paragonne

My inspiration to write about this, rather than just think this, stems originally from watching the fourth episode of BoJack Horseman season 5. Yes I like the silly horse show, sue me. Only after having talked it through with a friend of mine did I decide to actually put it into words. But the episode was, if not eye opening, at least eye reminding.

In the episode, we see the writer of BoJack’s TV show, Philbert, seek a costar for our titular horse, and settle on a member of Hollywoo who has, on varying occasions, choked his wife, called his daughter a slut, sexted a 12 year old, and if I remember correctly punched a prostitute. In other words, unfortunately not far from your average Hollywoo leading man. And yet, two recurring female characters (PC and Ana) root for him, try to get him redeemed in the court of public opinion.

In a previous episode from season 2, a late night TV show host by the name of Hank Hippopopalous is accused of sexual harassment. More specifically, he is called out on this by Diane, who received some rather interesting backlash for this; from Wanda, who is trying to keep the television network afloat, and from Mr Peanutbutter (Diane’s fiancé), who is a star on said network. Later on in the episode, Hank informs Diane that in a day’s time the media will have moved on, regardless of what Diane says about Hank and regardless of the truth of her statements.

In both of these episodes, we see women and otherwise (at least relatively speaking) feminist characters capitulating, “surrendering” their feminist ideals. What could possibly drive them to do so?

It’s capitalism. It’s my writing, so you already know the answer is always capitalism.

Now, the events of these episodes are very real. That is one thing that adds to the “piercing” nature of the show, the fact that much of it is realistic and, in some cases, relatable. Statistically speaking, most women are at the very least sexually harassed at some point in their life. Statistics aside, just talking to a woman will reveal this to be true. Scaling up to assault and flat out rape, the statistics don’t drop too much lower, with these again being common experiences for women. That is realistic about these episodes. The men involved in these incidents often go unpunished. That, too, is realistic.

Women are oftentimes the defenders of these men. That, as well as the way women’s voices are ignored on these issues, is again realistic.

Why would a woman throw another woman under the bus, or stand by as another woman is thrown under the bus, over an issue she has most likely faced herself?

Because there are no wins for women in society. They simply do not exist, just as they do not truly exist for other underprivileged/oppressed/minority/all of the above groups. Any “win” simply profits the people already in power.

The conversation which sparked this text was specifically regarding the porn industry, and female liberation within that context. What my friend and I agreed on was, essentially, the thesis of this essay: that there is no liberation for women within capitalism.

There has, for some time now, been an ongoing debate regarding pornography. Some say that women are exploited by the industry for profit, others say that women are able to achieve social and financial liberation by earning money for themselves, and exploring their sexuality. A dichotomy is presented with this argument: either women are openly sexual, or they are not.

If a woman is not openly sexual, she conforms to societal pressures to be “modest”. Frequently these pressures stem from “traditional” views on women’s roles in society. A woman is meant to be docile and obedient, and therefore cannot portray herself as sexual without breaking from that role. So, then, surely sexuality releases her from these chains? If she becomes an overtly sexual being, or at the very least is not discreet about her sexuality, she no longer conforms to these societal pressures, right?

If a woman is sexual, she becomes the embodiment of patriarchal desires. She becomes living proof of the view that women exist as servile in a sexual manner. She becomes little more than a sexual object, whether she is simply a woman living her life or if she is a porn star; the industry profits regardless, it is merely the industry that changes. Yes, madame, this is the perfume of the true, sexual woman you are! Buy our new heels, become the goddess of lust you are born to be! Because birth has placed you here, it is your destiny, so say the patriarchs and so sing their wallets. Money talks, and it talks very loudly.

Ah! But if she is not sexual with men, surely the patriarchy does not benefit? The sexualisation of lesbians by straight men is simply another example of how the industry always profits. You can make no choice that does not appeal in some way to the patriarchy and which does not profit someone, and the people who profit most are already in power. They are the patriarchs. They rule, and their rule knows no bounds.

So exist as asexual, but in defiance of men! You are a woman, and proud, and your sexuality is not theirs to behold, and you are heard to roar! They sell it to you still. They tell you that your way to this defiant being of feminine power is independence. And how to be independent? Get a job, of course. Get your own car, your own house. Buy buy buy. Always the answer lies in your ability to consume.

And if you don’t consume, if you don’t get a job? You either suffer, are entirely dependent on another, or both.

What choice is there? Mulligan, as always, speaks truth: You can choose to go left or right, but the roads were made a long time ago. You always profit the system, and the system is your enemy. The system empowers the patriarchs, the chauvinists, the bastards.

Let’s return to sexual assault, and harassment. Why would a woman betray another woman in this way? Ana and PC do so because otherwise they will lose financially. They will lose money and prestige in their industry. Diane is told off by Wanda and Mr Peanutbutter for the same reason. Everyone has their price, and the system owns all the coin.

If a woman stands up against sexual harassment, she alienates herself, one way or another. Either she wins, and is feared by the men in power, or she loses, and is cast out as a liar (oh those women and their fits of hysteria, they’ll say anything these days!). And even the baddest bitches need to eat. So they keep quiet, and put up with it, because to do otherwise is to suffer.

And their silence permits these acts, and so even inaction still benefits the industry and those at the top. It always circulates back to the economics of it all, and the chokehold it has on the social aspects.

The house always wins. The house keeps you tied up, whether you know it or not. You cannot liberate yourself socially without being economically liberated, and there is no economic liberty under capitalism.

