Category: politics

Digging to China: Utopias Always Become Nightmares

 

One of my favorite Johnny Cash songs is his cover of Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.”  The refrain goes like this:

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money,
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind.

It’s very country and it rests on the country music genre cliché of human relationships being more valuable than wealth, status, and power.  It also makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory,” from Sounds of Silence, which was the first time I encountered the idea in music outside my uncle’s self-produced country albums.  Richard Cory has everything, then shoots himself, yet the impoverished speaker in the song continues to envy him.  They’re both good songs.  They both carry a timeworn message in popular music: money can’t buy love.

Still, as a cynical friend of mine has pointed out more than once, it may be true that money can’t buy love, but it can buy travel, leisure, interesting rich-person adventures (vs. the poor-person variety), politeness, serenity, entertainment, granite countertops, educational opportunities, good food, access to the gifted and fascinating, and quality healthcare, which in the aggregate starts to look a lot like love.  Love of the world.  Love of life.  Love of fate.  Amor fati.

It’s easy to love what your life has become when you can do things your way.  Oh Allfather Zod, I don’t often pray to you (because why?  I have a shit ton of money), but I’m here at your subterranean temple of fire and perdition on Zodsday, just like last year, to recite my only prayer: DON’T CHANGE A THING.  Amor fati, you know?  I’m good.  You do you.

The rest of us will have to sacrifice two blocks of insect-soy protein at the altar of the Allfather on a regular basis or our paranoid, sadistic deity will smite us.  We may ask ourselves why the Sam Bankman-Frieds, Martin Shkrelis, and Anna Sorokins of the world have millions (ostensibly there are many, or at least some, of these individuals who have not yet been indicted), while we labor in Zod’s gulag, but that’s asking the wrong question.

The real question is whether we are about to own nothing and be happy, which is to say, whether we are authentically mentally ill (as opposed to performatively “mentally ill” as part of a curated online identity).  Think of Elon Musk declaring that he was just going to live with friends for the rest of his life instead of owning houses—because friends are the spice of life, no?  I wonder what sort of friends Elon has.  Sure, take the fifth wing.  Yeah, kitty-corner from the spaceport and the athletic complex.  Stay as long as you like!

Amor fati, brother, amor fati.

If the definition of mental illness is, to a certain extent, mediated by culture and indicated by transgressions that show deviant behavior (i.e. behavior that indicates deviation from cultural norms), then Elon’s version of owning nothing might qualify.  Klaus Schwab’s utopian vision of the post-pandemic “Great Reset,” in which every human culture, corporation, nation, and industry must immediately “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions” likely also qualifies.

                                           Klaus Schwab, at the World Economic Forum, envisioning utopia.

We might ask why utopian visionaries, who seem to know the truth and have a final solution worked out for the world, always end up as Robespierres.  Moreover, why do social movements dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” tend to devolve into bitter gestures of intolerance, over-compensatory bias, and exclusion?  Well, money.  It’s the economy, stupid.  And pandemic dread really seemed to fuel that sort of white-knuckle utopianism.  It goes without saying that any future vision according to a tight group of political and economic experts will not stay very bright.

Utopia nearly always leads to the dys– version. Utopian visions born out of pandemics and other global traumas seem the worst.  As the British sci-fi roleplaying game, Carbon 2185, put it: “Carbon 2185 has a highly detailed economy with reference tables and charts to help you instantly know how much a bowl of street ramen costs.”  I tried playing this game by post with some friends during the pandemic and we gave up.  According to the rules, a bowl of street ramen cost more than my monthly take-home and we had to rent all our guns.  I’ll pass on the ramen, thanks.  Bring on the insect-soy.  It was depressing.  Someone proposed D&D instead.  Someone said, “Fuck that.”  We didn’t talk for a bit.

 

Why lean into cyberpunk dystopia when talking about the future?  Why put a frame of Max, from Elysium, visiting his parole-officer bot, who asks, “Are you being sarcastic and / or abusive?” at the top of this piece?  Why call it, “Digging to China”?  Am I implying that, in the Monbiot-Thunbergian horseshoe irony of the post-pandemic near future, we will be eating processed insects and living in the pods of a grubby rental economy, where the CCP and the USA have arrived at the same socio-economic terminal?  Am I now going to start referencing the episodes of Black Mirror that made me the most depressed because they seemed the most likely?  Am I committing tone crimes and microaggressions in this paragraph?  I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’ll propose that there has never been a better time to stop monetizing your hobbies (or your art or your body).  The impetus for such a proposition comes from Colleen Doran’s excellent, “How Long Does it Take to Draw a Comic Book Page?” on Colleen Doran’s Funny Business.  I love Colleen Doran’s newsletter.  She’s a wise professional who’s been around long enough in her industry to have a few things to say about creativity, money, and staying sane.

