Anonymity and Conformity
Why are we blind to happiness, and why are we so self-destructive?
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“Everything we see hides something else we want to see.”
— René Magritte
Or maybe something we don’t want to see.
Children are pure at birth, unspoiled vessels of potential, without bias and innocently, inherently creative. Soon after, the process of narrowing their potential begins, with both benign intent to protect them from the world, and from the limitations placed on them through us, as we, too, were often raised wittingly or unwittingly from wounds and limitations of others carried forward. Our early uninhibited imagination of what’s possible is suffocated in a drive to conformity of what is deemed socially acceptable.
When my sister was in kindergarten, she often came home speaking of her friend Sandra, with whom she loved playing. It wasn’t until an open house night for parents that it dawned on her Sandra was black (my family is white). When she met Sandra’s parents, big people, it startled her. That’s how nonjudgmental the mind of a child is. All division and hatred is taught.
Poisoned minds create a poisoned world. In a recent study not yet peer-reviewed, but with precedence from previous study, it was found plastic now occupies five percent of our brain tissue. Micro and nanoplastic defined as fragments 500 micrometers in diameter down to one nanometer were found at higher levels than in even our livers and kidneys. Compared to samples taken in 2016, just eight years ago, plastic in our brains is now 50 percent higher.
Plastic in our brains is a physical manifestation of contempt. Wealth gained from the knowing harm of others is a sociopathic disorder. Many sociopaths rise to positions of power.
Creatives — artists and writers tend to be observers and critics of power, (at least many of the best ones), and their creativity can be seen as a threat in a world that demands conformity. Creativity is continually harnessed, driven into supporting the status quo. Although there needs to be agreement for functional societies, when that agreement is defined by sociopathic people and behavior encouraged as goals and even enshrined in law, society ceases to be healthy. That begs the question if any human societies have ever been healthy, and for how long.
“We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.”
— René Magritte
Human societies are for the most part have been predatory. Certainly, the neoliberal economics we practice which I wrote about in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves are predatory. One only need to look at wealth disparity. As of 2020, the world’s 2,153 billionaires held more wealth than 60 percent of the world’s population, 4.6 billion people. In the US, we strip the homeless of their meager possessions and sweep them out of sight. The Supreme Court recently criminalized sleeping in public, heinously ruling that doesn’t violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Being found on a park bench exhausted under a piece of cardboard is now a criminal act. When I wrote I’ll Be Homeless for Christmas, 653,000 Americans were on the street. A small tax on billionaires (a class which wouldn’t exist in just societies) could easily house these people and give them a chance to lead decent lives again.
Civilization should be based on cooperation, not competition. We’re not just competing against each other now. We’re competing our way to extinction, led and forced by sociopaths.
The succession of western colonial nations have all been violent and predatory. The civilizations they have conquered, violent and predatory. Mayans famously cut out beating hearts of sacrifice victims and rolled the bodies down the stairs of their temples. I have a haunting memory from age 12 of a newspaper article featuring a series of photos of black on black violence in Africa, a practice called necklacing in which a tire filled with gasoline is placed on the victim’s shoulders and lit on fire.
Psychopathic behavior heeds no race or religion. Crusades? Spanish Inquisition? Look at the Christian fundamentalists in America right now. Be afraid. “Cleansing” happens all the time.
After our conquests, we rewrite history, to justify our actions. We dehumanize the victims long before that. I remember the bland way Manifest Destiny was taught in high school, not speaking of the genocide of Native Americans or the enslavement of Africans. We attempt to expunge the bleeding remains of entire civilizations from memory to carry the conqueror narrative forward. This malignancy in the core of our souls is a rift in our evolution, brains with the capacity to make destructive tools and technology governed by inadequate raw, predatorial animal instinct. With every rewrite of history and every deluded lie that our science and technology elevate us above natural law, we fail to become humans and ensure our own destruction.
Paleolithic evidence before written history offers additional proof of our violent nature in skulls crushed with rocks and arrowheads buried in deep in rib cages. So called higher thinking without spiritual reverence for life and beauty is empty. Spiritual reverence can be found from the fertility goddess statuettes uncovered in archeological digs, to the towering hubris of Egyptian pyramids, preserving those elevated to the status of gods on Earth through power.
Today, we worship billionaires, who emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person, a massive step-down in my opinion. At least the Egyptians worshiped more than wealth.
Thankfully, you and I are not part of primitive culture, we’re evolved because we drive cars just as any Neanderthal could, or perhaps even a well-trained chimpanzee, dribble cheeseburgers down our fronts as we drive them, both of which destroy the biosphere and environment, and defecate privately in porcelain bowls instead of open sewage holes in the ground, a practice to which we have consigned numerous African nations through our indifferent greed and resulting abject poverty. I learned of this in grade school social studies, dammit, talk about progress. As we expel our global warming, concentration camp raised beef that lays waste to the lungs of the Earth, through the massive deforestation and assault on the biodiversity and indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest, we can also witness genocide and tiny Palestinian children blown to bits by AI enhanced “smart” weapons on our “smart” phones, 24/7 devices whose primary purpose is to promote unsustainable consumption and ruin the mental health of our children. The news outlets we find on our phones and “smart” televisions both collect intimate information on us and conveniently leave most oblivious to the fact that our taxpayer dollars provide the vast majority of Israel’s weapons murdering people’s babies, on average $3 billion a year adjusted for inflation because the mass media goosesteps with our wealthy overlords. I didn’t vote for blown up babies, regardless of party, did you? The October 7 Hamas attack does not justify 41,272 dead, an undercount, or near eight decades long occupation and oppression of unarmed Palestinians and an open air concentration camp. It is NOT antisemitic to say so. Nor does it justify pager bombs blowing up Hezbollah members in Lebanon, a terrorist act by definition, killing dozens including an eight-year-old little girl, indiscriminately injuring thousands and escalating conditions that risk WWIII. CNN describes Hezbollah as “militant” and fails to call Netanyahu’s act what it is, terrorism. Stay tuned, more overlord news at 11.
