Sick Unit
We really are a sick unit. By we I don’t mean just me (though it’s patently obvious I’m not coping well) and I don’t just mean all the right wingers (who now perform the role as the toilet for everything non new-new-left-corporatehuman-beautifully-clean-from-performing-16-nonracist-rituals-daily-pro-capitalist-censoring-safe-protected-pretranshuman, but ironically who, many of them, have been fighting a good fight against corporate fascism for two years when the left went missing while also, many of them, blindly upholding capitalism, the train which all this rode in on, but hey, we all have our pathetic blind spots, right? Right?) but I mean you. You’re a sick unit because you are of the sick unit.
I imagine you resist that thought as much as I do and try to do at least some of the things that go some way towards helping you get around the idea that you’re inherently dignified and worthy of care and beauty and love and flourishing. But how could it not be so? No amount of self-care negates the boot in your face that’s trying to tell you it’s not a boot. How can you not be even minimally affected by the oil-dumped water you’ve swum in all your life, which has got more dystopian by the year? By the absence of community and local work that helps bind it together? By the criminal hardline suburban symmetry of people and pets?
The reality is, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know who you would be if you weren’t stuck inside this thing that visitors from another planet could see as requiring immediate overthrow*, but which you’ve been taught to accommodate yourself to in order to get the rent paid/approval/a root/a promotion/food/space to think in order to come up with an idea on how to overthrow the system.
Sure, you can distance yourself from the idea that you’re not as sick as the unit in your mind (necessary, in order to regain a sense of your self) or in your actual body by hermetitude (not recommended; the distortions clang and the paranoias grow like mould, as you maybe/probably/I don’t know gleaned from lockdowns) but you are not getting away from this, no matter how you ignore all the politics out there, or the lurching machine, or spiritualise it in your head to get some excruciatingly needed psychic space or to make yourself the star of the shitshow so you can keep getting up in the morning and carrying on and being not like me.
You. You are me are he are they are a walrus are a part of the sick unit, and we are all (not [yet? not ever?]) together. You are that. You are this. You are me and I am you, which is why I don’t place much credence on envy, really, as a side note. You’re out doing good and beautiful things and I’m not? Good. I’m glad one of us is. Hold the space and hope to see you there sometime soon when I can get myself together. (Which is taking some time. As someone who is now for governmental purposes Officially Single and Sleeping In The Spare Room, I’m finally able to get some financial assistance from the government. Have I applied yet? No. Because the whole idea absolutely terrifies me. Which is part of the built in psychological warfare, of course, which is applying for government benefits, and which I don’t accrue to myself as entirely-my-anxiety because I know how the system works. Maybe it’s not as blatantly warfaring as in the days of robodebt, and especially not now that Labor’s in and giving some of us the illusion that anything has much changed. But I know its face. As should you. And so interfacing with it, even as banally as uploading forms and going for doctor’s certificates to prove my incapability of working as much as is required to prove my worthiness of existence on the planet, terrifies me. I am terrified of interfacing with the state in any of its forms. Which is not where I want or need to be but it’s where I am, as a sick unit of the sick unit).
You, regardless of how hard you try, think sick thoughts you’d never think if you were in your right mind. You don’t think some beautiful amazing creative thoughts for the same reason. The only reason you’re not curled up in a ball crying about how this place has ruined you is that there’s no place for you to go to where you could see how you would be if you weren’t tarnished from the hellscape,
And oh, it’s very sick. How sick? Well, the puppeteers have disappeared. People now think ever more highly of themselves and their correct position despite no evidence for the fact at all. People are too posh to be propagandised. People don’t see class anymore. People who once would have marched against the war in Iraq are now waving a Ukrainian flag in their avatar and refusing to examine the parameters of pandemics. That’s how sick it is. Insert here some doublespeak Orwellian reference if you like. They all count now. Except not in relation to you of course. Only to the stupid people.
