The illegality of murder aside, at face value a blasphemous notion although any wealth, power or authority is measured by whether it successfully entreats the right, for ending a life is the most extreme method of negating the sovereignty of others who are unwilling or unable to supplant their thoughts and feelings with one’s ego-maniacal own and indeed the function of wealth, power and authority is for supplanting the thoughts and feelings of others with one’s ego-maniacal own, not killing has always been the most pivotal of the ten holy commandments. At least insofar as it being the one I myself have never fulfilled. Nonetheless the framework exists for no person or agency to declare any right to ending the life of anybody anywhere under any circumstances. And of all the things for this society to lazily not follow through on, none can possibly be more damaging. I refuse to believe, no matter how extreme the physical threat of the moment, that every point of violence short of lethal force can be exhausted by failure. Particularly while so many are so casual about going immediately to overkill. A cook burning every meal they prepare would be taken for an idiot. Sexual release without the foreplay, or even the sex itself, is the stuff of masturbatory perversion. Any establishment, any icon or institution be it of church or state or industry, not stemming from the singular root that every life must be given a chance, will never garner even the hint of support from me. Maybe homes and communities are not broken as such by drugs or crime, but by too many people giving their time and energy and esteem to strangers possessing dramatically more already. Maybe the uptick in “wrong place, wrong time” shootings is down to people no longer able to communicate in person, one on one, instead having eyes only for their icons and dreams with anyone not conducive to those icons and dreams regarded as threats. Civilization was established prior to guns, prior to celebrity couture or mass-marketed entertainments; illusions cast rendering lies as ideal while nothing else today gets awarded with greater importance than the ego nurtured at all costs.
An exception for me being the actress Hermione Corfield, whose presence brings something necessary to narratives ranging from the challenging to the insulting. She’s among those I’ve admittedly eroticised in essays here past, for what is humanity but a thing clinging miserably to a magic exception for the most tantamount principles and convictions.
Nothing in all of time and space is more subjective than love. As a species we must embrace the reality of that, and in the doing pause our demands for others to ever sacrifice in service to what we love, for autonomy is the only thing which everybody warrants, not entitlement, privilege or luxury or any other one-sided fantasy amidst a world shared by all whether anyone likes it or not. I can love the potential which humanity has always maintained, but if that potential depends upon me dying or killing for its behalf, for it to survive or for it to know comfort and joy above and beyond, then that potential banks on a life disregarded. We really don’t have to be so obliged to find use or to make use of the lives of others. Whether it’s the universe that existed long before any of us were made available for usage, or some starlet whose agents and managers have marketed to prolong whichever negligible voids. It’s why I try to avoid giving or receiving love, because there will always be degrees of lacked independence for the sender or receiver or both. That infringes autonomy. Poor Hermione, her ability to carry such a diverse range of roles shouldn’t mean she be required to carry the one I’ve in mind for her, a symbol to represent the quandary for understanding the very basis of appeal itself. Love makes us all tyrants no matter the object of affection, and tyrants cannot help but to help themselves to all the things they’ve simply no right to.
I gave my life to prolonging my mom’s own, to the extent of quite literally throwing out most of my worldly possessions in sacrifice to the universe, and ultimately being met with defeat on that front have I no life left worthy of sharing. And even in that love so seemingly pure and true was a cruelty on my part no less, prolonging her life in a world of people who would not return any of the love she herself had given. Every love proves one-sided and subjective, and so every ego must check itself or be checked so as to spare the invariable destructions to be wrought by even the best of intentions, the easiest to control being our very own. Every appeasement of comfort and convenience held to question lest somebody somewhere play mere fodder and only mere fodder and nothing-more befitting their own potential or autonomy, in accordance with a reality we can’t help but to share regardless how arrogantly discomforting or inconvenient is the idea of a life free from subjugation by our thoughts and feelings. What if well-regulating a power over life and death meant once per month the enthusiast has to check in with some unilateral board of bipartisan fellow citizens whose only alignment is in being survivors themselves of gun violence, and if they cannot prove they’re proactively taking up their arms against any existing, non-subjective tyranny then they must forfeit their permit, their collection and their ammo immediately. I see no use for guns, but it’s not difficult to believe the most fervent fans would still object even to such a modicum in logic, reminding us all that no fantasy instills life unto itself, but oh so many can and do detract from or worse.
