Tag: next system

In the Wake of Election Night 2024

You all should be ashamed of yourselves. Whether Republican or Democrat, whether you voted to accelerate our slide into fascism or remained entrenched in your refusal to abdicate your personal comfort on behalf of real progress, you should be ashamed. No one won last night. All that happened is that we all lost.

How am I not complicit in this? What allows me to presume to point a finger at you, and yet absolve myself?

Firstly, I did not vote for a Fascist platform. This isn’t name calling; I’m being serious here. Read Mussolini. This isn’t partisan inspired vilification. The plank that the individual who a majority of people in this country voted for ran on is openly fascist, as Mussolini defined it. You can pretend you were voting for something else, but the fact is, that’s what he ran on and what you voted for. If my saying that makes you angry, perhaps you should direct that anger at your own guilty conscience, not me for pointing it out.

Secondly, I did not vote for the same uninspired, interest-laden political-industrial complex that failed to inspire in 2016, 2020, and last night. In fact, 2024 election numbers demonstrate that that platform has been in steady decline for over a decade. Those of you still clinging to that plank would do well to recognize you are alone in a vast and stormy sea, and that bit of flotsam is not going to save you, let alone magically become shipworthy again. It was your blind adherence to self-interest, your commitment to a centrist neo-liberal agenda, that allowed this to happen, not my refusal to vote for your pathetic candidate.

I tried to point this out to you. I told you that you had to offer a more progressive platform that addressed the material concerns driving our slide into nationalism and fascism thereafter. You scoffed and replied that those who supported such a platform just needed to get their heads right. I noted that they didn’t know they were supporting a fascist platform, that they were merely looking out for their own interests in the best way they knew how, just as you were looking out for yours. You denied such motivations and called the other side racist and misogynist, completely deflecting your own culpability in the matter. If they would just stop being bad people, you claimed, and come over to the “right side of history”, your side, everything would be fine.

That was never going to happen. Structural inequities, the benefits of which you assume for yourself, on the basis of merit mostly, were always going to result in a growing dissatisfaction. You ignored this at your own peril.

For those celebrating today, under the false assumption you have won something, let me assure you – you have won nothing. All the concerns you have will remain unresolved. Any claims made to the contrary are unfounded, and had you been courageous enough to have critically analyzed them when they were first proffered, you would have seen them as empty promises aforehand. Now you will have to learn that lesson after the fact, to all of our detriment.

I will close on this. You all must open your eyes. We will be forced to pass through the crucible, whether you want to or not. There is no going back to the chimerical age of US greatness touted by your pseudapostle or even the real neoliberal era of prosperity his detractors pine for. A new system must be, if not actively pursued, at least allowed to rise from the ashes. It is impossible that it should be indistinguishable from the previous mode, the one that both sides sought to maintain, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. The material conditions of the world are such that it demands a new system of human organization and mode of reproduction. Further resistance is futile and will make clawing our way out of this grave only all the more painful.

Jobs and People Talking About Them Should Be Avoided

Be very wary of anyone talking about jobs or the need to create them. Jobs are vestigial organs of the capitalist era and are no longer a relevant concern for any reasonable person. Anyone speaking of them should be considered suspect. Real leaders speak only of livelihood and the work that needs to be done. A job means that someone is using you to accomplish their ends; the livelihood you derive from accomplishing those ends is a consequence, an unnecessary byproduct, a cost that the corporatist would prefer to eliminate – in fact, has a fiduciary duty to minimize. Yes, there are jobs, in the sense of a specific project that a construction company might bid on, an encapsulated endeavor to accomplish, having finite specifications and a beginning and an end. But the notion of jobs, as a requisite interface between human beings and their livelihood, is archaic.

Getting Back to Normal is the Last Thing We Need

When I think about the coronavirus pandemic, my mind often wanders to what I would be doing did it not exist. Going about my business. Continuing to be a cog in the machine. Perpetuating the status quo.

Is that what we want?

In our rush to get back to “normal”, are we perhaps overlooking the possibility that normal is precisely the problem?

Personally, I don’t want normal. I never have. And I certainly don’t want to get back to it.

Have you ever considered the impetus behind the massive appeal of the troves of aspirational media on the internet – photo blogs, Tumblr, Instagram? These microcosms of alternative reality – cosplay, virtual reality, van life, nostalgia. Could the source of their allure be because we find the real world, the one we have literally constructed around us, completely unfulfilling?

Ever since we ceased having to constantly struggle to merely survive, there has existed the opportunity to create, with intention, a built environment that doesn’t only meet our basest needs, but actually serves to evoke within us positive emotions – inspiration, creativity, courage, joy.

I have long considered what might result from the following experiment: ask everyone to render, in whatever medium they chose, their ideal landscape. The image they see when they look out their window, gaze upon their home or neighborhood, walk out their front door.

I suspect the vast majority of them would appear strikingly similar.

In my mind, there exists an image of a perfect world. I often think about what keeps me from realizing it.

When I watch scenes on the news or video clips captured on smartphones on the internet, I am struck by how unnatural and uninspiring the settings I see featured in them appear to me. Gray. Monochrome. Uniform. Concrete.

Contrast this with the image that we imagined above. Or any image from your favorite influencer or visual artist on Instagram. 

Do the two images evoke similar emotions in you? I doubt it. 

So why not? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

The coronavirus has brought the “all stop” to the economic juggernaut that my wife and climate scientist Dr. Steven Running told me was utterly impossible and potentially disastrous. With that achieved, getting “back to normal” is the very last thing I want to do.