Dientific Killustration

This is capitalism's vast irrationality and inhumanity in action. Markets and The Economy™ matter more to capitalism than the concrete distribution of resources according to tangible human need.

Resources exist in abundance -- give them to people. Housing sits empty -- give it to people. The rules of the feast table should apply to our economic system -- no one gets seconds until everyone has gotten a plate.

I have felt very calm lately, despite everything—or perhaps because of it. Normally I spend my days quietly screaming into the void, braced for the worst, haunted by the future, horribly aware of how fragile everything is and how easily it can all fall apart. It’s terribly alienating, sometimes, to have to hold my tongue and pretend otherwise or be dismissed as a panic-stricken alarmist.

And the future they are ruining, on purpose, rightfully belongs to my objectively excellent baby (and all the other children, of course, but it's hard not to take it personally.) We are living under existential threat, and the threat is in the heads of other people, and we knew that, but I JUST HAD A TINY BABY.

See, normally you get to simply kill and eat anything that threatens your baby, but you can't do that to every gremlin running their mouth on Twitter, and there's no meat on a bot. So instead I've just been tense, at levels detectable to the NHS.

Also, the other parents my own age are all, like, casually having 3 kids LiKe iT'S nOtHinG and going on ~*~skiing holidays~*~ or ~*~cruises~*~ AS IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT??? They don't even care, they haven't been worrying about climate change, they don't even believe Brexit will affect them, they're blissfully unconscious of any responsibilities they have to the future. I bet they don't even have a stockpile of emergency preparedness supplies for when our FRAGILE ILLUSION OF COMFORT is disrupted by fires and floods and friction at the borders -

"I see," said the psychologist, looking a little taken aback.

"I'm at 90% tension at all times, and I feel like I honestly have to be," I told her, "someone has to be alert and everyone else is only at about 10% alertness. I will HAPPILY RELAX when everyone else is at, like, 30%. I'm not unreasonable. If people were just a little more worried across the board - if everyone was doing some of the work of caring about our shared future, if the worry wasn't the sole work of the anxious and marginalised and the scientists - and, worse, the anxious scientists - I would stop raising all the red flags on your Maternal Mental Health exams. But I'm an anxious scientist. I see the evidence about the icebergs ahead, and nobody else even cares, and I can only steer the boat by popular vote, and now I have TWO tiny children on this ship."

The psychologist was off sick, and in two weeks the world changed.

Suddenly everyone was at 20% anxiety. Then 30%, and rising. Suddenly everyone has an interest in Our Shared Future. World leaders who gained their platforms by mocking and scorning experts and evidence are now claiming to be led by scientists. Hahahahahaha.

The psychologist, who now had to speak to me on the phone instead of coming to my house, asked how I was.

These are people whose life works exist entirely in conceptual space, where the limits of what they can achieve are only their And they are impressive, don’t get me wrong, but few of them would I value more than a team of decent scientists. The amount of skill, intelligence, and diligence required to outwork even half a dozen of your fellows is pushing the limits of human ability. 

Even Albert Einstein, famed example of the brilliant lone scientist, was not that special. I’ve read his papers in detail, and those of his contemporaries (took a class on it actually). Without him the discovery of general relativity would have been delayed two or three years at most, the mathematical and conceptual groundwork that enabled his brilliance was laid down by others and being investigated by others as well. And I’d pit a decent team against Einstein any day of the week, an individual can only do so much. 

For the amount of money Jeff Bezos earns working for a day, $215,000,000 (x), I could hire a thousand such hardworking geniuses for a year. Maybe ‘only’ a hundred if they were from an exceptionally competitive and valuable field.

For the money Jeff Bezos earns in a year, I could hire a village. I could create a project with so many educated minds it would be larger than the Manhattan Project. About a dozen times over. 

No one is that irreplaceable. No one has a percent of that worth. If someone is a billionaire, they are earning beyond their contribution to society, at the expense of other’s well-being. 

I’m trivializing nothing. Routine Infant Circumcision and rape are both serious violations of someone else’s body. Justifying either with “they won’t remember it” is something a fucking psycho would do.

To think I’m trivializing rape, you’d have to think strapping someone down to an immobilizing board with no anesthesia, ripping skin, cutting it off, a trivial thing to do. Which is just fucking sick.

But let’s remove what you think is a comparison.

How does “He won’t remember it” make hurting someone okay? Is it okay to beat the same infant with a wooden spoon because he won’t remember it? If we give the spoon to a doctor does that make it okay? Where is the line? Earlobes are useless, is okay for parents to cut them off too? What about his nipples? 

He won’t remember any of it, so all of this is okay right?

Art by Jian Guo