On 36 Years in the Realm of Surrendered Souls
Introduction
I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers - it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Hello from the unceded ancestral territory of the Tamien Nation. umSe. This one is going to be a bit different from previous posts in this format. Firstly, it will be the first one published to the front page, since I no longer have a job that I hate passively nudging me into self-censorship. It will also be even more stream-of-consciousness than previous entries have been, mostly because the desire to put together even my usual half-assed outline has been pretty much non-existent since I started this. So what follows will be a collection of recent... let's call them disquieting observations that I've made related to my time on this space rock, with perhaps a little bit of closing commentary if I feel like writing it.
Welcome to the Freakshow
I suppose given recent events, the best place to start is with the corporate world, particularly in this country but also anywhere else that profit is prioritized over the wellbeing of living, breathing, feeling people. I hated almost every second of my time in these spaces, and I think I've mostly figured out why: they are not human spaces. A corporation is a place one goes to surrender little bits of their soul in exchange for little bits of the avarice-tainted money their "betters" throw them. They're places people go to play pretend all day. They happily gobble up the inevitable, relentless corporate communications about how their organization is doing good things in the world while simultaneously diverting their gaze from the real harms that their business operations cause other humans. With rare and delightful exception, corporate workers have a habit of cultivating a fakeness about themselves, with the apparent aim of advancing whatever petty, meaningless career goals they might envision on the horizon.
Minds of Metal
Corporate spaces are also getting increasingly farcical, even if you're only half paying attention. By the time I was let go, the morons whose primary message to us little people for career success was "join boards and become a money ghoul just like me!" were already pushing the "exploration" of A.I. bullshit as solutions to non-problems within the org. It's funny; if I had ever suggested to any of my bosses (the sane ones, at least) that we should employ a person that regularly hallucinates on the job to take meeting notes, summarize documents, or really do anything of importance, I'd be laughed out of the room. But here we are. Only it's not a person these corporate dipshits want to employ. It's technology. Not only that, but utterly destructive and resource-wasting technology, and that's before you consider the very real threat of delegating almost all thought to machines under the control of those who think only in terms of profit. You think your boss gives one fuck about whether one of these machines can do your job just as well as you? That was never the bar. It doesn't take a lot of smarts to look around at the world and recognize that companies, by and large, do not CARE about the quality of their product or service; only that it's good enough to keep selling to a bigger fool.
Goodbye Human Being, Hello Human Thing
Certainly related to the corporate world in general is a specific phenomenon of late: self-objectification! Have you seen this idiotic trend taking place on the premier platform for bootlickers and virtue signalers?
Of course I'm referring to LinkedIn. I've never found that platform or its membership to be particularly sane, but it certainly seems to me now that there is no limit to the absurdity people will perpetrate on themselves to sell their "personal brand" to capitalists. I find the juxtaposition of this period in history - one of increasing fascist currents and decreasing respect for human and other life, of corporate royalty snuggling up to mask-off authoritarians who are literally contracting out the operation of death camps - along with a pattern of people turning themselves into objects hoping to sell themselves like a cheap plaything... puzzling. Call me strange, but I find getting in the habit of thinking of oneself as an object... bad and dangerous, actually. I suppose the one slightly less depressing aspect of this is, I've mostly seen it being done by the upper echelon type; VPs, C-suite ghouls, and so on.
The Genocide Will Be Televised
The ongoing genocide against Palestine is a mirror most US Americans refuse to look into. On the one hand, I suppose it's not that much of a surprise that a country whose very existence was predicated on slaughter and slavery still can't grapple with the ugliness of its past, never mind present. On the other, it has been one of the most chilling realizations of my life to finally understand that these things we thought were in the past, simply aren't. We just moved the most objectionable parts of the death machine to places in the world where our own populace would have a harder time seeing them, or conversely, an easier time denying them. I think at this point in my life, I'm beginning to understand the real meaning of "the banality of evil". Certainly most of us don't sit around twirling our villain mustaches asking "What evil can I do today?" while kicking a dog. But how many of us stop to think about how the technology we've become addicted to actually came to be in our possession? How sure are you that nothing you use on a daily basis was produced with slave labor? Or conflict minerals? Or whose availability is only possible because the global North has strong-armed less fortunate nations into surrendering their resources and calling it commerce?
