Selfish and self-centered people only make the rules and run the world when fear prevails. On a long enough timeline, fear will always lose to love and understanding because it’s fragile in ways reason and empathy are not. It can get exhausting trying to articulate this to those whose lives are girded and underscored by the accumulation of power and safety within the constricts of fear and clear-cut delineation on the order of all things. Fear is to love what weather is to the climate.
Self-interest and cultural governance must eternally and vociferously espouse and champion its ephemeral and percussively unquenchable thirst for control in stochastic fits of internal and external manipulation. Its intrinsic appeal lies primarily though not exclusively in its ostentatious ferocity. It’s an attempt at balancing the saddle atop the back of a perpetually starving dragon. It’s the proud and vigorous hand that bites at and makes pretense of being the same dragon which it pathologically cannot resist feeding. It’s the hole at the end of human civilization that shimmers and shines as it exhorts the endless, cancerous accumulation of its own snake oil brands of superficial power and safety. It takes no great strength or wisdom to be afraid.
Love, for all its ineffable grace, wisdom, and beauty can be so much more difficult to encapsulate. Yet it cannot be so easily dimmed and is impervious to extinction. It carries itself in deep, abiding, quiet strength amid life’s greatest tempests. It’s often the whisper upon the wind in the wake of fear and anxiety’s conquests. It is on some level at once everywhere and all the time. Its counterpart in fear has its rallies but love is the throne upon which those passing flickers all sit. Love and all its consequential reason and understanding are the seat of creation. Fear is nothing without love yet love on its own is everything.
To embrace fear as a virtue is to sip the psychic poison of the power to which it can only ever be a pretender. We occupy a time in which power by way of fear and division has been at the head of the table of human civilization for so long that to notice or elaborate on it is often called out by its defensive beneficiaries as paranoid. The only planet we can currently inhabit is now noticeably quickening in its death- at least as regards its habitability. And by the unambiguous numbers most human beings living on it are now struggling to endure. Even in the (financially) richest country in the world, most adults and young adults by volume are reacting to the reality of this economic situation. But that’s just it: it’s not real. Or at least it doesn’t need to be. It’s an economic, not a material conflict. It’s on the final frontier of human struggle in necessity that reason and understanding have been slowly and quietly gaining victory in their momentum.
An increasingly unignorable majority of people are various degrees of being physically and mentally over compulsory participation in a system which requires extinction on all its horizons to perpetuate itself. A global society built on the virtue of celebrating ego, steeped in superficial struggle rendered all too grimly real and consequential, demarcated by equally imaginary measures of power, avariciously consuming and destroying the material reality it inhabits like a tantrum wielding cosmic teenager. They are, as a consequence of their collective subjugation, reacting to fear’s presence and power at the table with a greater abundance of communal knowledge and wisdom. They are becoming the manifest growing momentum of the power of love, and deeper understanding.
One of my more interesting friends in the navy, Reggie, and I spent some time during our earlier years of enlistment casually studying Wing Tsun. Reggie- a self-avowed old-school punk psychonaut from the coastal American south once expressed to me once that he had the inclination to believe that ancient martial arts must’ve been formulated by sages quietly studying other animals in nature over long periods of time. Mastering the art of harmonic choreography of life all around us. Becoming instruments of raw beauty and strength through wisdom, insight, and discipline.
If you look carefully around, and you know what you’re looking for, you’ll see examples of love acting- slowly and quietly- as a remedial student of the abundant fears and anxieties of our times.
In the first few drafts of this post, I kept writing what would inevitably flatline into being a dry, academic, inter-generational polemic. Where I firmed up its voice was in thinking, or rather feeling, the vitally restorative and sustaining forces of love.
Much to the chagrin of the historically enduring seats of power (largely via fear, conflict, and division), all manners of greater collective consciousness have begun to emerge. From the millions-strong movement in places like AntiWork social media forums, to movements like Bai Lan in Asia, and the Great Resignation or Quiet Quitting throughout the west. What some authority figures and beneficiaries of the rapidly declining, and chronologically aging old guard decry as the deterioration of their way’s former glory can instead be reframed as a sort of critically necessary major inversion in ontological reasoning.
Riding the crest of the burgeoning dawn of information technology, we collectively know more than any other group of humans has ever known. We communicate at unprecedented scales and in historically unimaginable volumes. Greater knowledge, awareness, and empathy among differing civilizational cohorts abound, toward an increasing abandonment of top-down hierarchical reasoning in favor of a more reflexively bottom-up approach to the conducting of what might remedially become of our society if it’s to endure (and dare even to thrive). It’s an explosive profusion of radical ideation that mirrors so much of the reality we’ve always, as thinking and feeling beings, inhabited. It’s a heartfelt middle finger to the call and response of a withering system which has left its successors out in its wake to expire. The dragon has begun in its throes to eat itself, and we now possess the scope of vision to observe it holistically. Love through greater understanding, however diminished or resisted by the dragon’s presence, endures and rebounds.
