by achrilock
Forget all that schoolbook nonsense for a sec. I been watching this thing work in real time since Gulf War I. It’s stupid to call it democracy. The oligarchs pick a couple people, cut from the same neoliberal cloth. One’s an asshole, one’s a secret asshole. Red votes asshole, blue votes secret asshole. Then, in every single administration, like three guys sit in the White House and circle jerk history into rubble. Every time. There’s no ‘us.’ We didn’t shit all over international law. They did.
Eminem – Houdini
It is taboo to say, even in leftist circles, but if you believe in an all-powerful imaginary friend from which all goodness and authority derive, you suffer from a fundamental core error of cognition and moral judgment. You’ve the obedience-oriented mind of a child, minus the questioning and pressing of boundaries. You are an unreliable social partner, because that friend is imaginary, and it is simply other people who pull the strings and make that giant puppet move within your psyche.
So far as we know, humans are the only game in town. Probably others out there among the stars, just as there are others here on Earth that we are starting to recognize as more similar than different, but for now, everything that happens or that has happened is either down to chance or to the actions of other human beings. Everything you’ve ever heard about your imaginary friend was said by other humans, everything you’ve ever felt came from inside yourself. We made it all up.
If there is a divine will to the universe, it is unknowable. And in the unlikely event that there is some ‘plan’ it is equally unlikely that it is a moral or ethical one behind which humans should place their unquestioning support. Most gods are genocidal monsters for a reason, because they were conjured up by humans, by genocidal monsters. Gods demand absolute obedience for the same reason. God is a kind of shortcut for power through your defenses, a cop that lives in you, that they control.
You can accept someone’s rights as a living thing without internalizing their psychopathology. What we define as progress should be a project of dismissing the childish fantasies of all-powerful beings who take a specific interest in what we read or whether we touch ourselves at night. The project of human progress should be one, not of discarding ethics or morality in favor of cold reason, but of building people who posses these admirable qualities without the need for cosmic fictions.
We should be creating real angels, not worshiping pretend ones. We should be working, individually and collectively, to ensure that this life is pleasant and just, not making up stories about another one. A corpse feels no joy, no pain. It is simply the nothingness that was before you awakened to consciousness. What happens between the bookends of birth and death, and what we do in relation to other living things within that time span, is all that matters, all that should matter.
Honestly, anymore, I wake up and I think to myself ‘you know what, self, I haven’t killed any children in Israel, in Palestine, in Europe. Not once have I embarked on militaristic land grabs or ethnic cleansing campaigns or done a terrorism or engaged in war profiteering.’ And, after feeling a certain self-satisfaction at meeting this very low standard of behavior, I feel a profound sense of relief in that, despite the uncivilized nature of what we call civilization, that’s not on my conscience.
It’s telling that the people who control the laws, who preach nonviolence, are also the one group of people for whom there are no consequences for mass murder, what we call war. It is also very telling that they have turned it into a profitable business enterprise or an amoral political game. War is a relic, people. We can’t afford it, morally, environmentally, economically. It’s time to grow the fuck up. War, genocide, mass murder, these things belong in fiction and history, not our headlines.