You are a woman. Or perhaps not, how would I know? But regardless of who you are, the house has you gagged and chained. You cannot walk free so long as the house stands.

Burn it to the fucking ground.

So. White men are privileged. Of course, gay white men are less privileged than other white men, and white men of some nationalities are less privileged than those of others, but, unlike race or gender, nationality and sexuality are far, far easier to disguise, to blend in with the privileged group. One foot in the door goes a long way. None of what I have said here is new, or revolutionary, but it is necessary to acknowledge these facts. Because a privileged group, nine times out of ten, is the oppressive force within a society. When we look at the right wing in the Western world, we see mostly white men. Outside of this context, we see non-white (but usually male) right wing movements. I do not ignore these; rather, I put them to the side, to focus on the Western world. The principle I wish to draw out applies everywhere, to whichever privileged group one wishes to sub in.

The point of all this rambling is this: privileged groups exist everywhere, and they have a greater tendency to be part of radical, right wing movements over less privileged groups.

But why are white men so easy to radicalise?

Well boy oh boy, coincidentally, that’s the title of this piece!

As they used to say on my favourite television show, let’s find out.

The trouble with privilege is that we become blind to it. If you are able to read this on a screen, that is a privilege. If you are able to eat tonight, that is a privilege. It should be a right, but it is a privilege. If you have a bed to sleep in, running water, a home, family, clean drinking water, you are privileged in some way. Yet we do not think of them like that, or at least I do not. We lose ourselves in routine and habit, and stop seeing how fortunate we are. We gnash our teeth that we don’t have a better phone, forgetting that a phone itself is a privilege. Humans are rarely satisfied. This is in our nature, but is exacerbated immensely by capitalism and it’s inbred cousin, consumerism. We always want more, want better, forgetting that what we have is already more than many others.

When you are blind to your privileges, they enter a zone of your mind where you store your rights. Freedom of expression and life are human rights, a hot shower and chicken wings dripping in sauce are not. Even here, we can see privilege, the fact that I name these things I have access to, which I myself forget are privileges. How quickly do we become blind to our fortune.

When a privilege is considered a right, you will fight tooth and nail to defend it, just as you would a right.

Let’s invent a country. We’ll call it the Xanderine Kingdom (maybe three people will get this reference, because I’m soooo niche and cool and so forth). The Xanderine is full of white people, half of whom are men. Most are Christian, and of vaguely similar ancestry. Ethnic boundaries between them have largely ceased to be considered. All in all, one Xanderite is by and large considered to be the same as any other Xanderite, barring differences in class.

Enikesa is a nation a long way away from the Xanderine Kingdom. As a result of conditions in Enikesa (perhaps caused by the Xanderine, perhaps not) many Enikesans have chosen to emigrate, and many of them to the Xanderine.

Enikesa is not a nation of white Christians.

The Xanderites are highly privileged with infrastructure, national wealth, and a generally higher wealth per capita than Enikesa.

The Xanderites take this for granted. They consider access to these resources a right. They consider the sameness of their folk a right. See, the thing about people is they desire to be normal. We all want to be considered normal, in some regard. We try to stand out, of course, but we wish for that not to alienate us. Humans are inherently social, and we crave that closeness, despising the distance we so frequently endure.

The Enikesans are not like the Xanderites. Their food burns too hot, their skin is far too dark, their women wear strange jewellery, their language has too many syllables, their worship is too loud, or perhaps too quiet. And they are poor, willing to work any job due to economic hardship, and slowly, as they arrive, they are more and more common in every day places, manning the cashiers and sweeping the streets. Some are successful, opening their own businesses and shops and restaurants.

Suddenly, the Xanderites are less normal.

Suddenly, they look around and see, not reflections of themselves, but Others.

Their privileges begin to shatter, as their infrastructure becomes oriented towards these others, their jobs are stolen by them, their food replaced by this foreign stuff.

Suddenly, Xanderine belongs not just to the Xanderites.

Of course, this is not what happens. This is what they see, as they lose exclusive privilege. Or, as they see it, as their rights are stolen by the Enikesans.

If someone came to your home and started sleeping in your living room, you’d be annoyed. If they took your money, or food, you’d be mad. If they imposed on your rights, you’d be furious.

Some people want you to the Xanderites to be angry at the Enikesans, because they know if they weren’t, they’d be angry at those in charge. And these people? They own the television channels, the newspapers, the media as a whole.

The narrative of rights being stolen is pushed, despite this not being truth. More and more Xanderites begin to believe their nation is under siege, and their rights are being leeched away, by this vampiric force of foreigners.

We know this is untrue. The Xanderine Kingdom is told otherwise. They believe the big lie.

And who screams loudest? Who is the strongest supporter of the Xanderites? Who fights hardest for their rights?

The right. The fascists. The nationalists. The racists.

If you see your home under attack, and the person most clearly on your side, you tend to side with them. You may not agree with them on everything, but they have your vote because they’re on your side. Who cares if they think your wife shouldn’t have bodily autonomy? They’ll get rid of the damn Enikesans, that’s what’s important! The swastika tattooed on their back does not matter, the dogwhistles sound far quieter, because as long as they’re on your side, you’ll forgive them their vices.

As long as the Nazi fights for you, you’ll fight for him.

And so otherwise reasonable people, infuriated by loss of “rights”, in a frenzy fueled by the media, are radicalised into movements they would never have thought they’d be aligned with.

Propaganda is a disease which can infect us all. Every single person can be radicalised, as long as their buttons are found.

