Freeflow #2: For the human condition

As the wheel of american politics turns, the more inclined I am to view the u.s. as a plastic country, a plastic culture, one that has been hollowed out. Along with our identities and our abilities to create meaning from our experiences, they've been metabolized into social control, to feed systems that funnel wealth and power back to the already wealthy and powerful. Everything we have has been becoming more and more empty, more removed from substance and truth, concealing our society's most pain-inducing contradictions. As I listen to Justin Scott (@cypher.j on TikTok) discussing the kind of moment we're living in, I feel the current state of the world highlights important conflicts in the human condition that we've been grappling with for ages, especially how we survive as humans, whose survival do we strive for, and who gets to decide.

This time is yet another where we are confronted with the darker aspects of the human condition, where we are faced with the consequences of apathy, distrust, (false) individualism, unreality, deception, domination, obedience, exploitation, etc., and the violence that emerges from them. When these appear, they are readily exploited to satiate ruling class appetites for power, to line their pockets while our people suffer and our planet is scorched. The ruling class designs crisis, manufacturing consent for the expansion of their control. They feign dissent and engineer distractions to conceal the project of continuing and expanding enslavement, so that they can pursue endless material gain without accountability and in plain sight. Against this inhumanity, we have to reach for truth, seek understanding, and become conscious with the world. We have to tell our stories, create our own meaning beyond the systems they have set up for us, and reclaim our collective soul. We have to give new substance to love, to healing, to emotion, to power, to labor, to freedom and liberation, rather than accepting the hollow facsimiles that we have to rent from the moneyed few.

Our societies are big, but our villages have become small. We have to grow our village and nurture it. We have to pool together our material resources, raise our spirits, and foster connection, so that we can resist the forces of domination, control, and violence, and the impulses that lead to them. If we want to resist them, there is no out from the work of truth-telling and holding ourselves and others accountable to justice and to reality; this is a condition of our freedom, just as our freedom rests on the freedom of all others. We can't liberate ourselves if we aren't in right relationship to each other and to the world around us. We can't be in right relationship to each other without acting against senseless harm, cruelty, and violence. We can't work against these without also acknowledging ourselves as participants and perpetrators in harm and violence against other humans. The bystander who watches another's abuse or murder and does nothing to prevent it or respond to it is an abuser or murderer in their own way. We have to reject narratives that enable us to claim a false innocence, propaganda that lionizes us or aggrandizes our acts.

To love others and ourselves in a way that is true demands truth, honesty, responsibility, care, and commitment. While the autocrat, the dictator, the emperor, the fascist, and their servants and functionaries work against truth, take no responsibility for anyone other than their own glory, exploit others, coerce, intimidate, brutally force, hone apathy, and thrive on building an indifferent, unconscious world; we must raise consciousness and improve material circumstances for all, in order to build a world in which all may live, one in which it will be easier to love.