Questioning Everything is Cool Even When the Cool Kids Aren't Doing It
It doesn't make you a Trumptard. It makes you an adult
I got booted off a Reddit board last night for spouting “conspiracy theories”. I had pointed out that it was good that the uptake of vaccinations here in Melbourne was slow because it showed people were finding out for themselves that these are not traditional vaccines but are closer to gene therapy, and that the clinical trials are on us.
None of this should be controversial, because it's all true, for anyone willing to do a bit of digging beyond mainstream media. It should not be uncontroversial, when you have a basic understanding of the pharma industry, to be wary. Nothing. Not one iota of controversy here. None.
Let me repeat: it is entirely uncontroversial to be suss on these vaccines. To be so doesn't automatically mean you are against vaccines. That would be stupid, wouldn't it, to jump to such a conclusion?
It is understandable why some of us are unable to accede to the idea that mainstream news has an agenda. We are familiar with its brands. We derive comfort from their familiarity. They feel like ports in a storm with a reminder of childhood (Australia's national broadcaster is called Auntie). But there are countless examples everyday that the media has its own agenda, and that agenda is not to keep you informed but managed. All you need to do is look at the way the media are reporting on Israel and Palestine as if they're equally weighted.
I mean, come on, it's palpable now.
But then, lots of people are busy, overwhelmed. They just want to get back to normal. A normal that is not returning. Ever.
I listened to the latest episode of The Dollop last night. They were talking about the beginnings of the manufacture of deodorant in the US in the early 20th century and the methods deployed to achieve sales. The usual suspects of shaming, of being made to feel undesirable, of setting up in lonely single women's minds questions about why that second date failed to materialise. Maybe it's something outside of your sphere of awareness. And maybe that something is also something that other people have noticed. And maybe they’re talking about you behind your back, even. You dirty stinking shit. So buy this deodorant, you disgusting, repulsive, ugly cow.
Advertising has got more sophisticated since then, although by the 1970s we were still being jingled to "Don't wait to be told you need Palmolive Gold." These days, the most popular methods of coercion are being used by the hydraheaded beast of capitalism not so much in advertising (those ads are largely now about convincing us about how good multinational corporations are) but in the editorial. The editorial is everywhere. It's sponsored content but it doesn't declare itself as such. It declares itself as the entirety, the whole, the totality. It's simple. This is the real true trustworthy story and these are the trustworthy people to declare it to you. Don't peer closer and examine the structure of the lacy material and its many holes. No need to. You sit back, and you let us tell you what the score is. It's very soothing. Plus, we give you built-in targets to fear and loathe. Those disgusting people who, out of some innate deficiency, cannot accept reality. People with low IQ levels. Selfish people who refuse to participate in solidarity in order for us all to get through this and get back to normal.
When I was seven years old, my dad said to me in exasperation, "Why are you so inquisitive?" Well, I dunno, Dad. I guess I feel like a natural curiosity about my world is a beautiful thing. It's so complicated out there with so many people, like you, trying to silence people for your own benefit, to their detriment, because you are a broken soul who went on to break your own children. I mean, surely, if you can't accommodate a very bright child wishing to discover the patterns of beauty she senses humming under the concrete and the shit, at least you can accommodate the idea of a child, clawing her way towards understanding why you're such a shit broken wreck, towards the day when she can start reclaiming all those exiled parts that you caused, by your neglect and your lazy banal evil. So shut the fuck up.
Questioning isn't a weakness. When I think back to that kid asking, searching, despite the shitty cold environmentmade for her, it fills me with a little bit of awe. The desire to understand, to know what we're looking at, to begin to parse out why things are the way they are instead of a beautiful way, or at least a good way, those are strengths. Brave strengths. Anyone daring to question anything now understands this well.
Questioning means you're suspicious, that you refuse to be spoonfed a prevailing narrative. It means you have been able to incorporate an understanding of the system we live in and the patterns it creates. It means that you have learned from history, that you understand that the system reverts to totalitarianism unless the people are sufficiently strong to resist it. Because when totalitarianism comes calling, it finds a bunch of people willing to bow down to it. And I guess I thought that, despite everything, something might have changed for us this time around.
And who knows, maybe it will yet. But people are very scared, and very broken from living in a culture that does not teach them to live with death as part of life. We westerners have been dessicated by our position in the world, in our societies that don't even exist anymore, the collective converted to cash and sold off from under our feet so that we, paranoid and depressed, must rebuild, replant the grass.
We are so up against it, the war now in our own minds and those arrayed against us powerful and insidious and sophisticated. Propaganda is so thick, and no more than when you can see it, smell it's metallic shitstench, and watch as we collectively decide to go along with it because all our dreaming was some time ago sucked out through our feet.
Questioning in this environment is not a weakness, though the narrative will tell you so and those positioned comfortably within it will mistake the ease of their position with obvious rightness and therefore feel right in spurting their bottomless tub of scorn and self-congratulation on those who point to the emperor's right ballsack. Questioning is not a weakness. It is a sign of a sophisticated mind that understands complexity, and how things fit together, and how corrupt it all is right now, the pus sliding through all the fibres and all the optics, fogging the view.
Questioners feel the tug of wishing to conform, to shut up, but they can't because they see the strings at the other end. Don't feel like your questioning is a weakness, champ. It's a fucking superpower, a beautiful, honourable thing. People knew that in the past before the latest mind-virus blew in on the back of a real one which has a PR team, a dodgy PCR test, a measure of deaths that lumps in a whole ton of other people so we've never been able to get a proper set on how deadly this virus really is. Questioning is out of favour now as it was when the last mind virus blew in, and it will be back in favour again after it's all over. Well, hopefully.