Nothing is more repulsive than a messiah complex, stigmata’d hands down the most extreme form of cosplay, but some yokel over at y-combinator’s Hacker News recently asked why I was commenting anti-establishment platitudes on a website custom-designed to fetish Capitalism. Obviously, the clear majority of commenters there see AI for example as an approaching utopia, refusing even in passing to acknowledge uncomfortable nuance along the lines of, oh I don’t know, how the billionaires of the world would magically be willing to float all of humanity when to date they have built themselves up explicitly by conning whichever of humanity that might contest their claiming and collecting all the lucky charms. What I do online is comparable to how Jesus Christ surrounded himself with lepers, whores and thieves. I’m sincerely not trolling here or there, I just don’t see a point in preaching to the choir, even though that is the way this society runs, with liberals appearing on Fox News and conservatives appearing on MSNBC News considered traitors by their own kind, when reaching across the aisle to steal votes is expressly how the two-sided coinage has always operated. Literally every single successful political candidate gets elected under the presumption that they intend to change the system from the inside out, yet to date this end has never even remotely been achieved by anybody anywhere. Under any other circumstance, should a voice strive to actually change a system from its inner workings, the intent is widely denigrated as disruptive, toxic and harmful. I respect values of information that occasionally gurgle up at Hacker News or any other fragment of the noosphere where self-purported innovators might accidentally address anything other than marketing and promotions, like how Edward Snowden landing in Honk Kong was announced at Hacker News before any other website.
But should we manifest sanctioned comfort zones, echo chambers or safe spaces or news bubbles or any other variety of gated community, we would by design be blocking out the greater portion of reality, including an eternally inordinate amount of truth in the doing. In order to think outside of boxes, one must refrain from dreaming inside them, no matter the sensual lull.
If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing and promoting would be irrelevant. We’ve been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. Advertising is fundamentally a disingenuous act. But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to undervalue choice and to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be every part as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we’ll never know that again.
I am fine with violence, because for all too many it is the only language that can be understood, and communication in all matters is always key. All matters save advertising, which is a one-sided conversation creating only monstrously feeble minds. But no matter the source of a point of conflict, no matter how mighty or minuscule a difference regarded, you leave dissenting opinions alive, because showing them the metaphysical door is granting them the easy way out of this world. Leave them around free to consider possible flaws to their thinking, to experience shame and guilt, to learn what the whole concept of remorse really means. And, ideally, give them the space to come around and see other perspectives, perhaps even to knowledgeably join your web of evil so you can be that much closer to having enough players for a Satan’s Six rock opera on the rooftop of city hall, awaiting the eventual drifting off and away of zombie hordes below as all the pot from the police evidence locker slowly and mysteriously vanishes.
To paraphrase and ride to its end what the late Dwayne McDuffie once wrote in a Deathlok annual, if you kill your enemy, their argument doesn’t die with them. Only they can end that, but by denying them effectively on their own the opportunity to learn otherwise, to see how the other half lives and thus have a chance to grow and evolve in their personal search for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you’ve instead martyred your opposition, enabling those inspired others to continue on their behalf with all the tag-teaming lust of a human centipede. For me, the very definition of heroism is self-sacrifice. Logic then translates the act of taking a life, any life, as being its loathsome opposite. Because you’re sacrificing something else, something other than yourself which is not yours to give. I’d far rather face unarmed a roomful of threat.
That’s when magic is borne, just as my words here are gnosis ventured and pained and forlorn gnosis all the same. How revolting it must be, to open Pandora’s box and to already feel quite familiar with each and every demon to flee out into the world, this world of guiltless double standards.