And how many of us would pay no mind if, in a hypothetical future where evil is allowed to prevail and the Palestinians are wiped out, we saw produce from the ethnically cleansed region on our store shelves? This atrocity is being streamed in fucking 4K; there is no excuse for those who have chosen to look away and deny what's happening. Do you think there's something that makes you special? That this kind of violence won't eventually be turned against you? (Hint: imperial violence of this kind has a weird tendency to turn inward.) The Palestinian people are every bit as human as you and I, and our government has no problem with their extermination. What does that tell you about what lies ahead for us?
All Capitalists are Bastards
"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. O God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
- Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol
If you want to know how we got here, you need only look at what came before, and you don't even need to look that far back to start making sense of it. The routine denial of health care by giant multi-billion-dollar corporations. The home insurance industry canceling policies and pulling out of areas, in some cases just months before disaster strikes. The acquisition of wealth for a select few is presently the driving force behind the vast majority of problems we face as members of the tree of life. There will never be enough to satiate the avarice of those who seek to dominate. They will consume every last resource and seek to conquer every rival until there's nothing left but a burning trash pile... and them. Sitting in their doomsday bunkers, hoping that whatever "mitigating controls" they have put in place over their servants is enough to prevent an uprising against them.
Capitalism, and the capitalists that demand it remain in place, are not our friends. This is the class of people who knew beforehand that their business model would destroy our habitat. The class of people that sells weapons of war to the most vile regimes, because war is good for business. The class of people we have been warned about, time and again.
Suggestions
If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.
This is where I tell you it's all going to be fine as long as we do XYZ, right? No, not really. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible for things to improve (whether or not we have a collective long-term future due to our dying biosphere), but it's becoming increasingly evident to me that even my own personal pessimism of, say, 5 years ago, was probably too optimistic. I think we're entering into a time of significant upheaval, deep loss, and increasing lawlessness. I think the people of this country are not prepared for the tasks and challenges that lie ahead, and the odds of that changing in time to prevent or soften any of the many catastrophes on the horizon are diminishing rapidly. So given that, here's the only advice I can muster: cultivate, in yourselves and others, a sense of class consciousness. Organize in your local regions and workplaces. Prepare to participate in the strike being planned for 2028; if we make it that far with our freedoms intact, there are many changes we must demand if we expect to survive the coming years and decades. Create or join communities that have at least a chance of taking care of their own basic needs outside of (or at least as far removed from as possible) the capitalist system. Find the people that will actually stand up for themselves and their community. Join a mutual aid group in your part of the world. Build the foundations of something new within the rotting corpse of the old, because there is no scenario in which this bullshit story we call a way of life can continue. It's physically impossible, and therefore it will eventually end. The only question we have to answer is, what will that look like, and what - if anything - will come next?
Closing Thoughts
[...] Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it - it's like pieces of glass in my head, all the time. Can you understand?
- John Coffey, The Green Mile
I don't really know how to end this but to say: the near-complete lack of US Americans' consciousness or consideration of anything happening outside of their petty little hedonistic lives is a large part of what has brought us to this point. You can take that assessment or leave it, but that is my sincere belief. Part of me feels like the majority of us never actually learned how to empathize with others. Not in any meaningful way. And slowly at first, then faster and faster, the cancer of self-obsession spread, the institutions that kept us informed and educated were chipped away at, and that same class of fucks that brought us to the brink almost exactly a hundred years ago are set to do it again. Only this time they have significant control over the outmoded and vile structure that is the modern nation state. All its weapons, all its technology, will be employed against any dissenters as the country (and perhaps world, though I have hopes that not all peoples are this irredeemably foolish) descends into chaos.
To the extent a person in this world can be, I aim to be done with capitalists and their corporate machines. My skills and knowledge were built up over the years with the hope that I could contribute to something genuinely beneficial, not just to myself and a tiny class of plutocrats, but to as many of my human siblings as possible. Too many of us, my past self included, allow our goodwill to be hijacked by those who seek only to profit, and then we forget anything but the hollow pursuits of careerism and the seductive pull of consumerism. My only plea to you at the end of my 36th lap around the sun is this: take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if your soul has been surrendered in exchange for petty comforts or raw ambition. If you like what you see, then by all means, continue doing what you have been. But if you recognize your part in the operation of this vile machine and are disgusted by this reflection, consider what you can do to reverse course and actually be the kind of force in the world you want to be. I'm still trying to figure out what that means for me, in the time and place and overall situation I find myself, but the time of smiling while capitalists force a shit sandwich down everyone's throats is definitely over for me.