Pessimism: About our business we go

About our business we all go, day to day.  The various moving parts of the country running . . . smoothly?  Like a juggler with many objects in the air, hands a-blur, more and more objects being added until the blur of hands can no longer keep up.

But on the system goes with all us snug inside.  Playing our parts – we are all integral, right?  Involved and integrated citizens doing our part.  Voting, for example, lets us have our say.

Then a news item comes out or a book is released, the kinds of stories that surface then sink with suitable rapidity.  Other interests have their say in the way our country is run?  What is that you say?  Groups more powerful than the government, that influence the government: influence the government more than the individual citizens?

How much insult can one take in one’s life?  To live and toil – to fit in but not truly have any input in how things are run: surely we close our ears and our minds when these stories surface.  We dutifully sink these stories, stories incepted in our minds with a hole in the hull, sinking into the depths of our consciousness, down to the depths that we cannot see or remember.  In doing so we again play our part in society, supplying inattentiveness.  Inattentiveness, such a useful thing to have in societies, how essential to the functioning of society.  Inattentiveness fueled by Hollywood, television, alcohol and drugs.  But we still matter and we won’t let ourselves be told otherwise.

Pessimism and Propaganda

Utterly lost, our foreign policy is beholden to popular mandate – the heartstrings must be pulled, uh, ahem, I mean certain heartstrings must be pulled in certain ways.  Propaganda is set to the key of popular sentiment.  So sad that this has always been the story.  Do we need atrocity?  Yes, we need atrocity.  But we, the atrocity-seekers, are blind and we grasp out, needing to feel and to understand but ultimately going about our lives uncomprehending.  42 dead in an American strike on an MSF hospital, sure we will talk about it but, no, don’t concern yourselves with it you blind people.  No, that was not an atrocity and unfortunately (or fortunately?) you can’t say the hindsight of the blind is 20/20, no, their look backwards is the same as their current outlook, besmirched forever by the staining splash of bullshit, lives lived on the edge of the propaganda river with filthy cataracts, confusing eddies.  Lives lived comfortably nevertheless.

This school of Earth

Are you familiar with the New-agey concept that before we incarnate on earth we choose to come here in order to further our (I guess big “L”) Learning?  Earth is a great school, the travails we experience lessons that we might learn from.  But is this just one more apologistic patch put on the matrix, a matrix either blind and evolutionary, or a matrix meant gnostically?

The topic of eternal, of eternal fascination: where did we come from and why are we here?  There are two general answers at odds to one another – no to meaning and yes to meaning: at least with regards to an external force playing a part in the generation of meaning.  Of course people find meaning outside of turning to a god or God or external force.  People find awe in the universe, awe at how “small and insignificant” that we are and, perhaps ironically, on the other hand people present themselves as insignificant specks in front of a god (an awe-inspiring god).

How successful materialism?  Fairly successful, at least in the west.  But what animates everyone, a sort of baseline, is a belief in simply going forward, just keeping moving, an animating force I suppose meant in two ways: not only the force of life that grants us physical motion but also the idea of someone seemingly being alive, being described as animated, the life force finding a billboard to advertise itself on, a common factor more fundamental then stated religious or non-religious beliefs, a belief common to most beyond words, spoken with action.

Yet, the idea that we choose (or not) to be put here in order to learn – are there some lessons that are actually not worth learning?  That we come here to learn operates still on the presupposition that life itself is good simply because it provided the incarnate school to educate oneself.  Which does not preclude that in a higher realm people/spirits may also seek out learning in other venues however they may exist, just not a physical one.

That we make peace with ourselves and explore our shadows is done to be happier and enlightened: these both, happiness and enlightenment, seem to help people come to terms with the world which from the blind evolutionary perspective are correct attitudes in that the species continues to exist.

All that aside, I do find appealing the earth-as-school idea.  Coming to terms with my shit makes me happier.  And, fuck, while I’m here I better learn something about the beyond, sure as heck will not dismiss spiritual stuff with the bullshit wand of science.