This War of Every Man Against Every Man

I have a past, like everyone else. I know that might come as a shock to some of you whom I've taken all this time to convince that this blog isn't a procedurally generated string of symbols and syllables conjured up, ordered and presented by a prototype artificial intelligence over-endowed with vocabulary unchecked by anything as mundanely human as editorial restraint. What, did you think those paragraph-long single sentences unburdened by punctuation or thematic coherence were the result of a fully formed human intelligence? We here at the lab wish. We've been feeding it Faulkner and Joyce and Pynchon and Tolstoy in order to boost the base-level of intelligence. After a full decade plugging away, as you can see, we've got it about up to the level of a really pretentious starfish.

If you were fooled, hooray for us I guess. We can't really call it a Turing test since you're not actually interacting.* We're glad you're here, but if you really thought this was the way humans communicate, we'd really encourage you to shut this off and maybe get outside a bit more. We appreciate the support, but you're making everyone here sad.

No no, for the purposes of this ongoing exercise, I'm a real, actual adult human male, with readable, understandable history of survival, overcoming, banal mundanity, triumph and loss, love and television. I've eaten as many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as the next guy. The trick of experience is to understand not what it tells us or how it shapes us, but what the point of it is. Experience as an aggregation of events is a useless jumble of noise, disconnected vignettes that defy understanding beyond the occasional flashes of color and music. Basically like any of a dozen mid-to-late-90s post-Pulp Fiction films that decided that the trick to aping Tarantino was by jumbling up the continuity of their story telling and jamming in obscure 1970s Top 40 hits. The result is frightening, tedious, confusing, disappointing and, depending on how frantic the editing is, likely to cause seizures.

Every once in a while, it would do to step back a bit and try to slap a dull latex gloss of perspective on the whole stupid thing. Sure, it's the imposition of narrative in a life and a universe that presents and violently insists on presenting as chaos, so the root of it is delusion and bullshit, but come on. We're human beings. In the midst of centuries of privation and disease and miserable death, we build things like cathedrals. It's the bullshit that makes us people. Lump enough events together with the right kind of gap-spackling bullshit of the right consistency and you get to call it wisdom. Earned, deep, edifying wisdom. It's sounds like a trick, but it's the thing that separates us from the starfish.

I'm beginning to think, however, that wisdom and age aren't necessarily linked. Right now people are living longer and longer, which is tied intimately to the reality that we as humans (as a general, statistical whole) are living better and better, likely with the highest standard of living in the history of all human life, if not life full stop. This is especially true for those of us in the west, currently on a progress streak (with its attendant consequences, sure) stretching back at least 200, maybe as many as 500 years depending on how you want to measure it. Sure the Reformation unleashed a whole nother level of barbarity and darkness, but it also gave us literacy on a level previously unimagined, which turned out to be a good thing aaaaaall the way up until Facebook. I guess every idea has its logical limit.

We don't struggle for food or shelter, at least not in the existentially precarious way whole populations of humans used to have to. For most of us with full bellies and un-torn clothes, the Hobbesian threat-memory of a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short is a sophist's fantasy safely un-remembered by never risking exposure to the idea. Social philosophy is for nerds and queers and abortionists and SJWs. Literacy is great, but reading will only get you into trouble. That's how people become Democrats.

Our success as a species has pushed us into this odd space where we've lost the sort of Jungian objective psyche by disconnecting us from the immediacy of an actual threat. As the culture fractally splinters into more and more compartmentalized segments, the idea of the whole fades into the tangle of self-constructed reality strands. But the need for a motivating danger to give the struggle (such as it is) a shape and meaning, however false, lingers.

And that, I'm pretty sure, how you get QAnon dipshits getting a Northern California Earth Day picnic cancelled. Literally the most innocuous event I can think of, where the worst case scenario threat to public safety is potato salad diarrhea, was cancelled because a totally made-up public safety threat from non-existent jihadists turned into an actual public safety threat from the people self-deputized to protect the event from nothing. Because some reddit fucker "decoded" a James Comey tweet. Seriously, click the link and read the story. It's fucking amazing. I want to be mad at the school and the families for buckling to this, but the thought of these conspiracy monsters showing up armed to "protect" me and my family is so blood-chilling I'm practically hypothermic.

Am I being hyperbolic? I don't know, they already shot up and tried to burn down a pizza place with no basement because they were sure the basement was the center of a child trafficking ring. Some other non-threatened assholes have made up a threat from vaccines that has resulted in actual disease outbreaks. And hysteria about illegal border crossings has resulted directly in a bunch of illegality at the border by the people self-appointed to stop the illegal border crossings.

Sometimes I miss the Cold War I guess is what I'm saying. Sure, there was the constant threat of impending nuclear annihilation, but at least we all had a thing to be actually afraid of, to sharpen the senses and dull the edges of the borders between our internal communities. Maybe we need a Bran Stark Three-Eyed Raven to come along and the memory of the world, but you know what, at some point some horned ice zombie motherfucker would just show up determined to frag him anyway. Because if there's anything Americans hate, it's a smug, crippled know-it-all.

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*there is a comment section, you guys!