Fortunately, this is America, and if we have an inkling of uncomfortable truth we can instead to watch our favorite $100 million-star athlete who plays with a ball for a living, jump and bash an opponent into CTE brain damage who goes insane and takes their life or someone else’s on the way out. If we don’t care for sports there’s always Jeff Bezos’ ironically named Amazon website to fritter our dollars away so we can work more hours slaving on some job we hate, a cog in our own extinction machine, purchasing some child slave manufactured item mined from the ground, expelled into the air, shipped by some warehouse worker treated like a machine and not allowed to pee without permission (until they can be replaced by a machine) destined for a landfill to ultimately leach into our bodies. Makes sense to me.
Clearly we’re better than those who preceded us, no longer primitive. Hurray for contemporary civilization.
Let’s look at some artwork now.
The only thing confused is the mind.
— René Magritte
For sheer artistry, show me a Vermeer or a Caravaggio, my awe is endless. I have often gazed at great paintings then walked up to them, blown away by the individual brush strokes, so immediate and alive, as if made moments ago by the artist leaving the studio momentarily, the blood of a beating heart and thoughts still warm and alive on the canvas, almost time travel.
Magritte, was a good painter, not a great one in my opinion, but more importantly, a philosopher as well, giving his work special resonance to this day. I appreciate his irony and good-humored wisdom. Philosophers, writers and artists carry the best of our potential.
Born in 1898, Magritte lived in a far different world than Caravaggio or Vermeer, experiencing blinding technological change, just as we are, although far more rapid and insidious now, and the horror of two world wars. America has waged war my entire life, none with any moral imperative other than WWII, and technology today is at once more overt and opaque, careening along recklessly with little concern or oversight of its consequences. Government is failing to provide a level playing field or protect us and for every problem technology reputedly solves, it causes six more.
When I think of the terror of WWII, and the fascist Nazis, I can’t help but think of the fascist trends in countries today like Italy, Sweden and America. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, the Brothers of Italy, has lineage to Mussolini and post-war fascism. Similarly, the Sweden Democrat (SD) Party had significant victories in 2022. Originally founded by Nazi sympathizers, the SD, scrapped its slogan "Keep Sweden Swedish" (how Trumpian) to appear less radical. Here, we know what our Republicans have become, and sorry, but much of the Democratic Party is a shadow of itself as well. The former three represent a rising tide of unified racism, in the US being exploited by Trump, his misogynistic sidekick Vance, billionaires with dollar signs dancing in their heads and a portion of the electorate that is abjectly ignorant. This at a time when the real fight is for an inhabitable planet. Most don’t understand this yet, as our corporate wealthy owned media has little interest in telling the truth.
The oligarch heathens care not one wit whether we live or die. The Nazis looted great works of art in their evil attempt to make the world Aryan, exterminating six million people in the process. As contemporary fascism gains in popularity fomented by record wealth disparity, the oligarch heathens can hang great artists on their walls, but they’ll never understand greatness. They’re philistines, not just stealing works of art from humanity, but stealing our humanity itself and ability to live in cooperation, turning us against one and other with deliberate malice. As climate change brings ever greater tragedy including increased homelessness, reduced crop harvests and supply chain disruptions, endemic inflation and more anger is inevitable. The oligarchs ramming technology down our throats and turning the planet into a gas chamber the Nazis could only dream of have brought us to this dystopian precipice, aided by a corrupted government no longer by the people and for the people. We have been reduced us to data points for manipulation.
Magritte recognized humanity’s inability to discern reality, which is what makes his work relevant today. We can pretend technology is going to save us, and I often touch on technology in my writing. However, technology brought us to the edge of this cliff. If we don’t take risks by calling out evil when we see it, talk to those oblivious to reality, set examples with our personal choices, and find the courage to demand change in the streets, we’re done. We, and the planet, have been reduced to commodities. We need profound social and economic change, not electric SUVs pretending they’re going to save the world, and we’re going to have to put our necks on the line to get those changes. My neck is on the line. I don’t publish under an alias. Imagine if Trump is reelected, what will happen to people like me. All of our necks are on the line. We must exhibit courage.
Our future is degrowth, one way or another. The short-lived consumption frenzy made possible by fossil fuels is coming to an end. Renewables will not replace them in either quantity or energy density. Other than the richest, is anyone happy in this madness? We need a wiser, slower world anyhow. We can either degrow with a plan, or navigate unmitigated chaos and tragedy. It’s going to be tough either way, but one scenario is fatal, and one keeps hope alive.
Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.
— René Magritte
Thank you for reading this tough piece. Be brave. We must fight for a better future, it’s never just given to us. For those interested, here are the basics of degrowth, reduced from books to something manageable.
Such a powerful perspective and one that needs to be shared and heard.
I have one caveat, though.
Psychopathy is not rare; not created by life experience; and not fixable. These people are born this way. They have measurable differences in their frontal lobes. They are incorrigible and they walk among us, like they always have.
I point this out because they position themselves for power, wealth, sadistic control.
They drive the horrors we face.
Excellent piece.