I’ve never understood the plausibility of persons engaging friendships without participants watering egos. Privately and socially I’d much rather communicate with persons I disagree with, because then we might learn from one another. For that matter, every job I have ever held boiled down to me cleaning up, physically or psychically, after the lacked consideration of others, their messes or their mistakes. But beyond the recipients of co-workers and employers, that role certainly extends to other relationships as well, to neighbors and landlords and to the women I have fucked, and to family especially. Rather than enriching myself in the tunnel vision of self-serving pathways to fame or fortune, I get other people organized. Which unarguably lays at the other end of the ideological spectrum from erasing someone from existence. There are far more important matters in this life than being liked, being loved or being praised.
Everyone gets it dead wrong, the debate over cancel culture’s popularity contests and lynch mobs. How dare an animal, vegetable or mineral exist without unending servitude either to your most comforting fantasies or to the supremacist illusions cast by those who have purchased or connived your best interests! If power corrupts irrefutably, then irrefutably none must have it, as those individuals or groups possessing powers whether inherited or pillaged or swindled will invariably convey prejudicial reasoning, explicitly to justify their biases, desires, fetishes, quirks and whims no matter the costs to the life and liberty of others, the civil and basic human rights which all persons must be welcome to engage. This is precisely where the concept of church in practice has failed, where the concept of state in practice has failed and where the concept of industry in practice has failed, for to suffer any demigod is to enliven one’s own eventual depletion. And it is my conviction that there is a distinct culprit to blame regardless of which favored branding of creed or escapism is calling the shots. The ego itself, which is the one actual commonality among all humans regardless of race or gender or sexual preference, the damned thing which must never be fed, for every interpersonal and societal ill comes from its abundance of rationalized comfort, its self-perpetuating wishes for flattery and appeasement. Personally, I think all social media without exception is DIY segregation to that end, and whenever I hear phraseology of anti-establishment dialogues being merely another of the masturbatory indulgences habitual of xenophobes I think back to my homeless years when a uniformed patrolman urinated on me for daring to sleep in a public parking garage in the dead of a New England winter.
Existing is neither a crime or sin, even if it directly or indirectly refuses complacency to one’s interest, if it does not concern oneself in any way, shape or form and especially if it fails to enrich one’s own or one’s favorite ego by any measure. None of us is the center of the universe, and none of what we may love is the center of the universe, whether we belong to chain-gangs or to bucket brigades and no matter if those we purposefully or haphazardly disagree with would dare grant the very same mutual consideration to our alignments and affectations one’s own or one’s favorite ego so openly denies them in turn. When inundation only suits dry fields, then the only personalities who earnestly need platforming are those in danger of drowning.
When you claim no privileges and seek no entitlements is when and where the masses of throngs are readily eager, willing and able to confess withholding theoretical enrichment. And not, contrary to each and everything this culture and society rests upon, when one simply wishes fame and fortune to be so in accordance with the promises of church or state or industry, helping themselves to the enrichment one feels they righteously deserve. The least self-serving among the population are enabled by culture and society toward nothing but death and taxes. Show me the film-maker or musician or journalist or preacher or stripper just trying to innocently pay the bills and I will show you how survival is quite possible without exploiting, extorting or entrapping friends or foes or strangers. If one wishes to make art then they would make art, but when they want an exchange of time and money for the troubles of obsessing over themselves then art is no longer the priority, and such persons really need to stop being pampered like that were not the case. Your dreams being met with success is nobody’s responsibility or obligation. Failure either to belong to a personality cult or to become the subject of a personality cult is no deprivation of anything fundamentally necessary to survival, not mentally or emotionally and certainly not physically. The plethora of contrarian excuses amply proffered from the mirrors may require less responsibility, but then, feeling good about the decisions we make is no service which others must execute, not if we are to realistically share in relationships or a culture or society together. If democracy and coexistence are not completely synonymous, someone somewhere is taking it up the ass. Finding no logic in compensating for the extravagances of others is reasonable, although roundly mocked as blasphemous.
Others being unwilling or unable to get subjugated or murdered is no violation of any inalienable right. Nobody gets to endanger others. Not for the sake of pride or self-pleasure or for an arrogantly mistaken sense of self-preservation. Freedom means that self-determination cannot ever be contingent upon interfering with the self-determination of others. Absolutely nobody is owed love or flattery or servitude. Nobody warrants more attentions or resources than anybody else, and any habit or partisanship or dogmatic or business model coercing, obliging or mandating inequality or otherwise requiring for any difference of opinion a diminished access to unobstructed free will, is evil. The most puerile and self-entitled among us, the universally lying celebrities, universally cheating politicians and universally stealing executives enabled by the entrapped, extorted and exploited into privilege above and beyond reason, regardless of what is fucking popular in whichever meeting of space and time, deserve not continuous esteem but confinement. For their egos to get fed the majority of others are manifestly made to suffer. Others undergoing actual turmoil and tribulation is slightly more weighty than the impulses of anybody to avoid inconveniences, any and every insistence to be praised and adored proven sight unseen dramatically inconsequential as others starve.
The only center of attention which needs to exist, aside from ourselves purposed with bettering ourselves, could and should be those whose life and liberty depend on the assistance, the weakest links guaranteed by proper society to not survive their respective lacking of civil and basic human rights. No conscionable person ever plays video games, watches cartoons, reads comic books or collects toys, because all of that is a divergence from a future where everyone individually and collectively might know a reprieve. The artificiality of fashion and pop culture, of identities not stemming directly and exclusively from merit and mettle, is nothing but denying space and time to endangered lives and livelihoods, feeding egos of those buying and selling the fiction of personal truths, the fantasy that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the lunacy that authority ever arises from good intentions. The entertainer you like, the artist you love or the pundit you admire, exactly what life-saving thing are they granting you in trade? When will television have fulfilled all your needs? If you have not rendered yourself dependent on such trivialities then why are they in your life at all? Supporting celebrities, politicians and executives is vile and one-sided, but yearning to become the celebrity, the politician or the executive is to yearn for others to experience every heartless and thoughtless sacrifice that has been made of you. If any of us were truly so special, if any of us is indeed allowed by this society or culture to be free or independent or original, how can we seemingly not exist without the condoning esteem of hapless strangers, their attentions and resources and their nonobjective love?
Empower nobody but he or she with less than yourself. Give your energy to nobody who wants it, to nobody declaring ownership of it. Everybody gets it wrong, fictionalizing agreeable philosophies of alliances and enmities and personal relationships, because everybody actively and proactively avoids personal responsibility, shunning with every fibre of their being ethics, morality and virtue, whilst doing infinitely more with what is said and done passionately arguing against any accountability for how their own actions and inactions contribute to that which binds us all, how their own actions and inaction prove most culpable for all the faults and fallacies of the world we do know. If the Peter Principle is in fact real, then through caregiving I tap out saving a life each and every day and night for years now, with nothing to show for it by the standards of all those who nonetheless fantasize taking full credit for my words and actions provided I accept full blame for their own many, many wrongs. Meanwhile, being no mere plaything I do not share ownership of my blame, and I place no designs on the credit of others. As such, what problems do I create or support for others to suffer? Whose thoughts or feelings do I prioritize in my total opposition to lethal force wielded against anyone anywhere? What person, place or thing holds power or authority over me? And who suffers all the more from my principles and convictions? Who am I using, who do I abuse?