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by Underground Panther in the Sky, Unknown News
March 10, 2006
Life is unpredictable. Even if you prepare and do the responsible things, reality can still fuck
you over. It can hit you upside the head with a curveball.
Reality is not
kind to most people. We can get sick, injured, some of us are born with flaws that
impair us, and we cannot guarantee that every conception will result in a
perfect child.
The body may look fine, but what if the kid is a sociopath, or
developmentally disabled, or just can't cope with stress? Whose fault is
that? The parents, the child himself? God? Who?
Why do we blame the victims for their pain? Why do we blame ourselves or
point fingers at the wounded, for the wounds this reality does to us all?
Nature or nurture, free will or not -- it hurts regardless of what you think
or what your values are. It's all crazymaking.
Every person in our consumer society has been systematically convinced
that we have to pay someone else to exist. We 'know', because we've been told, that if we cannot grow up to become
efficient, obedient workers we will get shut out of having a way to
pay for our existence, shut out by those who have plenty. So the fortunate, by
proxy, wish death upon the less fortunate of us.
Meanwhile, every day, sophisticated techniques of persuasion are invading
our senses begging us to buy stuff we don't need, mistaking wants for
real needs, and confusing the need for security and connection, love and
relaxation, with the drug of acquisition to soothe the savagely anxious
mind.
We are encouraged from the cradle to become addicted to
something -- anything. Certain forms of addiction are socially approved, as
ways to relieve this unresolvable stress of being one of so many million lives
of quiet desperation moving ever forward to death, coerced and suffering
in an untenable situation called "normal life." Other addictions are
taboo, and people do them until they die, like a rat pressing a lever to
get another hit of cocaine as he slowly starves to death. The rat doesn't feel a
thing.
Like the lab rats, we are born and we suffer and die. Sometimes there are pleasures mixed
in, but there is no way out of this equation without death. It's the
human condition, the curse of life is death. Some will numb it away until
they face death, and sometimes seeing death isn't enough to stop them
from killing themselves with their desired escape.
We do not have much of a say in our fate, really. We are either born fortunate or we are not. We can struggle against it, but sometimes the struggle wears us away and we end up exactly where we were trying to get away from. We don't control what kind of body or nation we are born in, or our
parents' income, our social status. Yet these things are with us our entire lives, good
or bad.
Some people play make believe and say they chose their own life, before
birth. That is a fantasy. I am not one to blame myself or anyone else
for a bad reality, and I did not create this shit -- nor did any other
person. No gods walk among us, even those who really believe they are god.
We try the best we can to "make it" as a cog in a system stacked against us,
a system stacked against the majority of humankind, a system that offers its opportunities only to a few born-lucky people, or to
people who marry into wealth. Some people have pleasure-filled lives of ease attainable, taking for granted things the rest of us dare not imagine for ourselves. Many try to taste it on the buy-now-pay-forever plan, credit cards,
getting suckered with predatory lending to live a day at usury rates
that border on debt slavery.
Yet we are taught to assume that the wealthy "earned it," that the wealthy
are not scamming us. We accept paltry paychecks and benefit cuts because
a crappy job pays the bills, and bills never stop coming as long as you
exist -- your nose so close to the grindstone you never have to look at
anything else.
Everything changes and is impermanent, perishable, uncertain, unstable, unpredictable. Ironically, death is the
only certainty in a sea of variabilities. The gate over Auschwitz says, "Arbeit macht
frei" (Work will make you free), but death is the only real
escape.
Do you drown those sorrows? Eventually the anesthesia buzz wears off,
and again you awaken with a hangover, again you find how hard it is to be
conscious of our existence as we struggle to exist. The piper has to be
paid.
So people go crazy and end up not coping. Some seem perfectly normal,
but with a cauldron of misery and rage under their nice smiles and
chit chat. People can so easily slip into denial about the human
condition, like an oil magnate so easily denies global warming exists.
