People fall so easily into the trap of feeling like they know things. Not necessarily everything. But they know things, and they want you to know that. Knowing those things is not important. Recognizing the other’s superiority is.
Now, I’d say I know things. I’d say there are certain highly influential consumerist traps and patterns in society that the majority of people are blind to. I just happened to be raised outside the Big Disney machine, so I guess I have the privilege of having less of my train of thought controlled by it. But the tendencies I have towards certain things come from the same place as the tendencies of people who gladly slurp convenience store sushi off of old Uncle Walt’s rotting corpse every day. We’re all human, and humans do weird things to make the right bells go off. We don’t know the picture by name.
Consider every ping as another step towards our individual version of ‘enlightenment’, to use a universally understood term—a step towards consciousness. A step towards awareness, towards greater understanding. Greater understanding of how the world works requires knowledge. But we hoard the knowledge we obtain. We convert it to a status symbol, because we see it as the only thing we have. We live in a Western world of abundance and general stability. When we take these stabilities for granted, we think we own nothing when we really have what many in other parts of the world—or even within our own country’s borders—would consider heaven.
Attaining consciousness requires suffering. But one cannot truly attain consciousness when the good is taken for granted. The generations that experienced World War II and Vietnam are slowly dying off. ‘Nam was the last time Americans utilized the draft, the last time Americans feared friends, family, and themselves being randomly plucked from the claw machine sprawl and stranded abroad to die…now wartime is something only baby killers partake in, despite the many pressures that lead many to enlist for a life plan. If we don’t need it or are told we don’t need it, anyone who engages is a subhuman and a toasty crisp. When my foot is blown off by a landmine I let out a cry and I see a man in crisp jeans who loves that I have gotten what I have asked for. I let out a wail, but he does not hear. He sees the headline about the silly human, the sad human, who got what she asked for. And because of that I am an ant. A cool ant, because I’m dead, and the only thing cooler than death is committing your life to dragged out suicide.
In a chaotic world humans seek stability, but only one kind of stability is uncool. The mind is a whirling vortex of neon lights flashing colors and sedation to black and white—that’s the good stability—keeps the color from bleeding and mingling. The black and white, names constantly changing and mutating, maul each other, unable to coexist but destined to in the name of endless warfare. They create holes in each other, which regenerate or are filled by the other side instantly, constantly exchanging punches. The world (or a thousand, or a hundred, or one) watches with binoculars on the outer edges of the coliseum. The show is a spectacle. The crowd roars.
No war but sex war.