Something I realized only recently, partially through trying to understand the appeal Corfield inadvertently holds over me, is that noting how enthralled some are with their weapons of minor or major destruction, too many others are no less idolatrous with regards to their entertainments, the basic concept of living without automatically rejected as sinful insanity somehow lethal to our own existences. Whereas guns are all about jumping the gun to prevent any more productive or coherent form of problem-solving, pursuits of gratification, obsessive-compulsive drowning in appealing artificiality consisting of the thoughts and feelings of others, is the abject evasion altogether of problem-solving. And so, no more useful to the world around them than wielding a gun.
“When are the billionaires gonna do something!” he hashtags angrily while streaming games with money that’d definitely help the single mother next door keep from robbing Peter to pay Paul. “Hey I work hard in the rat-race, I deserve a good time more than her kid needs diapers and baby formula!” he shrieks to the narrator, continuing “I’m a contributing member of society with no power but to share in what benefits my self-interest, my sole responsibility to vote away my responsibility!” “But I’m a good person though I swear” he says finally, aghast by his own lacked ability to present anything to even vaguely uphold the claim. “I think I’m decent and I feel that I’m decent, isn’t that enough? I mean I’m not one of those executives or politicians who can affect the fate of others, I am a victim!”
As with guns, televisions and smart-phones and computers are not manufactured to empower self-determination or personal responsibility, rather do they provide hollow alternatives to the humility which the rest of the universe thrives upon, users cowering in fantasy for fear that themselves or the people they’ve the biggest problems with might ever grow beyond such limiting perspectives as what’s permissible by ego. But what if we viewed fantasy for the unnecessary luxury that it is? Is it not possible that more art may not even remotely be what the world needs, now or ever? If not for mindless consumerism on behalf of untethered icons and dreams, commoners would apparently have no life at all, only the series of nightmarish, ridiculous circumstances one and all desperately wish to escape. Pop culture is a thing simply because problem-solving is not. Uncountable millions of dollars in proceeds and revenues spinning about professional sports while uncountable millions of living, breathing people go unfed and/or unhoused. Conservatives and Liberals arguing over whose laundry list of things to get censored by social networks, news media and schools is the right list of things to censor with all parties claiming to fight against indoctrination while clearly fighting to indoctrinate. Purportedly grown men infuriated by their cartoons and comic books not being manly enough. If an artist or entertainer or their audience arrogantly believes that the universe at large is not inspiring or informative enough, their susceptibility toward marketing is not exposing themselves to enough of it. If the roof collapsed on an Academy awards ceremony there would be suicides in every city across the country.
But imagine if you will, were an entire country with all its culture and all its laws, were it adamantly on the same page not for stroking egos but with regards to a profuse mentality denying the right to end a life, what harms would come of it? Corporations suddenly disallowed from deregulating safe products from safe working conditions for safe application by idiot consumers? Neither entertaining unprovoked warring directly, or funding, arming and training such exploits for others? No more militaristic devices so simplistic and casual that any toddler getting their grubby hands on it would be a thing of the unlearned past? Imagine the obtainable education and healthcare, were so many not blowing their change on primadonna substack subscriptions full of explanations for who’s really to blame for the horrible life decisions of subscribers?