At the same time, the way she tracks her time (“I tried to stick to an eight hour day for awhile, but it is impossible for a working cartoonist to work only 8 hours per day.”) reminded me of how I’ve been tracking my fiction words-per-day and how stressed I’ve felt (for decades) about staying productive.  Where does this stress come from?  From the same economic imagination that envisions being priced out of a bowl of street ramen.  From illusions like “upskilling” which seems to borrow logic from the old trickle-down economics that clearly worked so well.  And the self-publishing option is no consolation for a working writer.  You have to grind.  You have to write more or nothing works. You have to monetize everything and keep a straight face. No sarcasm permitted.

Yes, there have been some slot-machine winners in the self-publishing game (read their work and the slot-machine metaphor will begin to make a lot of sense).  There have also been slot-machine winners in social media influencing, self-managed parasocial porn sites, and various forms of crowdfunding.  And I have no doubt that some of it is good (Chuck Wendig’s writing comes to mind along with the band, Scary Pockets—no comment on OnlyFans and its clones).  But mostly people seem to have been lured, at least for a while, into another self-exploitation gulag.

The self-publishing platform (Amazon, Lulu, etc.) now stands in the place of a traditional publisher, only with non-existent gatekeeping.  Sure, buddy, you’re an author now.  Good luck with that . . . another utopian vision gone westward to seek its fortune while the company takes its cut.

As a writer, you will eventually eat the bugs.  You will own nothing.  You will labor to pay rents to monolithic inhuman organizations with AI customer service—economic entities that conflate sarcasm with abuse and practice zero tolerance toward any microaggression that may question their mission statements.  You will prostitute yourself from your temporary pod.  And you will be happy.

I’ve learned a lot about how my body and mind get monetized by scrupulously tracking time spent working on various projects.  I think Colleen Doran and my many creative friends are right to pay attention to how they’re spending their days.  But I also think, absent a trust fund, time and grind eventually converge violently in you.  The personal sacrifices, the mental illnesses, the continual self-betrayals in the interests of time, money, and productivity point more to the cruel altar of Allfather Zod than to some glorious worker’s paradise.

War is a Failure of Imagination

I’ve been reading St. Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle, not because I’m a Catholic but because I’m always looking for perspectives on how to lead a meaningful life. She was a mystic with a lot to say on the subject and she had a lively mind. She didn’t put it exactly this way, but reading her book gave rise to one of my own, perennial themes: if there is no eternal soul, physical existence is merely a brief, trivial moment in time. If there is an eternal soul, physical existence is still merely a brief, trivial moment in time.

In other words, whether part of us lives forever or all of us dies tomorrow, whether the most meaningful emphasis falls on “this life only” or on “life after death,” makes little difference to the fact that we’re here right now and have to lead our small lives, such as they are. Earthly life will be relatively short, either way. So it should mean something in itself, as itself.

Of course, St. Teresa believed in an immortal soul, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. But we don’t have to believe in all those things to see the wisdom here. The question that arises is far older than the Catholic Church of St. Teresa: “How do you want to spend your brief time on earth?” which is another form of “What is good?”

It’s a useful thing to ask, whether you’re a postmodern reductive materialist, a 16th century Christian mystic, or somewhere between those extremes. Maybe it’s the ultimate question one could ever ask. And for most of us, the answer will be personal. The good life for me may not be (probably shouldn’t be) the good life for you. Conversely, most of us will agree that certain life experiences are definitely not good and to be avoided whenever possible.

We may agree more on what we want to avoid. That might be due to some shared Pleasure-Principal bias—avoiding pain usually seems more compelling than seeking pleasure. But it could also be that there are simply more things we’d commonly like to escape than experience as a members of the same species. War is undoubtedly one of those things. 

Adrienne Rich described war as a failure of imagination: “War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.” It’s the failure to imagine and pursue better options. And there are always better options.

War seems like an extreme form of cultural and psychological dysfunction, one of the foremost things people would like to miss, along with terminal illness, poverty, public disgrace, imprisonment, and loss of career. Yet all these things exist and are experienced by large numbers of people every day. There is always someone at war, just as there is always someone dying or becoming destitute or being put behind bars. We just hope it isn’t us.