The trouble with white men is their buttons are easy. Their privilege, that they see as a right, is so easily “under attack” that their buttons can be pushed. Once they’re in the pipeline, it’s easy. They just keep flowing further and further right, not bothering to swim against the current. Because if the current takes you towards your most staunch defender, why would you swim away?

White men are easy to radicalise, not because they are oppressed and search for freedom, but because they are blind to their privilege. Media manipulation and propaganda target their anger at these “injustices” towards desirable targets.

The wheel turns. Mr DarkStone, who owns 15 different newspapers on all sides of the political spectrum, isn’t fond of those homosexuals. It is no longer just the Enikesans ruining the country, but those degenerate queers! The wheel turns. It’s the youth, with their unruliness and anger! The wheel turns. The women and their promiscuity! The wheel turns. Those damned Muslims! The wheel turns.

And it keeps turning.

The funny thing is the privileges being lost? The actual rights being infringed upon? It’s by Mr DarkStone. It’s by Mr Ksum, and Mr Sozeb. It’s by the very people who direct anger at minorities, to distract from their theft and corruption, their ravaging of the world and the working class.

Everyone can be manipulated in the same way. Those with highest privilege are simply the easiest. When the playing field levels, and privilege gives way to equality, those who were highest up always feel the “fall” the most.

White men are easy to radicalise because they are privileged, and suddenly everyone else is getting a chance. They don’t like when the status quo starts to change.

In Kenya, the reason our protests don’t work is because of economic hardship. As previously discussed, people lack the economic power to prolong their protest and develop it into a true revolt. They must soon return to their daily lives in order to feed themselves. This is true in most countries, but especially in nations with high wealth gaps, high rates of poverty, low daily income, or other economic conditions which might make it difficult for long-term mobilisation of the working class. Essentially, the wealthier a person, the longer they are able to engage in non-labour activities, whether pleasure or protest.

This applies to first world countries as well, despite their higher wealth. But we’re not going to get into that. That point has been made, and it applies everywhere. Now, if people’s needs are met, they have little to no need to protest (sorta), and if their needs aren’t met, they struggle to find the capability to protest. This is an inherent part of capitalism as a system. This, like corruption and exploitation, is not a disease afflicting the system, but a symptom of the system itself.

Another reason people do not protest is fear of reprisal. This is often in the form of police action. Remember kids, the police are the occupying army of the dominant group of a given state (intentional Brennan reference). In less developed countries, the citizens lack access to advanced means of defence, but the police (sometimes) lack access to advanced means of offence, so it balances out nicely. Sometimes.

In the first world, they can know you will be at the protest before it begins, find your home, and send a drone to kill you before you set foot our your door. They don’t (usually), but they can. They can also use sonic weaponry to force you to move, send out advanced military grade vehicles and weapons, actual members of military, and of course toss in some good old fashioned tear gas and water cannons. They don’t (sometimes), but they can. Every military showcase becomes a reminder of who’s holding the stick.

Of course, the West does not have a monopoly on police brutality. It occurs everywhere. In states with higher rates of corruption, it simply is not punished, but even in states known for lower levels of corruption it is a crime which frequently goes unpunished (cough cough USA cough). So there’s that too. That’s nasty.

Now that that’s all settled, we can get into the juicier stuff.

There are in my mind three reasons why the Revolution (note the capital R) might not occur. Firstly is the increasingly unlikely explanation that everyone is happy and noone needs to protest. The actual reasons are that people either are against revolt, or those who are in favour of revolt lack the capability. In terms of leftistism, non-revolutionary socialists have some pretty valid reasons for being against revolt. Violence is always bad. That doesn’t mean it’s never the answer, simply that it’s the final answer because it must be weighed so heavily. And of course faith in a broken system, but we all cling to hope, I suppose, in one way or another.

Of those I have seen, only one of those reasons has truly stuck with me in an important manner, because violence sometimes is the answer. Sometimes you should use violent means to end an occupation, or an imperialist force, or a fascist government, and so on and so forth. Who would deny the oppressed their right to force from the earth those who dare deny them humanity? When we look on the history of colonialism, it’s final chapters are marked not by decrees of willing freedom by colonial powers, but by Kalashnikovs. The imperialist speaks but one language, that of violence, and can only be convinced by words he knows.

The reason that has stuck with me is this: when the Revolution comes about, people will suffer as government systems shut down and infrastructure halts. Hospitals need electricity to function, and many people need hospitals to live. Electricity doesn’t come without power plants. And who keeps the power plants running when the nation is mid-revolt? While the Revolution occurs, they will die, not as willing martyrs, but as collateral damage. The only acceptable amount of collateral damage is zero, hence why it doesn’t matter how many Hamas members are killed by the IOF because they have killed civilians in the process (this sentence only makes sense if we consider Israeli action as non-genocidal, so let us make space in our minds for a reality vastly different from our own, so that this poor little sentence my find a place to live). Any revolution with collateral is a revolution done badly. We can sit and justify the ends, but the means can never be come less evil.

The purpose here is not to argue for or against justification of these means, rather simply to bring it into the light, and to then understand why that light shines brighter for some than others. Because it truly does.

When the Revolution happens, infrastructure stops functioning. It may be only for a few minutes, it may be for months, but it stops, or at the very least slows down. So when the blackout starts, the cancer patients are on a time limit. The parent feeding their children through food stamps gets hungry. Anyone who is in any way reliant on governmental infrastructure to survive starts suffering.