Currently, a Democrat such as Joe Manchin appeals to conservatives for his willingness to prioritize select lives, for the sake of whichever corporate interest. While a Republican such as Nancy Mace appeals to liberals for her willingness to prioritize select lives, notably concerning her stances on abortion. But the unobserved reality is that the majority of abortions in the USA are not at all in response to cases of rape or incest, or matters where the mother’s own life is in mortal danger. All of those together probably represent less than 10 percent of total cases nationwide. Most are committed as matters of convenience, the mother simply acting irresponsibly and refusing bluntly to be held accountable for her own poor choices because somehow that is what liberated feminism has digressed into, the liberation from responsibility. But they are more than happy to equate their convenience with those women who are indeed victims of circumstances actually beyond their own control. Sex without consequences, as though sacrifice and salvation aren’t joined at the hip and accountability is only for the people we don’t care about. It’s curious how neither side of the debate ever proposes aggregating the means to remove living embryos faster, safer and cheaper than dead ones. Neither side offers this option, because both sides seem to want blood on their own hands. There is a grotesque wing of liberalism that views abortion as an entitlement and privilege. And there is a grotesque wing of conservatism that cruelly does not care for the physical or emotional well-being of the mother. We have the technology for test-tube babies though, cloned from stem cells to the extent of customizing traits. We can theoretically use components of that same technology to simply finish the growth cycles of the real thing, in hopes that each new life might be able to determine its own value for itself, rather than be treated like an unwanted dodge-ball thrown madly by self-inclined pubescents. Somebody somewhere can and will recognize that value, yet both sides are intent on denying them as well. What the pro-life fanatics have in common with the pro-choice fanatics, is that they each have exceptions in mind for whom self-determination should never be a human right. Both sides clearly descended from those founding fathers who believed there was any kind of sense to the notion that some peoples can be only 3/5 of a person, automatically inferior and inconsequential. We’re informed heaven and hell share no borders, yet obviously there is eternally the shared parking for concentric circles of jerks.
There is absolutely nothing heroic or good about requiring others to kill for what you love, or justifying others die for what you love. On the world stage it’s classified as fascism, but among the microaggressions of our day to day living, the unconscious practice of asserting our thoughts and feelings upon the society or culture outside our heads is how it begins. To survive, to find happiness along the way, is indeed feasible without making demands of others, particularly if the survival of others comes up short in the execution.
Of course, in reality nobody actually changes a corrupt system for the better from the inside. Indulgences of power or wealth or authority are never achieved through good intentions, but by conniving the good intentions of others. It’s accomplished by lying, cheating and stealing, and by rationalizing the lying, cheating and stealing as somehow necessary to one’s own survival or for some higher purpose of a grand design. But always is the marketing no more than ego whispering its sweet nothings into any ear bent toward its favor. If a functioning economy is about manufacturing goods and services to meet existing demands, and not producing demand to meet preordained supplies thus limiting both consumer options and profiteers, where exactly is the actual demand for AI-anything? Hard not to believe that whenever pundits, market analysts or politicians reference the economy, no matter the context they’re really inferring net gains of the 1% and not the monies in circulation. If the economy’s “good” the profiting is rich even as the unwashed stay unwashed. It’s like money is only allowed to exist in the hands of the people completely incapable of doing for themselves in life without. Were trickle-down real, there’d be no unwashed masses. Inundation only suits dry fields, and all that comes downstream are splatters of golden showers and mud baths from the aspirations of unregulated ego having its cake and eating it as cost of living. There are no good guys on the national stage, only competing brands, just egos competing for the imagined right to influence and control others either which way.
As such, those working any capacity in public relations should be renamed lip service workers, news presenters expressly should be renamed fan service workers. Everyone forced to work past the age of retirement is an out of service worker. Elected officials should only be referred to as temp workers, religious officials as non-workers, and executives and entertainers alike as unemployable. Because in this world we are all mere workers working towards wish-fulfillment, and if our only mutually-agreed-upon right is consumption, consuming ourselves and whatever worlds we know, it must be said that only pride and comfort prevents us from opting not to consume from the shovels. Hunger strikes are not about being self-sustaining. Were Corfield’s legs to stop for me, whatever the destination of her own life, liberty and pursuits of happiness would be that much more encumbered by the markings of my broken teeth.
Our livelihood and well-being should never rest on miseries undergone by the people who cannot or will not love us, just as the well-being and livelihood of the people we ourselves cannot or will not love should never rest on our own miseries. I won’t indulge a fantasy because I won’t ever contribute to the hierarchy of culture or society, but I will contribute to the lives of the people around me.