I read a story a few years ago about a people who lived in two dimensions rather than our three. They freaked out when a circle came into town, I think I vaguely recall, through the mush. I never finished it though because the container in which I can hold things like entire stories is shrinking now I have allowed the computer in my hand to dictate to me the new way to take the world - in fragments, in pieces, none of which join together properly so that none of us can properly get the lay of the land.
I can’t remember what happened in that story about the flatlands people so I don’t know why I’m talking about it, except for the bit where this is all we do now anyway. We talk about things we can’t remember. We are the most forgetting people in the history of our planet. Giant swathes of it. And the more we forget, the more we think we know. Which I guess makes sense, in the same way that pissing your bed because it’s too cold to get out and go to the toilet makes sense. It’s all warm for a second, until it gets colder. We all pretend that we remember everything, which gives us our credentials to speak as if we do, a delusion to wrap about ourselves as we spout shit we know nothing about on social media, where all that we do not know is evident to everybody except ourselves.
All it took for us to forget the things we absolutely could not afford to forget was 40 years or so, an austerity ideology, a heap of propaganda, our inability to understand that we too are people who can be propagandised, a burgeoning billonaire class and some technology.
I’ve forgotten the name of the flatlands story, which is fine because we’ve forgotten the names of a whole bunch of things while also being quite sure that we know the fuck out of everything. We know things in the way a bureaucrat knows things. Not their contents but their form, so that when the experts tell us things we can quickly move them into the correct spreadsheet column in our heads that is representative of the world.
We do magic tricks now. We go out into the world and we don’t even see it while we claim that we want to save it. We see our representations of it, and we feel depressed, we feel suicidal, we feel so fucking anxious that we attack ourselves with panic, but how often do we imagine that we are depressed and suicidal because we have been taken away from her, from the centre, from the earth? Now, though, it’s like an almost-forgotten dream. There is no anthropomorphising the earth. No Mother Earth. We barely even miss it, even while we quest to save it. What is there to be taken away from now but blips of dead stuff that get moved around and converted into products we can put into a cupboard or guiltily throw in the rubbish?
We have become like them.
Of course, we don’t really believe there is a them. That kind of thinking is for those people who are paranoid and who vote for Trump and who protest at rallies about lockdowns. They’re barely people anymore, not as we conceive of them. There is something off about those pathetic people who are questioning vaccine safety or lockdowns. They are not sticking to the program, which is to say the program that we ourselves have collectively decided is the program and not something that has been presented to us, of course. We don’t buy propaganda. We buy reality. Sure we have heard of the concept of manufacturing consent but we do not believe that it applies to us. All that we receive is all that we have first perceived ourselves. We are the agents of this narrative, us westerners who are going to save our flailing nations by consuming greener and driving out the dirty within our ranks.
This is why we look at, say, the horrible rates of domestic violence, and we see two types of people. We see the victims of the domestic violence and we see the perpetrators of the domestic violence. The focus is, of course, on the victims. We examine how DV victims are shunted within the system so that reporting on DV matters gets them nowhere, gets them blamed.
If you suggest that perhaps a broader concern could be applied helpfully here in order to maybe prevent domestic violence, we will turn and spit on you as the pathetic lover of violence you are. If you suggest that, say, it might be helpful to also examine the structural issues that are causing men to become domestic violence perpetrators, we will not have it. This is not our wheelhouse. We are the new new new new left. We’re done with your disgusting casual dismissal of violence, your allowing of it, your assertion that these evil men could be anything other than what they are, that something outside of them could be contributing to their taking-out of their despair on the soft flesh of the beautiful women whose they do not value.
You will suggest stupid things like how we are gaslit constantly now with the idea that we are meant to be living flourishing lives here in the west when so much was taken from us. Of course people are going to go rancid when there are not enough jobs that aren’t bullshit, when our connections to each other have failed because the traditional means with which we connect to each other as a society going about sustaining itself have all been stripped in the name of globalisation, decades ago, centuries ago, so that we are a husk, a terrible husk lit by Coca-Cola billboards telling us how to behave to each other. We will look at you contemptuously. We understand what you are. You are apologists for violent men. That’s what you are, you piece of shit. Because we know that people are categories. Unchangeable ones.
You will continue suggesting more stupid things, like maybe we shouldn’t all be rushing to get vaccines that not like traditional vaccines but are different. But we know what you are. We have your measure. You are anti-vaxxers. We vaguely hear you complain as if you have some substance to what you are saying, as if you are trying to appropriate science for your own benefit, to hide how anti-science you are. You will say that we are being actual guinea pigs, that these new types of vaccines are basically in a clinical trial right now and that humans globally are it. You will say they are closer to gene therapy, that this has never happened before on this scale, where people are so quick to take on something untested, that it’s fucking nuts, and we will laugh at you, at how gauche you are, at the way you hide behind things in order to keep your biases and your paranoias. We know Trumptards when we see them.
You will say, but don’t you see how power has been used in the past? Don’t you think we should be concerned that, at the time the level of corruption in the west globally is at its zenith, when a small group of extremely rich people have effectively taken over guiding us where they want us to go, that politicians are their puppets and that we are the product, that we should be worried about how we are being divided and conquered further? That the same class of people who poured oil into our oceans and sold all our jobs offshore and told us austerity is the only way, who lied to us countless times, been prosecuted in courts, who have bombed and sanctioned people in other countries for the sole crime of them not wanting to play the capitalist game, who disabled Indian children with polio, who cut everything up right in front of us and sold it off and murdered our souls so that we’re now dumb as a box of fucking spanners, that they are the people trying to sell us a future we should be fighting against. That the working class must renew its understanding of what it is and come together no matter which decrepit useless dead political party they are meant to be attached to, that all of this stuff that appeals to the middle classes, all this horizontal cleaning up without factoring in the vertical, is going to get us all killed?
And we will say to you depart from us, we never knew you, you trailer trash losers. We are not you, and we never were.
You will continue in your paranoia, in your pooh-poohing of anything good, any single glowing spark on the horizon. You will start talking about the children on their school marches and their plaited figurehead and how that’s all a front for the capitalists to rebrand themselves as green capitalists in order to keep their power and give us the illusion that we are heading in a direction that’s absolutely the best and only direction. TINA.
We just look at you and we shake our heads at your ignorance, at all the personal faults you all display in your insistence on ripping apart things, your insistence that it’s all coming from the same place and that that place does not have our best interests at heart because this is what happens when power congeals. We know you. We see you. We know you are a singularly lesser type of person. You’re the type who cannot own your own shit. You will not accept that all of this stuff going on in the world is the product of individual bad apples. It’s the bad apples who are causing all of this chaos and as long as we can pluck them from the tree, things will then begin to flourish once more.
We look at you and it feels like we are osmotically thinking together now, those of us who are responsible and emotionally mature. It is becoming clearer and clearer who our enemies are to progress. It is becoming clear that what you, and people like you, are doing, is a form of domestic terrorism.
We feel quite good about this conclusion we came to all on our own without anyone else’s suggestion. It feels like a good thing, to understand the blights in our path, those who are preventing our move forward, those naysayers who tell us green capitalism is bullshit. We wish to be free to begin purchasing our way with green products to our glorious future of renewable energy somehow maintaining our way of life. It makes us feel safer knowing that the old-fashioned, the silly, irrational people who will not own their culpability, their racism, their misogyny, are being shunted from social media. It makes us feel good thinking about mandatory vaccination. Force is good because people are stupid. Governmental force is necessary. It makes us feel good thinking about how good some of our governments were at locking us all down to keep us safe purchasing UberEats. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel a little bit more pure. Helps tamper down our fear. Helps us feel safe.