As a Hard Knocks U alum obsessed with essaying on stripping ideologies to barest bones, I value truth and trust my 5 senses over any middleman or third party no matter the yoga pants implored by a marvelously lithe and lissome form. I believe complications in this world arise by construing ego-centrism as the universe. I think every possible ideology crumbles due to a universal fallacy for its participants wanting to neglect principles or convictions where convenient to self-interest. Ego undoes all collectives. As with beauty being in the eye of the beholder, much good is subjective and much evil is subjective, but neither good or evil is altogether subjective. Marketing is never noumenon, and a reality measurable by all holds its own meaning irregardless if it serves us or not.
Denial of entitlement, privileges or special interests is no violation of human rights, nor is the inability to impede or infringe upon the equal and basic human rights of others to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness unto itself a violation of any rights. But it is ego-centrism, and I sincerely believe that virtually everyone wanting loopholes for themselves or their favorite things makes them more rightwing than they’d ever care to fess up to. I refuse to hide behind adjectives, although leper colony ministry fits all that I do online.
At some point, America culturally made the backwards leap from rewarding hero status to the most self-sacrificing persons, to the most self-serving, giddily giving esteem to celebrities, politicians and corporate icons when one and all do such false messiahs reap all rewards from the arrangement. As a society we are willing to recognize the likes of Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam and the Zodiac Killer before giving any thought to remembering the names of any of their victims. As though only those who divide and conquer are the people who matter. Or worse, to look up to. But when might makes right then rapists and murderers are never in the wrong. Ideologically, law enforcement and military the world over operates from that core mentality. And, insisting others must like us when our actual rights are not being violated is the same assertion of one’s will across another. Equality isn’t at the expense of another, or to the detriment of another. Existential threats to Uncle Sam’s dominance are no threats to his equality, but to his ego, to his insistence for more than the rest. It’s no different for anyone of us in the streets. Maybe resolve the living hell before fancying up new ways of defending it from imaginary threats.
American exceptionalism has only ever existed in terms of self-promotion. Wealth is for people incapable of doing anything for themselves. Likewise are people good only because they tell themselves that they are while living only for the betterment of themselves. God and country are masks for that by the standards of conservatives and social liberties are masks for that by the standards of liberals. As both parties are representative not in words but by actions only of business interests, profit is always the endgame for everything. Anyone doubting that is sold on the marketing. You only help yourself in pursuing positions of authority in a place where self-enrichment is long-standing status quo. The Nazis were not defeated by well-intentioned persons looking for employment opportunities among their ranks.
If you want to change the world for the better, then just stop explaining away your own selfishness, stop pardoning your own entitlements. You do not deserve that comic book, sports ticket or Doctor Who bottle-opener more than some family in need deserves a meal for the day. To say otherwise has you obliging by the same pathology as the Trumps of the world. You need nothing at all to be a good person. Sacrifice and salvation are one and the same, regardless of one’s definition of salvation. Whether it’s love or truth, enlightenment or heavenly rewards for hours clocked in picking cotton from the salt mines. It’s prosperity doctrines vs Zinn’s populism, same as anything else. Until all those elected or appointed are mandated by the people carrying pitchforks and torches to work for minimum wage themselves, self-enrichment is precisely what governance is for, what it has always been for. Until religious leaders stop announcing themselves as gate-keeping middlemen to divinity their followers are down on their knees for all the wrong reasons. Life is serving the ego and nothing else or serving everything but. In all my miles, the people that I have encountered under any and every conceivable circumstance would rather overlook how entertainment is neither a duty or a right. The outrage in someone, anyone, not catering to sensitivities.
If I am an anarchist it’s not from my shunning personal responsibility, but because I value its importance more than does our establishment. Where is the convo about limiting the machinery from allowing travesties of justice to happen again and again with whichever other cult of personality centerpiece after the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest? When we can’t even maintain life-saving corporate regulations, regulating the federal government will never seriously be on the table. There is no logic to being a contributing member of such a society frightened to death of seeing how long its shadow is cast. Fuck proper channels with a fistful of rusty sporks. Not only do I endure without assistance from the government, law enforcement or the healthcare industry, I endure in spite of setbacks caused proactively by those proper channels, cleaning up their messes for others. People who think anarchy is either a prefix or a suffix do not understand anarchism. They leave a door open still, same as those daydreaming for a good Capitalism to save the day, as though such a thing as swimming halfway were even possible. Ideological loopholes make for a shitty foundation to build from. What if the endless allowances for principles and convictions are only digging the hole deeper? Six feet is industry standard, folks. Anything more makes reanimation awkward.
The biblical line about how the meek shall inherit the Earth is a fairly clear argument in favor of deflating egos, but it’s a holy wonder what people will pardon to save their own hides from scrutiny. Yet no agency owns the trademark on morality. Misconstruing good and evil may be status quo, but then, the status quo is in the moral fucking wrong no matter the tax write-offs claimed for their tithing. It’s harmful enough when we prioritize ourselves, but when we praise centerpieces to our favorite cults of personality for doing nothing less with their privileged authority, we enable damages their egos create. If everyone saw to the needs of others first, there’d be no problems in the world. From the illusion of political partisanship to religious zealotry to corporate branding, the defense of selfishness as necessary to survival, or in blunt extremes a warranted supremacy, is the prime directive. Always symbolism before the casualties of said sexy symbols. Nobody might love thy neighbor while refusing to see the forest for the trees. You don’t have to love anybody at all- fuck religion generally- but that’s no invitation to use them or to abuse them or to have them deprived of what they earnestly need in life. In economics the opposite of diversity is monopoly, while the opposite of diversity in genetics is inbreeding, all of which spells out that the world is here for everyone, no particulars of special interest. I promise you, you are not that interesting. Nor are your icons.
I would never work for you, pray for you or vote for you. If only I could trust in you to do the same.
Ego-death is seeing how everyone is too flawed to fix anyone. Our identities and worldviews are graffiti on the walls of our prison cells, and expecting others to oblige our own ignores the fact they’ve their own cells to fret over. Empathy only comes by way of humbling. Instead of catering to or otherwise enabling egos, your own or that of someone you’d care to be, befriend or fuck, whether for the illusion of political partisanship or sexy superstars of corporate branding or religious zealotry, they must be deflated, including one’s own. Needs of others must come before exceptions, exemptions and guilty pleasures of comfort zones, bias and fetishes. Abolish the proverbial whip rather than wish for it to merely exchange hands, or it will invariably be used. Equality doesn’t mean exceptions to rules or get out of jail free cards. What we want or wish has no place as none of us is the world and the world doesn’t exist to serve us. It means recognizing entertainment must take a backseat til others are fed and housed. It means that no matter how important our self-perceptions are to ourselves, the self-perceptions of others carries as much water. We are entitled to opinions but no opinion must be mandated. Every conceivable grouping is undone by ego, all forms of government devouring themselves when leaders behave as Capitalists, religions when leaders behave as kings and corporations by default for seeing profit as more meaningful than life. The needs of the many replaced by whim. It’s wholly exponential, down to us in our day to day lives. We can be better people to our family and friends, co-workers and neighbors and strangers, or we can use them and abuse them, rationalizing our autofellatio like a snake choking on its own personal end.