Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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We really need a name for the mental illness that comes with obscene amounts of wealth. Elon Musk’s bizarre progeny obsession. All the weird shit Michael Jackson did. The stories you hear about rich families making their servants clean their toilets after every use or throw away plates after every meal.
Call it rich-brain or something. That psychological phenomenon where extreme wealth causes people to lose their mental moorings and spin off into deep space because there’s no one in their lives telling them “no” or holding them to any standards of normal human behavior. Where their ability to shape their day to day lives however they want with no limitations lets them fly off into uncharted psychological territory where they’ll have whole teams of people orchestrating elaborate scenes and projects to accommodate their debilitating neuroses.
We need a good label for this phenomenon because these are the individuals who are shaping our world. Many people suffering from psychological disorders will come up with unhealthy ideas for how society ought to be run, but they don’t have the means to turn their vision into a reality. The people who are made insane by obscene amounts of wealth are not restricted in this way. Their mental illnesses can actually directly influence how human civilization plays out on this planet.
As billionaires take more and more control over our world, we are finding ourselves increasingly led by those least qualified to lead us. We are trapped in a dystopia that is ruled by lunatics. We should probably do something about that.
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They’re ripping kids in half right in front of us and telling us we need to be mad at Kneecap and Ms Rachel.
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A Palestine supporter witnesses new footage every day of children being mutilated, shredded and burned to death by Israel. An Israel supporter spends every day avoiding looking at that same footage. This one fact tells you very clearly who is on the wrong side of history here.
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When you witness an injustice you can either oppose it, look away, or make up some reason why the injustice is okay. Only the first option can lead to the cessation of the injustice. Ignoring the Gaza holocaust looks different from justifying it, but both yield the same result.
There are people opposing the genocide and there are people justifying it, but the largest group by far are those standing in the middle and shrugging. These people may tell themselves that they are morally superior to the ones actively cheerleading a mass atrocity, and at first glance this may appear to be the case, but in practice both are choosing an option that allows the mass atrocity to continue. One is just more photogenic than the other. It allows a certain type of person to feel nice about themselves while still facilitating an active genocide.
This is almost everyone with the loudest and most influential voices in our society today, by the way. The celebrities. The people with the largest platforms. Most of them are not actively supporting the Gaza holocaust, they’re just sitting there watching it happen, like a psychopath sitting back watching a toddler drown to death in a swimming pool. They know something terrible is happening, but they know they’ll pay a professional price if they oppose it, so they avail themselves of the many distractions afforded to the wealthy and keep their attention fixed on the insignificant.
And the end result is that this nightmare continues. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. Because too many people, when faced with history’s first live-streamed genocide, have chosen to do nothing.
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It would be a mistake to view the Chinese people’s skyrocketing quality of life as miraculous or extraordinary. Beijing made some very clever decisions over the years, but ultimately it’s just doing the normal thing: spending the nation’s wealth on the public instead of on war.
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When capitalism simps want to shit on China they call it communist. When they want to dismiss its accomplishments they say it only happened because China became capitalist. When you ask why your country can’t do what China is doing in order to share those same accomplishments they circle back around to “No, that’s communism!” again.
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And meanwhile the war in Ukraine rages on, for no reason other than the fact that under our psychotic status quo it is much easier to start a war than to end one.
The risk of nuclear war is far lower than it was in the early months of the conflict, but Ukrainian lives are still being thrown into a proxy war to no one’s benefit but the war profiteers. NATO’s never going to directly enter the war, and without a massive escalation on that level it’s inevitable that this thing ends with a peace deal where Ukraine has to give up a fair amount of land. At this point it’s just a bunch of men killing each other and blowing each other’s limbs off for no good reason while they wait for that conclusion to arrive, because a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats far away from the fighting keep postponing it.
It’s so, so ugly and so, so stupid. Such a pointless, idiotic thing for all this suffering and dying to be happening for. This whole nightmare could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions from the US empire, but they decided to provoke a war to move a few pieces around on the grand chessboard for the advancement of their goal of planetary domination instead.
The world is ruled by sociopaths.
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I keep meaning to mention that watching or listening to Dave DeCamp’s half-hour show for Antiwar News every day is the easiest way to cultivate a lucid understanding of what’s going on in the world. Just put it on over breakfast or on your way to work or whatever and you’ll always understand what the empire is up to from day to day.
Other good resources include:
Drop Site News and its quality Twitter account
I’ve also got a public Twitter list of individuals whose commentary I find helpful if anyone’s looking for people to follow on there.
The other day I asked my Twitter followers for some recommendations of good leftist podcasts and YouTube shows with an emphasis on foreign policy which yielded a lot of good responses if you want to check that out as well.
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Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.
