Double Time

The Psychological Goose Step

Full Metal Racket

Left
Left
Left Right Left
I don't know but I've been told
That down this road lies a pot of gold
All I see is a fucking cliff
A pile of bodies all working stiffs

As an Angel once told me
If only we would dance our way to death

I wrote the above some time back. Naturally, it has a military connotation but that is not what it is really about.

I see so many references these days to “left leaning lens” to “populist right” to whatever. It drives me nuts, but not that I blame anyone for it. It’s a guaranteed outcome growing up in the midst of society as it is currently constructed. I was once an ardent lefty Trotsky type in my salad days, so I can hardly chuck mud at anyone for it. On either side of that line, or in the middle, I hasten to add.

One of our system’s truly powerful abilities is the way it can take an idea or movement born in opposition to itself, subsume the idea, tame it and sell it back to the populace to further shore up the system’s hold on society. Often for profit. Those left holding the original version of the idea and the idea itself are then branded totally heretical and insane and the danger to the system is averted. These ready meal versions of radical ideas then become fault lines along which the system can engineer division amongst the “rabble”, and while we argue along these engineered fault lines, it carries on its thievery and outright thuggery with little scrutiny.

Are you on the left or the right?

I’m neither

So you’re a centrist then?

No, most definitely not.

Now, hold on, you must be something? What do you believe in politically?

Well, I believe politricks are way past their sell by date. I see a world where we are simply on the side of each other - where wars don’t exist, the hungry are fed, homeless are housed and there is no authoritative superstructure that rewards those in the gilded seats who are guaranteed corrupted to their very core. And there sure as shit aren’t any gilded seats. Just humanity acting with, well, humanity, empathy and understanding of our place within this wonderful journey.

Ah, so you’re an idealist?

It would certainly be ideal.

But our history has just been full of war, destruction and inequality, so how can your utopia ever possibly exist?

Well, now, hang on there a minute. We have certainly celebrated wars, highlighted them, put them in books, films, education and commemorate them regularly. The same with so called great, mainly European, civilisations like Greece, Rome etc - handily overlooking their use of slavery etc. But isn’t that just the Lottery trick? If the news about the lottery was consistently presented as “Today, several million people once again won nothing on the national lottery, whereas one lucky soul did”, numbers of participants would likely drop off rather sharply.

Now imagine history at school etc being a much more balanced view of “Billions have lived throughout history in peace, co-operating in a spirit of empathy with their fellow humans, despite being repeatedly told it’s dog eat dog and that this peacenik shit is naive nonsense. A handful of total and utter psychos also continued waging wars for reasons of position, access to resource and enrichment”. Extending that, imagine wars were not taught in terms of good guys versus bad guys either - no more this “We went and kicked the nazi ass because we represent Freedumb and Duhmocracy”, more the nuanced view of “We created the fertile conditions in which that lunatic’s powerful rhetoric took root, and his admiration for the enslavement of black people and use of concentration camps on the African continent gave him a ready made template of control to copy and develop. It all worked, honing a nation into a fairly unified slaughtering machine, and as a result, he and his nation became a threat to our longstanding position and wealth, so we figured we’d best go to war with him. We then found out he was counting genocide by the millions with ruthless efficiency.”

But if you don’t believe or participate in politics and vote etc, what gives you the right to criticise this system?

Let me think, oh, yeah. Being born, drawing breath and continuing to do so. The system isn’t life, it wasn’t forged out materials born in the cosmic nuclear fusion of stars. It’s a Role Playing Game gone fucking mental. It’s just bad idea atop bad idea manifested to the point that they infect every single facet of our lives and this gives them a sheen of being part of the fabric of the transcendent reality. But we existed for way longer without all of this horror than the horror itself has existed. Which isn’t to say we revert - that’s contrary to the ever changing reality going on outside the window, which never repeats, ever hurtling forwards towards the eventual end of the sun’s life supporting capabilities on earth. Yet we think we can corral that force into a repetitive, mundane, tick box existence in pursuit of paper and zeros, as if life needs entrance tickets. So, yeah, i don’t want to “fix” this system. I want to obliterate it and therefore I try to keep myself mentally as far outside it as possible. Sadly, that money to survive thing can only be fixed by collective understanding and action, so I, like you, need to swim in those systemic waters just to survive. A fact that causes all of us no end of stress and resultant sickness/idiocy/tomfoolery.

Doesn’t that mean we revert to the law of the jungle?

Er, what “law” is that? Is that what you see when you look at the jungle, or what you’ve been told to see when you look at the jungle? There are millions of symbiotic relationships and interdependencies in jungles. They are a bloody beautiful example of co-operation if you ask me, from which we could learn a lot. But no, we grow up taught to believe we’re the shit and totally and utterly separate from nature and all other life. A falsehood so obvious I for one find it hard to work out how we, as a collective, buy into it so much.

But we are different from all other species.

In some ways, yes indeed we are. But try surviving without air, water, food and a habitat that can sustain you for any length of time, you’ll soon find out we’re not that different. There are lots of species we are beginning to understand have unbelievable levels of intelligence that we’ve hitherto failed to appreciate, probably because, instead of looking at them, we were watching WWE Smackdown. And even with those differences, what right to dominate and totally fuck up other species do those differences give us?

Well, God gave us dominion over all creatures.

You know that how? Because some old book says so? Well, fuck me, why didn’t you say so? Thanks for being so investigative and thorough, I feel like a prize boob……

Look, here’s the truth. You and I are animals. We are part of this thing called life, which to me encompasses everything in the universe. The rocks are part of it, space dust is part of it etc. Everything plays its part in the reality that Earth and all of its inhabitants are here, together, on this voyage through the almighty cosmos. What a total and utter privilege. The sooner we ditch that dominion idea and get with the real that we are simply highly intelligent animals with huge capacity for collaboration, invention and empathy alongside violence and selfishness, the better. And given the choice between those two groups of characteristics, which would you choose?

Stop telling me what to think.

If I may politely suggest, perhaps just starting to think might be a good idea….?