Some say "think positive, pull out those motivational posters, grab those
bootstraps and yank, and try to use the power
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Some people have pleasure-filled lives of ease attainable, taking for granted things the rest of us dare not imagine for ourselves.
Many try to taste it on the buy-now-pay-forever plan, credit cards, getting suckered with predatory lending to live a day at usury rates that border on debt slavery.
Yet we are taught to assume that the wealthy "earned it," that the wealthy are not scamming us.
We accept paltry paychecks and benefit cuts because a crappy job pays the bills, and bills never stop coming as long as you exist -- your nose so close to the grindstone you never have to look at anything else.
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Underground Panther in the Sky
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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of optimism and "free will"
to keep ourselves going." Keep punching the clock, keep saving for a
rainy day. Ever forward, ever stagnant ... ever dying, for want of a life.
And we fall in line despite ourselves. So many dreams are denied us from
childhood, dreams of being
an inventor, or traveling to strange places. Instead we learn to stay
locked in our imaginations un-lived, because who could afford that on
minimum wage, and anyway you're too old to go to medical school.
Some of us can let the dreams go and
find others that are smaller, substitutes. Others stay in the mind acting
as fantasy security blankets, safe places to hide our ego, away from the
pain of what is. Others get bitter because their dreams turned so sour and
their lives so fallow and they can't shake the malaise and so they
blame you. Others were so traumatized by existence they never had a
chance to entertain their own imaginations without the pain or
intrusion of what is. Death resides in the corners of their
eyes, and the tears never wash the blackness out.
For so many people, life in America feels like slow death. Suicide rates
are high, as are addiction and homicide. Why is that? People don't want
an answer, they want a solution.
Domination is cruel, blind, capricious comfort to the frail ego when
life is a curse to live through in times like these.
When you prospective parents get the big idea you want to bring a child
into a world like this, are you sure the child would want to be here just
because you can tolerate it? Ask yourselves, would your kid ever know
how to find happiness if you can't even find it in yourself first? Your
happiness -- isn't that a horrible burden to place on a child?
Life and its travails tramples the joys out of existence one by one as
you get older. How long must this go on, how long shall humanity suffer
themselves? Maybe it is time to let go of the cherished idea of control,
the idea we can regulate the "out there" with our mighty egotistical
wills and we can whine as we self righteously carry the world upon our
backs like some melodramatic Atlas bearing the terrible weight of
freedom that is not truly free except in our scariest dreams.| |
The Post-Copernican Double Bind:
We have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and
insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian
dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject
confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with
these compounded by the post-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible
means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence.
We are evolved from, embedded in, and defined by a reality that is
radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly
contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form
or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence
of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual
predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our
scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential
situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for
meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the
universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to
that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are
at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is
inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
Hegel suggested, a civilization cannot become conscious of itself,
cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is
approaching its own death." | |
And so the Archetypes in the soul of the world heard us begging to make
us die. They made their move, drawing the sword of Damocles to cut the
cord.
American civilization falters at the hands of a scared boy king
tyrant, and the constitution is in its death throes as each freedom is
killed off by the itty bitty most fortunate ones' committee. And those
of us who are awake see death stalking as the iron band is fitted to the
masses.
Talking heads are still talking about
the fluff faraway, while in this existential hell we suffer, being
bound to the ones of us not mature enough or not human enough to look death
right in the face and see ourselves looking out from that mantle.
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The
national will is a refusal to grow up, and give up possession of this world.
We will be free ... or
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we will kill ourselves out of the longing for what
we could not let go ...
And if we crap out now, death takes all.
Agent Smith:
Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why? Why do you do it? Why? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know?
Is it freedom, or truth, perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception, temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself. Although... Only a human mind can invent something as insipid as love.
You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can't win, it is pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?
Neo:
Because I choose to. Because I choose to ... It's all I have in this moment or any other. It's all any of us have. A series of moments of decision that over time add up to an unexplainable, irrational persistence.
© by the author.
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