See how the capitalist makes a weapon of the vulnerable?

See how the few benefits one can reap from the capitalist state becomes yet another human shield, another profit point for the wealthy?

See how they find more and more ways to rob you of your freedoms?

But what if there isn’t any infrastructure?

Much of the Global South lacks large scale infrastructure like this. This is often due to corruption, or due to lack of governmental wealth with which to fund it, due usually to corruption. When the Revolution comes, there is practically no infrastructure to halt. The people who would depend on the infrastructure have found other means, or they’re already dead.

Within the civilised realms of the West, one lives because of the infrastructure, the development, the “civilisation”. Within the Third World, one dies, because there is nothing, no “civilisation”. Of course lack thereof is due to neo-colonialism and imperialism by Western powers. These same powers, of course, hurt themselves in their hoarding, because now they are trapped by it. Imperialism hurts all. The Second World War was imperialism coming home to roost; a century later, we watch as it becomes the West’s undoing once more. Capitalism is a fire that burns everyone, some can just afford to stand further from the flames. The fires inevitably reach them, it just might take a bit longer.

Surrounded by the things they mark as symbols of their advancements, the West refuses to rise against its oppressors. The Revolution cannot happen without collateral. But there is somehow so much more collateral in the West, because the very reforms that free the people simply chain them anew. Partial shifts leftwards become exploitations, bugs in the code, ripe to exploit. The Revolution will not be civilised, because the civilised folk are unable to Revolt.

Only the uncivilised remain. And they are who revolt. Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Kenya, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines, all of the so-called “Gen Z Protests” across the world, occur outside of the West, in the uncivilised lands. Where they fail, the Global South succeeds. Decades of war against imperialism and colonialism, I suppose, has been a good teacher. We are beginning to remember the lessons.

Billionaires have a level of wealth that is far beyond exorbitant. A single person with enough money to last sixteen lifetimes of utter luxury is an abomination. It is unjust, inhumane, and a symptom of a failing society. The equation itself is as follows:

Wealth is made up of hoarded profit. Expenditure decreases wealth. If expenditure is lower than profit, wealth will increase. Expenditure increases in jumps. 10 dollars extra to profit isn’t going to lead to extra expenditure, but a thousand dollars extra profit will. This value increases as wealth does. To someone spending hundreds, dozens go a long way, but to someone spending millions, thousands aren’t going to get you very far. The higher the wealth, the higher the profit, and the higher the expenditure, and the higher the gap between expenditure and profit. This gap is what actually increases wealth. We’ll refer to it as gain.

Let’s shorten this a bit: Wealth is profit minus expenditure. If expenditure < profit, wealth increases. Expenditure increases with profit, but not at the same rate as profit. Wealth increases as profit increases. As wealth increases, the gap between profit and expenditure increases, so gain increases.

If we think about this for a moment, we’ll notice that it’s a positive feedback loop. As wealth increases, gain increases, and so wealth increases, and so on and on and on.

A former high school classmate of mine (mentioned previously) is quite pro-capitalist, and overall pretty right wing. Even he admitted that, at a certain point, expenditure stops increasing. This is because once you have everything you could ever need, you stop buying things. The profits don’t stop increasing, just the expenditure does. This is how hoards are created; wealth is amassed until gain increases in the same increments as profit.

The money stops being spent. It stays there, in a bank account or a wallet or a trust or whatever. It is stagnant. The spice must flow, and yet here a dam is built. Once the billionaire earns the money, noone else can, because it is out of circulation. Our handy dandy neat little diagram becomes this:

Every dollar that goes into that little box cannot be earned by anyone. It cannot be spent by anyone, cannot be invested, nothing. Water is siphoned from the river into a stagnant pool. The working class spend their time fighting over the ever dwindling river, unable to drink from the pool.

Ignoring all the exploitation needed to “earn” this amount of money, billionaires are bad for the economy. They are leeches. They disrupt it. They, essentially, steal, because for profit to be that high they’re either underpaying their workers or overcharging the consumers (or, as is often the case, both).

Once upon a time, there was a world. It was pristine... sort of. Things died, things exploded, a lot of the world was quite muddy, but ultimately, pristine. Because everything that happened (for the most part) was part of a system. The system corrected itself. If any one species grew to dominance, the balance would be restored in some way. Evolution was a constant arms race, each vying for dominance. It is rather absurd, isn’t it? Fighting for a victory that can never be achieved.

We are the victors. We have won. Humanity holds the world in its palm, a snow globe we shake at will. How we love to see the plastic snowflakes dance. I’ve heard human civilisation compared to a cancer, a thing that simply grows and grows until there is nothing left to grow into, regardless of the cost to all that surrounds it. I disagree with this. Because, where once there was a natural system, we have forged ourselves an artificial one. Despite the fact that we are the only beings who follow this system, all other systems have fallen, replaced by this one, ecological succession of system rather than biome. All living things dance to our tune, whether a frenzied waltz or a gentle bobbing of the head.

Evolution, ecology, “mother nature”, whatever you wish to call it, the concept of the environment as a self-balancing and self-sustaining system, is dead.

When an octopus’ tentacle, severed from the body, is placed in soy sauce, it contracts and thrashes about, searching for food to move to a mouth that is no longer there. It goes through the motions, suspended by artificial means, post-mortem death throes, but it is nevertheless dead.

That is what we still see. Collapsing ecosystems, evolutionary mechanisms failing, biodiversity falling like a moon over the horizon. It struggles to persist, but it cannot, not in the face of our gears and mechanisms.