Inevitably, sometimes it is—probably through no fault of our own. There is the stereotype of the naïve youth, who enlists out of idealism, because he thinks war will be heroic and exciting, or because he wants to prove himself. Still, the vast majority of people aren’t that daft. Most of us carry a deep instinctual knowledge that armed conflict is bad for one’s health and that the promises governments make when sending you to war become rather empty when you catch a bullet.

But let’s also try to be as honest as we can be: sometimes you have to go to war. That’s when it’s particularly tragic—when someone else’s failure of imagination means you have no choice, when your country is being invaded, when it’s a fight for survival. That’s how it seems to be in the Ukraine right now. Putin has said the Ukrainian citizenry won’t be harmed, but don’t you believe it.  He is not a world leader known for honesty.

Aside from the inevitable collateral damage and death that comes standard with explosions and chunks of metal being shot through the air, there’s the rumour of political kill lists and the Russian army’s need to suppress (essentially to hold hostage) an unwilling Ukrainian population. There will be domestic insurgency. There will be terrorist acts and guerrilla warfare. There will be disappearances and injustices and crimes against humanity. Sadly, these are the unavoidable adjuncts to acts of military conquest.  They are part of its grand failure, the slow-rolling catastrophe that always characterizes war.

No one in the world is buying what Putin’s selling. He’s chosen a Hitlerian Anschluss, the annexation of a sovereign democratic state under false pretenses.  It will become a legacy of self-destruction for him and a cause of lasting suffering for his own people as well.  Putin will never be free of the infamy that comes from playing the brutal adventurer.  And the world will despise him for it forever.

Reading the News with a Gelid Eye

 
Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That’s the first thing they teach you.
Vincent: Who taught you?
Sam: I don’t remember. That’s the second thing they teach you.
— Ronin (1998)

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what? For all intents and purposes, it’s a duck. Constructively, it should be treated like one. We don’t have to ask if something’s really going on or if someone’s really behaving a certain way or if some horrific event is really happening according to plan and it’s all fine so just relax. We don’t have to probe for sincerity and reasonability. We only have to accept one truth: people hide, lie, and attempt to cover their horrific mistakes.

The truth gets obscured behind spin. Sometimes, people get killed. Sometimes, they disappear. Sometimes, Jimmy Hoffa gets buried under the 18th hole of a Florida golf course. It comes out years later, but by then, everybody just shrugs. Some things are so well concealed that we’ll never figure them out. And sometimes it’s better not to know.

We don’t have to waste time and energy speculating and trying to sift truth from falsity. All we have to do is look at intended and actual outcomes. If your partner comes home smelling like a strange cologne, you don’t have to ask whether she’s cheating or whether some bizarre twist of fate led to her getting sprayed with random eau de toilette on her way to the metro. You only need to note the instance and keep your eyes (and nostrils) open. If it happens a second time, it’s a case of “fool me twice, shame on me.” But let’s be honest: you already knew from the beginning.

It’s the same with political events. If it looks like someone’s lying or prevaricating or taking some other sort of evasive action, you don’t need to engage with the reasonability of their countermeasures. You only need to ask two questions: what does it look like on the surface? And who stands to benefit? Note the instance. Keep your eyes (and nostrils) open.

If you do this, fake news has no power over you. Fake news is momentary lying and you don’t care about the lies of the moment. You only care about what you see over and over, which fake news cannot affect as easily or as consistently. Note that the accusation of “Fake news!” is also a form of media gaslighting and damage control. Whenever you notice people screaming that, look at them more critically than before.

But we don’t need to dwell on the concept of fake news. We only need “news” and a bit of critical thinking. Here’s an example from the Vietnam era (since Saigon just fell all over again): “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” a statement most commonly attributed to journalist, Peter Arnett.

  • What you should take away from this statement: the village is (probably) destroyed.
  • What you should disregard: “We had to” (abdication of responsibility for the decision) and “in order to save it” (moral justification).

Responsibility shifting and self-justification on moral grounds are classic rhetorical countermeasures when large groups of people have been or stand to be murdered for the sake of someone’s re-election strategy or financial profile.

Don’t you believe it. Read the news, but read for that nugget of information embedded in the spin. Just remember: ask what it looks like on the surface and ask who stands to benefit from it. Then disregard everything but what might be the facts. You don’t have to be a detective. You merely have to see the duck flapping away.