Freedom to get incessantly inundated night and day with absorbing the fantasies of others is hardly a freedom, it’s an omission, of you from what could or should constitute your life. The voicing of unflattering opinion is simply not discrimination, as it neither impairs, impedes or infringes actual civil or basic human rights to life and liberty. Yet appeasing ego, egos appeasing only bigger egos at that, is what all are prodded to aspire after. In a society scratching its collective gourd over how and why such diverse real problems fester astronomically when the only problems acknowledged socially or publicly are challenges to ego, whether one’s very own or the favored ego of whomever they’d wish to befriend, to fuck or to vicariously be. The actor from that linked article does not own the thoughts or feelings of anyone, absolutely nobody does, and for him to equate not being liked with actual injustice shows just how sheltered are his own thoughts and feelings of the world around him, as well as the experiences of comic book bloggers leaping to his defense.
Matters such as the Q-anon movement have grown explicitly because that many people are that ignorant of the pressing world outside their egos and favored egos. Feeble-minded, these people are royally stupid to apex degrees of stupidity, and they have been made so for no better reason but that susceptibility to marketing is the lone canon of western civilization. Especially marketing meant to distort or to contradict working reality, for the blessed sake of making the most selfish among us look or feel justified in their depravity. This notion of any particular ego ever being validly warranted under any circumstances fathomable is horrendous enough, but applied to the most obviously self-enriching makes Q fanatics laughable. The asinine fan-fictional conspiracy theories aside, it has never been right about anything. Without so much as a single exception, every one of its predictions resulted with nothing. The multiple dates set for the arrest of Hillary Clinton amounted to nothing. The Obamagate thing, with the previous President to be outed by Trump for some horrible crime amounted to zilch. Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey were never under house arrest as covert sentencing for pedophilia charges. John F. Kennedy Jr is still dead. Not only is Q a hard denial of reality, but followers and supporters specialize in contradicting reality explicitly to defend Trump as some manner of savior who can do no wrong and who can say no wrong, contrary to his own life story. Any documented mispronunciation or misspelling is always just another code for them. DC struggles with how best to deal with Q-anon followers and supporters not because any large subset are terrorists or potential terrorists, but because it would mean addressing just how dumb are so many American ignoramuses who have self-righteously mislabeled the unnecessary appeasement of others as their own personal pursuits of happiness. The more one follows or supports a given ego, most dangerously those cultivated into a collective which, as relentlessly as cause and effect, strives to singularly mask its bias and fetishes, its quirks and whims beneath symbology of god and country, symbology of capital or anything other than human beings themselves, the less free do they reveal themselves to be. They accept a cheap suit on division as rebranded unity, their resources carjacked into benefiting not said fanboys and fangirls or the greater community but their opted centerpieces collecting absolute focus of their attentions. Like the Texan lawyer using half-assed simile to declare America has no king, when what he is arguing for is precisely that, to declare a kingship for an ego more flattering to his own. Presuming that I am using the term simile properly.
When Capitalism does not exist without inequality, excruciatingly codependent as its foundations rest entirely on responding to ego’s unregulated superiority complex and the validation of the most self-entitled bullying masqueraded openly as survival, then perhaps if inequality were a true goal for any public figure, more consideration would be given to the removal of Capitalism altogether from our frame of thought. But it’s not happening, for the people as individuals have been roundly bought by self-assurances of pablum and baubles, and happily sold on the marketing that their own ego’s appeasement somehow matters more than the life or death struggles of those outside themselves. From overworked and underpaid workers to price-gouged, overcharged and over-taxed consumers to the self-serving pillagers of resources and tax-evading inheritors of pillaged resources themselves overseeing the standards of life and liberty, all inconsiderately play their predetermined roles, unveiling for the all-inclusive audiences gathered no examples of personal responsibility in this society or what passes for its culture. Contributing is enabling.
When so many can so readily rationalize not loving so many human beings, always in defense of some ego or other’s preference or to justify whichever symbology of capital, of god and country or other branded pathos, the lack of love is not unto itself discriminating. Failure to be loved is neither the crime or the sin of this mass hallucination’s jurisprudence. The demands for love on the other hand, are what egocentrics depend on without exception, and without scrutiny when they afford public relations. If a thing is produced without being tantalizing toward favored preferences of branding, an action or inaction observed for any cause but ego enrichment, that thing or action or inaction is not necessarily misgiving. We do not have to love anybody, we just have to stop using and abusing whomever fails to align with idealized egos. Self-interest contributes positively nothing to others, while contributing to the self-interest of others works against what would otherwise constitute life and liberty for the contributors, because the only things ever to trickle down back and to the left are mud-baths and golden showers, metaphorically or not. We are otherwise informed by proper society’s subjectivity that individually and collectively we cannot be virtuous without meeting with reward, and that we must irrationally extend rewards to others for their boldly claiming ownership of our thoughts and feelings.