Capitalism has robbed you of this:

A pristine world, unsullied by microplastics (its in your blood already) and fumes. Step out your door. There should be greenery and life, or perhaps the natural absence thereof as found in the desert. Not road, not streetlights, not houses. Of course, we do need somewhere to live, we earn that simply by being born. But we do not need mansions. We do not need processing plants the size of towns, soaking up all moisture, a sponge of ill intentions.

An ocean. Oh the ocean. To hear our ancestors speak of it, one can only imagine how vast it seemed to them, teeming with life. When all else failed, the ocean persisted, too close to the infinite to be sullied by us. Our waste falls to the floor of the deepest trenches. Our oil coats the meeting of the sky and sea. We do not need this, yet we have it. Greed keeps drilling.

My parents remember insects splattering on the windscreen of their cars. I do not. You are robbed of insects, of chirping in the night, of the balancing act between their populations.

Oh and of course, let’s not forget the artificial. They create things and then steal them from you. How can a human, made in the image of God, born of millions of years of evolution, a living being, die of preventable disease? Of starvation? Of drought? Every preventable death is a life stolen by their greed.

Ah, but they gave us such innovations! The surveillance state in your pocket, the propaganda pissing down on you (rain, I believe they call it) when you turn on a screen, the slop they call food (guess who profits from unhealthy eating habits), death coated in metal flung at whoever they label an enemy. What gifts they give us, in exchange for our losses.

Outside. Being outside, with your friends, whether as a child or adult. The outside is becoming more and more their realm. Billboards point us towards the neon gods they bid us worship, logos and marketing campaigns they sacrifice to in ritual. Pavement and anti-homeless architecture (which, if we think about it for more than a few seconds, is one of the worst two word combinations out there) and police and CCTV and where do you go now the smog and filth of their “innovation” clouds any routes away from this nightmare.

But we do have a voice! Democracy! Red pill or blue pill, which will it be? They’re the same pill, they just list the differences (our pill has salt, theirs has sodium chloride!) and hope (know) you won’t see through it. What does voting mean when whoever is put in charge is owned by one corporation or another? You don’t vote for them. They install themselves, and you vote for one of their puppets.

You can always protest. Except that they’ll tear gas you. And shoot you. And arrest your family. And surveil you throughout (Gaza is just the training ground for Palantir, remember who the real targets are) and then arrest you. And take your job. Oh and if you protest you aren’t working; this is not profitable to them, so they have to make it harder for you to not work by paying you less so you can’t afford the time off. You may protest, but you can’t.

You have been robbed. They have taken everything. Anything they can take and sell they have, whether clothing or flesh. They cut it from your bones. Often you buy it back (Nestlé).

Who fights their wars? Who labours under them? Who provides them with the source of all they have? Not them. Not their skill, their wit. Their money, our labour.

The wealthy have robbed you. Every dollar they own is a dollar you won’t. Every child that starves is because they refuse to share their feast. Every person that dies from diabetes dies because they own the insulin.

Be fucking angry. Become rage. How fucking dare they. And they grin and laugh about it, knowing what they do. The only thing worse than a killer is a happy killer. They act like they own you, like you are cattle for them to buy and sell with their social media tracking and overpriced drugs and for-profit addictions. Be angrier. A yacht drifts through an ocean. 50 metres away, a turtle chokes on the plastic they allowed to enter the sea, because plastic is cheaper and lets them earn more. Are you angrier? Be angrier than that. They sit upon a dragon hoard of wealth, able to buy anything and everything they could ever desire a dozen times over. Next door, a family is evicted from a house (they’re the wrong race for this particular government, or they’re late on a payment, or they’re homeless and have found somewhere to squat in because God its cold outside). Angrier. And angrier. There is no amount that is too much.

In Nepal, they burnt down the parliament. Ask yourself why you haven’t done the same yet. It better be a fucking good reason.

As a result, chemical reactions which could not normally take place, now can. The entropy of the outside world, the temperature, none of it is now mathematically relevant. We can create our own equations, our own formulae, and form what otherwise could not be. Suddenly, the chemicals need not concern themselves with everything, merely what is in this compartment. And that makes things far, far easier. The chemical reactions happen and continue to happen. They exist and continue to, sustaining themselves. With each new life, a new compartment made of compartments made of compartments is formed, and the reaction continues. Self-sustaining.

Without the compartment that is the cell, cellular reactions necessary for life cannot occur. As long as that wall, that fortress, holds, life can continue. And continue it does. Because life is made of everything that came before. And everything that comes after is made of what is now. That is life. That is reality. It continues, forever, into eternity. Hence the cyclic nature of biological processes. The tendency to repeat is not merely a habit of biology, but the very fibre of its being.

So all life is “mere” chemical reaction. Yours, mine, his, hers, theirs, its, all life. All that is before and all that is after is a part of this. Whether God had a hand in this or not, this is the truth. Faith has nothing to do with it. Knowledge and faith go hand in hand in the same way that fire longs for the embrace of water; it does not. Faith is belief, and rebels against knowledge. Its entire purpose, its entire being, is that of anti-knowledge. Not ignorance, nor stupidity, those are simply lack of knowledge and wisdom. Faith is born of belief despite a lack of evidence, and that has purity, but it has no place in this equation. It is not a part of the equation we write here, nor that the universe has written for us. The reaction occurs, with or without a god or God. That is life. The reaction.