I still can’t quite work out how it happened so easily, how class got to be wiped so easily from our minds at the very same time it’s never been so easy to see the puppeteers at work. But of course it did. Julian sitting at the top of the last decade with awards for service to humankind. Julian at its end a rapist. They can’t be seen, because of the success of their enterprise. The seamlessness by which they’re able to all speak in the same voice is the means by which we are now unable to see them, even while they’re right up in our faces, suggesting things of high stupidity which we nevertheless go along with despite knowing our institutions are corrupt, because to speak out against them makes you a Nazi. An unsophisticate. A selfish person, one who is so against solidarity that they refuse to do all the things that make us good citizens. Bah, spit on all your stupid cartoonesqueries that you buy wholesale. The most basic of structural things about power, that were commonplace understanding 40 years ago, may as well not have existed at all. All that good work, undone.
Good citizens. We’re so starved of opportunities to actually be good citizens that when we’re asked to perforn it we do it with gusto. Nevermind checking out what wall the ladder’s leaning against. There is no wall, unless it’s the wall of noise spouting the same thing from the same playbook, giving an air of authority by its repetition.
God, we’re such jibs, it makes me sick. The indignity of it all. The ease by which we can now be moved, wherever the class we no longer appear to believe in wills. All lassooed to some stupid flimsy sense of us as the ones on the right side of history because we’re not getting censored off the internet.
I was just watching a video earlier by a woman versed in physiology and human trauma and regulation of the nervous system. Felt pretty good during the first part of the video where she talked about how trauma displaces you from your own senses so that you can’t always recognise what’s going on in there. I felt good in this first half because I am tuned into my body. I do regularly now deal with this seemingly neverending voiding of its old unprocessed shit in my quest to make myself whole. Which is I suspect a work going on at breakpace around the world.
Transmuting our trauma. Feeding the greater health back into the collective. Repairing the effects of the old while making space for the new.
But then the second part of the video hit and that of course is where I’m falling down. Social engagement. You may have recovered from lockdowns but I certainly haven’t. Even though I was already locked down via health. The irony. Now, even though I might be feeling able to go out and engage socially, the thought fills me with horror. Not as much as it did, but still there. I was gregarious once. Not any more. Not now we proved what a zombie collective we are. Going out there? My god, what a horrible idea. Of course, that's exactly what the billionaire class wants for us, to divide and conquer and traumatise us globally, where it can now do so with neverending aplomb under the guise of "public health" or future “climate health” or whatever other shit they’ll come up with next now they know how foolable we are. The monster is so big now, so streamlined, so speaking as one, however, that it's now invisible and everyone who can see it is now automatically to be ignored as a right wing, mentally ill, entirely untrustworthy person. The propaganda is entire.
So that's the state we're in, and I know I need to get out there and re-engage with other people again. My massive misanthropy levels have precluded it. The zombies with solid opinions they seem to think they gleaned from out of their own excessive intelligence precludes it. There's no jail the modern disengaged western subject will not allow The Machine to corral us into. This is where we're at. Think of it as collective autonomic system dysregulation. It's a perfect fit.
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*Maybe the system doesn’t require overthrowing. Maybe all it requires is a turning away. If so, maybe what I’m perceiving as apathy is actually a wiser waiting. Maybe we’re on track. Maybe, collectively, we’re all going inside, each night we sleep, reworking, facing the monsters, strengthening. Maybe the 1000 little pieces of evidence of people turning aside and reconnecting, regrowing, cultivating, grassrooting, is the real revolution, and it’ll come right in on time. And the giant machine of terror will shudder to a halt by simple dint of our not participating in it. Before that, however, the ever-encroaching billionaire class is buying up tons of farmland, trying to tank the current system in order to introduce the next one of digital servitude. Maybe all that will just go away by dint of it being such a dessicated husk it’ll all fall over in a puff of corrupted wind. I don’t know.
But whichever way you look at it, ignoring it is the sure sign of a sick, sick unit. And desperately desiring an escape from it all is ultimately the sign of a sane, sane individual.
But to not turn and face it collectively, whether out of ignorance, laziness or unwillingness to admit you’ve been had? Well, that’s what you’d call a tragedy. But it would explain the extent of the propagandising. And Julian sitting in prison. And the magnitude of our collective task.