But what I’m getting at is a debate that even predates Capitalism versus Populism, on back to the philosophical concept of supererogation. Each of the trio of Abrahamic faiths held firm to the importance of moral obligations, at least for the purpose of maintaining appearances, although anything in addition to dutiful requirements of faith was regarded with controversy as extra and unnecessary. The Protestant division away from Catholicism actually stems from this differentiation particularly, with Martin Luther determining that if god wanted more from the flock than the counsels of perfection observed through chastity, charity and obedience, then he would have said so, and that actions above and beyond canonical duty were somehow an offense to god for not sliding by on the bare minimum of religious obligation. Basically, any impulse to give more was ironically cast in doubt as being a form of self-serving honor, as opposed to self-sacrificing for the betterment of those around us. While utilitarianism and the like-minded consequentialists insisted vaingloriously that altruism above and beyond bare minimum requirements were fallible unless producing further benevolence, as though being altruistic for the sake of altruism had anything wrong about it, their detractors formed an even more grotesque argument in what was known as the Demandingness objection. Which asserted that if giving of oneself beyond the basic requirements of tithing were unnatural for anybody, then it must be regarded as unnatural generally, because apparently those needy recipients have no earthly idea what they themselves actually require to sustain their own life and liberty, and that only those in a position to give might know what is needed by others. That prolonging virtues without reward must be called into question whenever and wherever it fails to reproduce itself of its own accord, the necessity of self-sacrifice magically disqualified for lack of results or convenience, as if ephemeral marketing mattered more than the thing itself.
I see this as not only an argument for contriving excuses in favor of being irresponsibly self-centered, but as well an argument for those who want fancies of self-fulfilling prophesy to impose genuine sacrifice upon anyone or anything but themselves. It pervades, and has invaded completely the supply chain of every form of governance today, every religious body’s dogma and certainly each and every industrialist’s fever dreams or wet dreams. Broader and far more harmful than systemic racism or systemic sexism or rampant militarism is this root to them all, systematic disqualification of the virtues themselves. So many ideologies today, popular or not, come down to arguments for avoiding virtue, avoiding doing what we can, so that all peoples can hide their personal shame and their collective shame inside fantasies where anything but this one neglect is responsible for all that ails them, personally and collectively.
All of which comes across as purple prose gibberish to all those psyches obsessive-compulsively and rather preternaturally feeling sorry for themselves, or for their favorite ego’s equating of lacked love with tales of woe, instead of actually confronting the all too real sorrows and woes of the really real world laying high and low beyond the comfort zones of their respectively delusional fantasies. Lacking of dominance for your favorite branding, marketing or fantasy does not mean you, your livelihoods or well-being are under attack, not while the greater spectacle empowered, enabled, entitled and indulged exists for no other purpose but the inevitably exhausting demise of everything. Taking more than is given, notably the misconstrued though extraordinarily popular precept of participating in society magically translating to empowering, enabling, entitling or indulging what captivates you exclusively, or who you wish to befriend, wish to fuck or wish to vicariously be, assures who truly is at fault for genuine needs anywhere gone unmet. Contributing to society does not mean contributing only in terms of self-regard or self-interest, and it does not mean contributing all of everything to those already claiming ownership of the sun, the moon and the stars, yet failure to oblige is automatically vilified by the marketing which such participants hang on as anti-establishment, at once counter-culture and counter-productive. And nobody is helping any of it.
There is no means or methods for being a member of society without as well being a party to its problems, no way of contributing to society free of contributing to its costs by default through negligence whether mindful or mindless, and any insistence to the contrary is either arrogance or ignorance or both. Of course there are actresses appearing on that American Gods program for example who I would eagerly fuck in a New York minute, but naming them only feeds their egos no matter how small in degree or pedigree, and the potentiality ever enacted would only possibly amount to my taking far more than giving, to say nothing of the fact I have no personal claims to their thoughts or feelings. Perhaps in this light fandom is the lack of benevolence, fanatics believing they own that which owns them, but when identities are based on nothing else but brand loyalty, compliance with whichever egos owning you body and soul, then nothing else is permitted past the illogically closed circuits of such invariably one-sided relations. As one-sided as centrists opting to meet rapists or murderers halfway, again masking division as unity as shortened attention spans from a commercialized ethos of constant gratification eternally seek out assurances and reassurances to pardon how forgiveness is yet enabling.
The lack of virtues is what defines ego, and the absence of virtues is not by coincidence where evil is born, so the lack of virtues must be confronted no matter the form it takes or the marketing it endorses, especially when homespun.