Faith fills the gaps. Faith provides the cause, knowledge provides the effect. Science, in its infinite time and wisdom, cannot grant us cause. The cause of anything is merely the effect of another, not in a loop biting its own tail, but a spiral, going further and further down to where we cannot see. Faith fills that gap, gives us sight where we are blind, and promises us cause. But what if there is no faith?

For a moment, let us pretend God exists for certainty. The Abrahamic God, of omnipotence and omnipresence and omniscience, and benevolence above all. The facts tell us we are a reaction; faith tells us God is the cause. But that provides no purpose to us, beyond that which man has interpreted to us. And man is fallible. The word of God has been filtered and sanded, burnt and remade, a ship worthy of Theseus. Fundamentally, little changes. We remain but reactions, created by God or not.

And we begin our individual reactions (how false that is, to believe ourselves individual) aimless, blind. We lack purpose from birth.

We are compartments for the reaction, ecosystems for the other systems to have their parts of the reaction. What separates us, then? We are all equally system and reaction. We all are born and all die. The same beginning, the same end. What differentiates us?

A sandwich is what it is not because of the bread on either side, that merely makes it a sandwich. It is the sandwich it is because of what is inside, whether ham and cheese or bacon, lettuce, and tomato. The middle is what counts.

The middle is equal. Always it is a sandwich. Some may like one type more than the other, chicken rather than steak, but objectively, their worth is simply that of a sandwich.

Our worth is equal. We all are born and all die. Our middles differ but begin equally in terms of origin; all is born of the same reaction. We are all part of the equation. Everything that came before you lead to you, do you know that? Every action, every choice, led to you. You are special. We are all equally special in that regard. And when the universe stops moving, when the energy is equal, when it attains heat death? The exact arrangement of particles will be affected by you. You have that power. You do. You.

But what’s the point of that? There isn’t one. Now we can get started. Almost.

We are all equally worthless. We are all born of the same reaction, we all have equal impact on the final arrangement, on entropy, on the heat death. And we are all born aimless and purposeless, lost in a sea of uncaring stars in a universe that seeks only entropy. Noone matters. But we all don’t matter equally.

If we are all inherently equal in our pointlessness, all we may do is equally worthwhile. The gap between zero and zero is another zero. Every action is equally without cause. Every decision is equally wasteful. So each matters just as much. Nothing matters, so everything matters as little, so it is all oh so important.

In the face of pointlessness, we roll our boulders up the hill. We keep going. And we make ourselves a purpose.

The universe does not care for you. It cannot. It longs for heat death, for entropy to take its hold over all and blanket it in infinite stagnation. You live in defiance of this. You alter the shape of the blanket. Stand tall, filled with spite and wrath, and rage against it. Burn yourself to death with the fires of your passions. Let the answer to the endless equation be written in your hand, let the final arrangement of particles spell out your life and your indignation at a universe like this. Find a purpose, and let it guide you through the reaction, until entropy takes you. And when you die, remember that your particles remain, at one with the universe as ever, absorbed and filtered and recycled and reused. Decay is an extant form of life. The chemical difference between life and death is nothing. You don’t die, you just change.

But back to purpose. We have none but that which we give ourselves. Some wish to heal, some to build, some to clean, some to cook. We each choose what we wish to do.

And if each purpose stems from an equal worthlessness, then each purpose is equally worthwhile, equally meaningful. Difference between two zeroes. Whatever you do is equal to whatever I may do which is equal to whatever any other may do, for none of it matters, and so it all matters so, so much. Your arts and crafts matter, and your cousin’s medical degree, and your neighbour's brewery, and your friend’s mushrooms. They all matter. So, so much.

Therefore every person’s purpose deserves to be met. Whatever your purpose is, functional or not, profitable or not, it is worthy of you, of life, of attention, of care. The ideal world is one in which every individual can carry out their individual purpose without inhibiting the purposes of others. That is the utopia, Omelas without a suffering child, Atlantis without the rising sea, Arcadia with no ego.

We must strive to this world, where each has their purpose. Not everyone finds theirs, not everyone fulfills theirs. Every person is equally deserving of whatever their purpose may be. Every person deserves to have the means, the capability, to follow their purpose. Only when the world is such that we are all free to follow our purpose, whatever we may forge it into, can we truly be how we need to be, what we need to be. I recall again the falling angel meeting the rising ape; this is how we meet.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is a phrase I hold dear to my heart. The boulder rolls, no matter what. Find what it is that drives you to keep pushing, to keep rolling, no matter how high the hill. Seek out that which may make you grin even when the boulder is heaviest, and which grants you relief when you inch upwards.

Before I begin, I want to say this: I believe out of everything I’ve written and posted, this is the first that is critical of Israel. This does not sit right with me, as I should have been writing critically of Israel much earlier. Although I guess any critique of neo-liberalism inherently critiques Israel as well, but I digress. Without further ado, let’s get started. (Warning: There will, as always, be further ado. Apologies in advance.)

Too many people have died. This is a very cold take, and can be applied to just about any conflict, but a truism is just that, true. Far, far too many lives have been lost fighting for freedom, for rights, for happiness. And far too many others fighting for oppression, and restriction, and control. Because let’s be honest, it’s almost as bad to die fighting for the bad guys than fighting against them. Almost.

