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Extempore

From the same culture of ego-justification to make suffer the world such oxymoronic examples in doublespeak as billionaire-guided-populism, socially liberal but fiscally conservative, intellectual dark web, extreme centrism, and creative industry, now comes the newest compounded antonym of enlightened hedonism. As though self-pleasuring enlightens anything beyond the one-dimensional immediacy of biases, desires, fetishes, quirks or whims of the self, and no earthly consequence might ever possibly befall with the costs or the side-effects rendered on anything beyond that ego for the blessed sake of its luxurious sense of deserving. Equanimity doesn’t arrive from taking without giving, nor from giving without taking. Words and actions have consequences regardless of appeal, because the world is comprised of a little more substance than what any particular ego happens to want or feels entitled to. The universe is nothing but the natural relationship shared between cause and effect on full and endless display beyond the pride of all egos whether anybody likes it or not.

World peace will never come from someone, anyone getting what they want, but by the opposite, all peoples choosing to go without what they do not actually need. Unheard transcendentalists have been condemning for millennia the personalizing of that, how personal fulfillment does not and cannot come merely from getting what you want, but by letting go of what you do not need. Dead generations understood how hard work builds character, but they never had a social media account with-which to fake it. Perseverance makes you stronger, so entertaining short-cuts must evidently be for the truly weak-willed.

Every self-righteous body has an enemy in mind, whether it’s the system or the status quo, Capitalism or the patriarchy or whatever other argument enabling or empowering whichever other denomination of supremacy or superiority. The racists, the sexists, the homophobes or xenophobes. Yet irrationally does each and every self-righteous body deign to replicate the standards for achievement of their standing threat, individually or with one’s favorite affiliations, as though reappropriating the rewards from conquest or domination undoes how those rewards were cultivated and curated. If life’s work adapting or replicating the standards and practices of the most egotistical could or should lead to any other end, then wealth and power reliant on blood, sweat and tears is perfectly acceptable provided it’s the right blood, sweat and tears failing promotion. Nobody but sadomasochists want “the man” to keep them down, but nobody proves themselves willing or able to part with his value system, his measurements of success. Refuse to use or abuse anyone anywhere, and there be the way of the friendless!

I’ve tried conveying before the hypocrisy of official homeless numbers and the US Census, how regional leaders without exception downplay their local stats, at once embarrassed and prideful and perpetually in denial, remembering the rough sleepers only on Thanksgiving, that special time of year where the homeless are not shewed away from neighborhood to neighborhood, chased city to city or outright bused state to state. National headlines suggest the same scenario in another matter altogether, with the World Health Organization declaring that first world nations have been excluding from their coronavirus countdowns those persons never previously diagnosed with covid19 and those persons dying outside of licensed hospitals. Only an idiot would believe this to be circumstantial error or good intentions misdirected, as the reality of the situation would be declaring failures far more numerous than what cannot so easily be underestimated or overlooked. And due to no other causation but unenlightened hedonistic decision-makers, who have been encouraged to believe their self-perceptions of competence, of heroic winning and handsome badassery, be awarded by all others regardless if reality fails to support the weight of their egos. By under-counting millions of deaths, they are senselessly demanding to be mistaken for their most appealing Halloween costume. And this is so commonplace, this avoidance of accountability and ego-catering at all costs, that when success is irrationally found through openly disregarding or countering the basic livelihoods and well-being of others, it never dawns on paid reporters to wonder if these statistics as well may have been manipulated.

For something as subjective as self-pleasure, individually or with one’s favorite affiliations, to necessitate disregarding or countering the basic livelihoods and well-being of others, for this to go free of consequence is manifestly how problems originate, not how problems are solved. There is a cost to everything in this life, and someone will always be made to cover those costs.

Downplayed or neglected by so many platforms is this other recent news story, concerning the Pentagon apparently maintaining thousands of soldiers serving on duty in secrecy among the public, explicitly as sleeper agents, fighting cloak and dagger battles to sway the masses from the inside while armed and ready for whatever such instigation and provocation would invariably embolden. It brought to my mind the fact of the FBI’s digital database for facial-recognition actually built altogether from the DMV archives, thus keeping a registry not of established law-breakers but of all others among the populace at large, as the more nefarious elements living outside the law probably never sat through all the paperwork which proper society prides itself on. These sleeper cell pricks are not embedded among criminal organizations, but among your neighbors, your co-workers, ironically explaining where some of the billions in military expenditures have vanished off to over the years. The timeline offered by the article makes me wonder about the comparable rise of militant domestic groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys and the Oath-Keepers and the Three-Percenters, even Qanon. Maybe these groups are intended by the nation’s leaders to divide and conquer the public. Maybe these sleepers are not actually acting on any orders, but just killing time until your neighbor or co-worker reveals themselves to be a gay communist. Whatever the case, such initiatives do not come from regarding and upholding the value of life in others, met or unmet, but from disregarding and countering that value, and always for appeasing the ego underlying whichever esteemed denomination of supremacy or superiority.

Perhaps these elements hiding among us, hiding from whatever legal or moralistic consequence of their own actions, are culpable for the curious commonality of popular TV shows ranging from Fear The Walking Dead to Jupiter’s Legacy all right now focusing on stories involving young adults arguing for the right to kill. The story-lines presenting their arguments as timely, acknowledging how the world is somehow different now and through that change must be regarded a different view given to the act of taking life, and by default the demeaning of life. I see the mass-marketed schadenfreude as displaying the abject avoidance of consequences, irrationally sold as moral high ground, irrationally because what further end more completely and irreversibly disrupts the civil and basic human rights of others to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness, but their preventable demise and murder?

No enlightened hedonist will care to answer that.