The People Suck
Posted September 9, 2009 by roger_peet in Inspiration
The world is over.
A goat with its throat slashed may buck against its bonds, but the blood will drain out and it will die. A gentle hand might give it a pill to ease the suffering. Like the goat, we've swallowed the pill, and so it comes to this. Buy an efficient lightbulb. Drive a "hybrid" car. We have eaten the host that was laid on our tongue, the host embossed "HOPE". We've supped from the poisoned chalice to wash it down.
Our sad flapping jaws will keep on hurking out positive affirmations like trained seals clapping for the ringmaster. Our prating of determination and principled struggle and positivity of all sorts sounds now as do the grunts of a dental patient turned loose to the street with a toothless gape and gums full of anaesthetic. For it's Hope that has killed us these many long years, and it will continue to kill us, though it will seem like famine, and it will seem like war. It's hope that strangles the life of the earth, hope that fills the land and water with poison, the hope that something might be better for our children, and the hope that our pestilential children might somehow impossibly behave other than humans have ever done. Hope places around our necks the thin, piano-wire garrotte of sustainability, and chuckles in syncopation with our breathless gasps. Hope throttles us with our efforts to bring "justice" and "peace", to fight "oppression", for we stand in the shadow of one hundred thousand years of world-rending growth and ecological annihilation and proclaim that without darkness, we would never have been able to understand the properties of light.
There is, however, no light. There is only we, the rancorous mob, fat with plunder and eager for revenge, knowing there must be a way, a way to make things better. The thin wax fat and the fat wax arterosclerotic. We eschew the grinning skulls of our failed predecessors, and presume that we are ever so much better and more civilized than everyone else. If we suffer, it is for righteousness. If we die it is for the cause of our humanist corpse-worship. The world beyond humans can, as the saying goes, suck it.
We are willing always to turn the blindest of eyes. Seven billion we are now. Seven billion and soon Ten and then Thirteen and on from there. All the gabbing of the left for social justice will only bring forth further generations of mewling tyrants to grab for themselves that to which they perceive themselves entitled, further generations for those with less scruples to practice their strafing on. There will be a revenge, but not for us. The world will devour us like a wolf in winter grubbing for marmots.
George Carlin, the twentieth century's preeminent social theorist, wondered why society produced such a bevy of horseshit-swilling ideologues and twee annihilationists. From where do they spring? Wherefore such an unending parade? He considered the eternal self-replication of self-assured fuckwits of every stripe, left to right, and declared: "I think it's because of the people. The People suck. Yeah, the People suck. Fuck hope! Fuck hope! "
Raise a glass to the last honest man, my friends. And another. And another.
Comments
it's a good question. i've been following these posts from this writer for awhile, and usually have been appreciative of the effort to get the word out about tragic extinctions and violence against the environment. but the utterly despondent flourishes here strike me as un-productive and wanting for vision. because actually, there IS a reason we are making these prints and books and gardens and friendships. and i think the idea that most people are basically selfish is a myth that the ruling class would like us to believe. it is certainly a disempowering notion.
funny, cos this just made me feel a bit better! I'm exhausted after a 13 hour work day on just a few hours of sleep, and I took a peek at rogers post and realized, well, that someone is seeing it more bleak than I am!
Thanks Roger.
I'm gunna go toast with some bourbon now!
I find it liberating to live without hope. I've always found hope to be a mental tic that prevents deep consideration of our contemporary situation. Derrick Jensen quotes someone or other in one of his books to this effect: "Die while you're alive and be completely dead. Then do whatever you want; it's all good." This is how I want to live my life, without illusions, and that requires of me an occasional overwrought belch of generalized contempt. Thanks to the infranet, everyone gets to smell it!
I just noticed this post. What's good about it is honesty.
What's interesting (ironic, counterintuitive) about this "diatribe" is that Roger's hunger and need for truth, for being honest and truthful with OURSELVES first and foremost, is the most anti-cynical and hopeful act we have to offer one another. This maybe why some people are actually rejuvenated rather than defeated by this anti-hope manifesto: the ACT OF WRITING IT is AN ACT OF HOPE: it means we still have the impulse to share the truth, that it is important to do so. Why? FOR ITS OWN SAKE. BECAUSE IT IS GOOD. RIGHT. JUST. Because that is the only foundation we have as humans to trust each other: that we will tell the truth when we feel it, and we will act on it. Because the truth (as we FEEL it passionately NO MATTER WHAT THE RESULTS, LASHBACK, POPULAR THINKING) is the most important, fundamental right of man to own and exercise, in order to be at peace with himself and the world. It isn't a rational choice. It is a primal need, like food, water, shelter, and mutual nurturing.
In writing this (which, let me re-emphasize, is a choice; for him to choose to write it speaks as much as what he writes about), Roger points out the first, last and only reason to do anything: because it is the right/good/honest thing to do. Whether you are writing a "futile" diatribe against hope, or tilling a "futile" garden, or printing a "futile" book, your need to do this is irrevocable, because you are human and need to live as much at peace with yourself as possible; which means, in alignment with your values; which means, true to yourself. You do this for NO ALTERNATIVE REASON, for NO AGENDA, for NO RESULTS. You do this UNCONDITIONALLY, because you need to be at peace.
I agree that hope as a form of wishful thinking - as a gamble or wager that our actions may contribute certain desired results, as a promotional campaign for certain conditional aspirations - is total bullshit. That's the kind of lottery-ticket-scratching that breaks my heart, as it does Carlin's and Roger's. And not just because it's ineffective and literally delusional (the results we want are fantasies of green pastures and frolicking free range chickens; but for WHOM is this possible??? 0.0001% of the world? NOT EVEN THAT IS REMOTELY LIKELY.)In fact, this kind of "doing stuff just to get certain results" is what got us in this mess to begin with! If your reason for doing something is based on an expectation, a gamble, that you're gonna get certain results, then your actions are not compelled by anything deeper than CONTROL and EXPLOITATION - no matter how "good" you think those results are gonna be. The hope-as-wishful-thinking is, to me, deeply cynical. It appeals to us when, deep down, we have lost all contact with our own sense of truth, and we throw up our hands and throw our lot/chips/actions/money in with the bandwagon that most seems, statistically, to get "something", "anything" done. Because we've lost hope in ourselves to be 100% honest and true and in power over our own lot and peace in life; that's when we begin believing in the false hopes of "10%" possible, or 5% chance that someone else's power (a president? an organization? a partner?) will solve our problems.
But Roger shows us true hope. You act (in his case, write) on principle. Because it feels like the only thing worth doing. For no other reason than to share it with others.
And guess what guys? NO MATTER WHAT THE RESULTS, we are on this planet together. The only reason worth acting on is to live according to our own truth, and share it with others, so we can be at peace, and live in peace.
There is no absolute truth. There isn't even a group truth or family truth. Fact is, there isn't even a personal truth - it's all a process of looking for it, and trying always to get as close to it as possible. But the closer you get in your own life, the less room there is for the bullshit. If you stop looking for it, the void your apathy will leave will get filled up by lies, fantasies, myths, distortions - and false hopes.
Or, as this smart dude put it A LOT MORE SUCCINCTLY:
"A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemorality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action."
"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
RIP Vaclav Havel
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Wait... then why are we making all these damn prints?
Posted by: shaun at September 9, 2009 12:14 PM