In the thousands of years of recorded history, we see evidence of a permanent struggle. For some reason, we gravitate towards a state of being in which one group is beneath another, and noone likes being the latter. So naturally, we struggle to rise up, just as we struggle to push down. Pratchett’s description of humanity as “the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape” seems fitting (though he meant it in a different manner to how I now frame it); we struggle constantly to meet that sweet spot where noone needs to rise, and noone needs to fall, and all is good and peaceful. Strangely, we have yet to reach that point insofar as I am aware.

I wonder which system of political and economic ideology is responsible for this. I guess we’ll never know. I’m not one to talk about such things.

Whether we are of the wrong race or gender or ethnicity or sexuality or simply not blond, we always find new reasons to oppress ourselves. But something’s gotta give. You live on your knees until they collapse, or you stand up. Either the oppressed break, or they rise up. And how do they rise up! Revolutions are as plentiful in history as flies around a carcass. A fitting image, in my mind; oppression likened to a rotting corpse makes it seem far more fallible than it has thus far proven to be.

But war never changes, and history is a cruel comedian indeed. A third Pratchett reference: They always come around. That’s why they’re called revolutions.

We never seem to get anywhere. Which makes the struggle seem worthless. But we must persevere. We must persist in rolling the boulder up the hill, because maybe we will reach it this time. Not just because Camus said so, not just because Marx and Christ promised us a utopia, not just because our children deserve a better world, not just because we do. But because we owe it to all who came before. We owe it to the martyrs, may they live long.

Anyone who has died for a cause is a martyr. Every slain protestor, fighting for a better future, is a martyr. Every soldier of the revolution is, whether a literal soldier or not. Those who sacrificed themselves for something bigger, who willingly surrendered their life, they are our martyrs. We fight for them, to give their sacrifices meaning. In the hopes that the same will be done for us. Because I would rather they die for an eventual utopia than die for nothing but a dream.

These are the martyrs I write of. Let them live long.

I write also of those who did not martyr themselves, but who we nevertheless fight for. I speak of

I’ll stop there for a moment. Shameful as it is to admit, I forgot the name of a girl, killed by Israeli soldiers while trapped in a car alongside her parents’ corpses. I forgot her name. And I do not know the names of countless other innocents, who did not sacrifice themselves, but were forced to the slaughter, dying for a battle they did not fight. And as I searched for her name (Hind Rajab, I remember now), I see other articles. Other Palestinian girls, killed by Israeli snipers and soldiers. The articles are spread across 2025 and 2024. This is not an isolated incident. Others suffered the same fate as her, targeted killing. We do not know all their names. But they are the martyrs we fight for. Because we deserve damnation if we cease fighting, after a child’s life has been taken.

We do not know the name of every martyr. I cannot tell you the names of the child slaves in West Africa, the miners working in horrid conditions in Congo, the countless dead from toxic chemicals used for mining in Senegal. I do not know the names of those killed by CIA-backed coups in a dozen countries, nor those murdered by Kenyan police, nor those tortured to death in Israel and Myanmar. I do not know the names of the Jewish people killed in the Holocaust, nor those of the wrong sexuality, skin colour, or ethnicity, and all the other “Undesirables.” I cannot name the victims of slavery and colonialism, of fascism and oppression, of humanity at its worst.

Their names matter. We should know them. They should never have died, but they are dead, and they are now the martyrs we must fight for. The martyrs who did not martyr themselves, they are the most important. A child’s death can never be justified, but a world which can look past it is far worse than a world which learns from this death. A world in which Israel and Myanmar commits genocide, where police commit brutality on the streets of half the world, where we throw money at corporations with unsafe practices, where we allow discrimination of any kind, that is not the world I wish to live in. If, at the very least, we can say things have gotten better since their deaths, perhaps then we can seek some absolution from the historians of the future. We fight for the martyrs, because otherwise their deaths are horrific and meaningless, rather than simply horrific.

Israel has killed tens of thousands since October 7th, 2023. Martyrs have been made by police around the world, by fascists in the West, by neo-colonialism, by hate and discrimination, by soldiers and civilians. I cannot list all the conflicts, all the struggles. I could speak for days and not be done listing them. I speak of every struggle against oppression, every struggle for freedom, every struggle against chains, every revolution against life on bent knees. The martyrs remain. Their deaths cannot be in vain. We owe that much, and far more, to their memories, to their families, to them. That they were martyred in the first place is tragedy enough without the cause of their deaths persisting.

I see a man, older than me. Far, far older. My father. I can tell, because that is father. Papa. Who else could it be? He is squatting, his green eyes level with mine, and he smiles. His voice is lost to time, but I know his words, or at least what he meant. I grin to myself, in the memory and in the present, overjoyed at his pride. I swallow. The memory fades as the chewed up mass flows into my gut.

Another bite. And another. And another. And another.

A girl, my friend, oh I’ve known her for so long. Flavours whirl around me. She is crying, because her mother isn’t doing a good job of it, and what can I do but be there, a shoulder for her to cry on, as she would do for me, as she has. It tastes as though the world has been leached of all evil and all that remains is now within my palate. Another girl, my girlfriend, who I love so much, the joy of my life, my anchor to life. My body shivers with pleasure at the beauty of the taste. The same girl, the friend, pretending not to see the tears in my eyes as I talk about the rage inside at my girlfriend and her actions and what she does. Tears flow freely now, revelling in the ecstasy of the flavours. A phone call, after dinner, hand no longer bleeding but bruised and torn, ready for the scars that will surely remain, mouth tasting of blood and torn lip, finally ending what should never have started, pretending to ignore her tears as we part ways, turning off the phone so she can’t keep calling me. I almost collapse, legs weak from the overwhelming spiral of flavour.

