I won’t ever recognize authority, as problems get solved by actually doing good, not by being recognized for it. I’ve always had more important things to do than being assured others find me agreeable. And unlike the commonplace psyche of every authority figure or hopeful aspirant ever to have projected their breastbone, neither my survival or my satisfaction depend on anybody else’s love or respect or trust. My happiness does not require anyone experiencing lesser rights, resources or opportunities than myself, because while I fail repeatedly to recognize authority, I do recognize that sadomasochism is a hobby and not a lifestyle.
Millionaire politicians idealizing beholdenment to billionaires in place of the self-dependence of their constituency, billionaires who know nothing of the world outside the confines of their curated comfort levels but that public servants are eternally cheaper than taxes or regulation, none of them truly need your savings. Celebrity superstars, entertainers and athletes who won’t ever know you from Adam will actually live on should they never win your esteem on a silver platter. Demagogues elected, appointed or self-avowed adamantly refusing to accept all forms of accountability are psychopaths, their followers violently offended by prospects of their leaders being held accountable are arguably worse. A nation’s population consisting entirely of teenagers are not misunderstood so much as pampered and spoiled rotten by fantasies indulged already. Choose to sacrifice on behalf of persons whose lives are endangered from lacking the willingness or ability to use and abuse others, or choose to sacrifice so that the self-inclined dreams of artists might be met and thus save them from a life of independence, responsibility and maturity. For if they cannot engage in self-expression, we are to conclude from their words and actions, then the world of people free of thoughts, feelings or experiences of their own would have nothing to replicate, nothing to guide them. Where would the masses be, without icons? An open road, one yet ending still with the same ash and aether which no icon might safeguard against, particularly not for their codependent selves. Salvation is not waiting in the wings for you from your favorite people, places or things, rather salvation is what you give back to the world around you in exchange for all the entitlement, privilege and luxury you help yourself to along the way,, were you to accept growing anger over others having lesser rights, resources and opportunities than yourself resolves more issues than does growing anger over you or your icons not having more enviable success. Nobody wants to cap maximum holdings, because all their dreams inform them that they themselves somehow deserve more than others. Dreams depending on the suffering of others are nightmares for the rest, but oppose that and you are no longer a contributing member of proper society. Everyone is fine with entrapment, extortion and exploitation as long as it’s someone else’s cross, and without irony everyone wonders why the world cannot be degrees kinder.
How much worse would a society or culture truly be, were participants to avoid all persons pursuing fame and fortune, to extents of avoiding efforts to achieve it for themselves? From the survival rates of minors facing popularity contests to the self-destructive miseries of their parents keeping up appearances of normalcy and success? People are drawn to online social media for the DIY segregation of it, allowing them to never meet with anything unfamiliar or uncomfortable. The self-obsession enlivened by virtual gated communities rebounded back into the real world with the masses insisting on the same liberties taken from schools and news media, to provide them only with what they are already familiar and comfortable with. But if a matter were truly ideal, be it a person, place or thing, how is its perfection so threatened by alternatives simply existing? It’s arrogance hand in hand with ignorance, such life or death insistence on being regarded as special, as most deserving of the most alluring promises from bullshit marketing by self-inclined hierarchies of politics and religion and fan-clubs. Anybody wishing to garner a rape or death threat, just share my redefinition for woke, as any word or action, any person, place or thing daring to have a function other than to indulge one’s dreams of importance.
Free speech and self-expression are synonymous, in that all must have the liberty to enact them by voicing what they want or need to voice, privately or publicly. However, neither free speech or self-expression unto themselves magically guarantee an audience or social acceptance for things said, as mandating responses for or against said speech is yet censoring, by granting one voice priority over the rest. Though everyone keeping exceptions in mind for who should not be permitted to live, and who should not be permitted to live with self-determination, makes it impossible for the greater whole to accept and incorporate so meager an equality as long as everyone’s preferred subsets go without adulation to come of such priority status. People are less bothered by select others having more rights and opportunities than themselves, than they are by select others having the same rights and opportunities as themselves. Those most upset by others having less than themselves could maybe fill a broken dumbwaiter.
Real, egocentric evil which all persons perpetuate through sidestepping for the blessed sake of entertainment and convenience, its power fantasies enabled and empowered by inaction whenever or wherever not outright fellated directly, doesn’t actually laugh at your expense, it laughs with your expense. But there is no audience for the last laugh, a realization which surely explains why every deity eventually goes mad. With all of time and space thus presented by these revelations as a mere private joke, none will be left to appreciate how the oldest jest is essentially gallows humor.
The proverbial serpent, also with no legs to stand on and notably without reach long-armed or otherwise, is eating its own tail, yet each and every authoritative presence falls short of suckling its nethers regardless how grandiose its gestures or how promising its infatuation. I say, it is the lone function of spineless humanity to devour our very own selves, not everything but.