In 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮, author Mark Fisher defines its titular concept as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is not possible to even 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 a coherent alternative to it.” He goes on to explain that “The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.”
To the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free- the wretched refuse of the dragon’s teeming shore, embracing such an ideology isn’t wholly unlike trying to ride a bicycle with iron rods jammed slantways through its spokes. Having been tossed off of it and injured repeatedly- and then ongoingly being admonished and patronized for necessarily setting the bicycle aside in acts of self-preservation can sometimes be maddening. Especially when through the communal lens of greater awareness and understanding the dragon is laid bare. The emperor has no clothes, and we’re living beneath the vaunted roof of its castle made of sand.
The very real monsters of our time don’t bear fangs, they come with flow charts. And they don’t lurk in caves or in forests, but rather dance hedonistically atop the ivory ramparts of their kitsch gilded philosophy. The strength we’re all realizing that’s needed to build the new world lies in the weakness of the old one. As Antonio Gramsci observed: “Now is the time of monsters.” And the dragon slayer is collective love, reason, and understanding.
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Sometimes when I wake up at night, or just before I fall asleep, or my very first thoughts in the early dawn will be about how for most of my existence everything has had to be a calculated survival of inherent decline for want of power to do or realize anything I need or to which I aspire. The older I become; the more time seems to incessantly ramp up in its velocity. Repetition and routine, while it can lend a sort of anesthetic familiarity, is one of the primary accelerants of this kind of cycle.
Within my heart and my mind lies an eternal longing for adventure and discovery, but everything- everything- is bound up and withheld by the constricts of fucking money. And it isn’t some longing for obscene wealth. I just wanna live beyond the shadow of the omnipresent anxiety of living at austerity’s borders. And the more I live (to whatever degrees I manage) the more I become aware of my unsurprising deficit of singularity in this reasoning.
I see this most abundantly in the love I share with my husband. Sometimes I lie awake and stroke his hair and rub his weary shoulders and think of how brilliant he is, and who and what he might be if we lived in a more civilized place. Where instead we’re stuck here, because going anywhere else in any meaningful way is always somehow impossibly expensive. In my now decades long pursuit of the mythic accomplishment of financial success within the alleged meritocracy we inhabit- I’ve only just glanced fleeting, rarified examples of such mechanisms in action.
And the sharks of better fortune, those from different times and places, or where different circumstances and values elevated them to attain such freedoms will no doubt balk at what it is that I’m saying. But every single bit of wage labor, even the best examples of such things, has always been an excursion into ritual self-abuse and annihilation. The pathological worship of surrender and sacrifice to the elimination of irreplaceable time in exchange for tchotchkes and tacky creature comforts to assuage your withering soul has never smacked of the same kind of inspiration it seems to have lent its more fervent beneficiaries.
I’m not a rat. And I refuse to see life as a race. If it will be the death of me, that’s just the price I’m going to have to pay. I refuse, in fact I willfully resist complicity in any society within which unqualified kindness is viewed as a weakness. Where competition and selfishness are the primary modes of engagement with other human beings all living their own versions of the same stories that I experience. A better world is possible.
We’re strongest when we work together. We’re social animals, and it’s what makes us formidable on the cosmic scale of our existence. An empire founded upon and elevated through the tearing down or exploitation of one another leads precisely to the kind of hell world we’re all so consequentially inhabiting.
No one person alone splits the atom. It’s been collaborative insight and power that has wrought everything we herald as our collective ingenuity and enlightenment. But that often stutters and is more frequently outright stifled within systems of self-governance predicated on materially necessitated, unnatural levels of superficially competitive self-interest. How many Einstein’s and Picasso’s have lived and died in fields and in sweatshops? Martin Luther King, Jr. (just one of infinite such examples) was killed by the FBI while fighting for a union.
[I’m well aware in writing this, because of our expanded contemporary sphere of knowledge and awareness, that many of them while oft cited as noble exemplars are also complicated figures.]
“(Capital) has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
If all your thought and effort must be expended in survival and subsequent insulation from the brutal base reality of the game you’re playing- maybe, it’s not the best way to do things. What a ludicrous observation, I know. How very unrealistic of me. As I’ve pointed out in previous entries, so much of the conflict we all fight to avoid is empirically make-believe propaganda. If you bother to investigate in the slightest.
I know it can be difficult to see if you haven’t personally experienced it, or if you’ve spent any measure of time significantly materially removed from it. At the end of the day, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐬𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐨𝐟. I don’t say this as any kind of self-righteous admonition. I’m not exempted from this sometimes markedly difficult practice.
When we remove the necessity for self-experienced suffering or conflict to better learn the answer or understand other people’s experiences of it- we begin to be able to build a more holistic navigation of its resolutions. And that’s what, by way of knowledge sharing and communication, people have increasingly begun to do.
The fatal flaw in the high tide of greed’s culmination is that when give everyone else but yourself nothing to lose, they stand everything to gain. And the world, for better or worse (it remains to be seen) is gradually awakening. I throw all the weight of my being behind the side of love.