie says, “No! You are free! You can choose to make your own reality!”
Nemesis will either kindly nudge us or drag us kicking and screaming to the irrefutable realization that to be alive is not to choose. It’s to do what must be done and to abide as best we can for as long as we can.
The Big Lie attempts to confuse the Will of Ego for what must be done. Its successes have been possible by how well we have confused this distinction and turned health upside down. The demands of Ego shout and insist. The facts of life do neither. We either see through the first and embrace the second or we maintain allegiance with the destroyers.
Our humanity, our very creature-hood, begins and is rooted in what takes place when we meet another. It is either there in the eyes looking into other eyes or it is not there. In our misunderstanding of predation we refuse to see that even a true predator’s gaze holds mutuality while the human Neo-predator’s gaze is hollow and empty.