I must move forward, I’m running out of stuff to eat here. My six limbs carry me forward, and my mandibles close around another hunk of pure flavour. Divine. So, so divine.

//

I am so deep in it that I can scarcely move but to go forward for more. A mouthful. Delicious, but somehow less so than previously. I hear a friend’s laughter, and I respond in kind, for the smoke has addled our senses and everything is just so, so hilarious. This portion is quite tough, and my mouth struggles with it. Another friend watches on, grinning at the contrast between his sobriety and our lack thereof. Swallow.

More. I want more. I wriggle forth, squeezing my limbless form deeper into this delicious matter, pink with flavour. A dog jumps onto my bed, excited that I have at last awoken. Another mouthful. The sun shines here, but I can see the clouds over the sea, rushing towards me. Another. The song fills my mind, headphones far too loud for my frail ears, but the whine of the guitar drowns out my concern. This portion is softer, easier to eat. I stand, cheering for my sister as she graduates, towering over the seated masses around me.

I continue like this for hours and hours, working my way through this fountain of sweet and savoury and sour and bitter and spicy and richness.

//

The dirt does not consume. It merely covers, providing a medium for the others to move through. Liquid flows from the matter, seeping into the dirt, providing an appetizer to any who might stumble inwards.

//

Hyphae wrap around the matter, absorbing it. Fungal minds of mycelium spark electric signals across the network, electrons flowing from the car swerving around a pothole as it goes too fast pages turning in hand cloth on skin nausea radiating across the body smoke filling the lungs as the neighbour’s house burns into the network.

//

The mosaic fractures, again and again, as the insects and invertebrates and fungi, all the detritivores, leach nourishment from the flesh, from the pink matter, from the filling of the bone. All the flavours combined would form a symphony of life, contained in this coffin, but the rot tears it apart piece by piece, and cannot see how it all fills the flesh from the mind.

Let’s begin with the “Circular Economy” (bullshit). We learnt this in middle school; what it boils down to is households pay money for goods and services, businesses provide these goods and services, businesses use the money earned through these transactions to pay workers, who in turn provide money for their households with which to buy the aforementioned goods and services. Here’s a handy diagram:

So in theory, the economy just sort of keeps going. Businesses keep paying wages, households keep buying stuff from the businesses, giving businesses money, which let’s them pay wages. This is where profit comes in. Some of the money businesses earn is not paid in wages to the workers (proletariat), but rather becomes profit, which the business owners (capitalists) keep for themselves or which are invested into the business as an entity. So the worker earns $10, spends $5 of that on buying goods from a business. $3 of that is then paid to the workers of the business, while $2 is profit. The business owner uses this profit to pay for their needs, so this money then goes back into the economy to other businesses which sell different goods and services.

Here’s where billionaires come in. Billionaires are (by God-given-right or pure business skill or whatever) able to earn enough profit that they spend less than they earn, thereby saving money somewhere. This money can then be used to buy more expensive goods and services, like fancy cars, oversized yachts, etc., thereby going back into the cycle because it’s spent on a business. Except this doesn’t happen with billionaires, because they have so much money they can’t possibly spend it all. Let’s put a pin in that for now, so we can talk about exploitation.

There are no ethical billionaires. Wealth is either earned or inherited. Inherited wealth is… sort of ethical? Because I didn’t personally exploit child labourers in Congo, I just inherited the blood money. But the earning of the money is always bad. It isn’t possible to ethically earn that amount of money. If your business is earning profits of that size, the workers should be paid more. If it’s being squeezed to produce that amount of money, workers aren’t being paid enough, or are working in inhumane working conditions, or the product itself is of bad (or even dangerous) quality.

To earn this kind of wealth is genuinely, unspeakably, insane. It is more wealth than can be spent in a lifetime. And that’s just one billion. Not 100 billion. 1. One. Une. Ein. Moja. A hundred lifetimes would not be enough to spend the wealth that people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos accumulate. Not even close. We’ll do the math on that in a second, because the title of the post does have the word equation after all.

And then to sit with it. All that wealth. A dragon hoard of bonds and stocks and dollars. While people starve, and die, and fight, over resources you could simply give them. What a fucking bastard you have to be. What a fucking cunt.

Hear that? That sound means it’s time for our math section!

Here’s a handy dandy neat little diagram illustrating wealth accumulation (I made it myself):

Business gives billionaire money (profit). Billionaire spends money (expenditure). Expenditure is less than profit by a large margin, so money piles up. As time passes, wealth increases. Therefore, as long as expenditure<profit, the billionaire continues to make money. Wealth accumulates, because it isn’t spent.

Now it’s time for the math, oh boy!

We’re going to use the USA for our data, just because. Average monthly expenditure for a single person is ~$6500 as of 2023, so a total of ~$78,000 a year. Another site gave $77,280 as the yearly average. So let’s use this.

Actually, no. Let’s round it up, then double it. $160,000 per year.

Let’s fucking triple it. $240,000 per year.

It would take four years before you’re even close to a billion dollars in expenditure.

Average life expectancy in the USA is 78 years according to the WHO. Let’s use their stat for women, despite women being underrepresented in the billionaires (#diversityloss), which is around 80 years. That amounts to roughly $19 billion in a lifetime, given an average expenditure that’s triple that of a single person in the USA, on average, which we can assume is sufficient expenditure for a pretty lavish lifestyle. In fact, it’s more than double the expenditure of a family of four according to that first website. So it’s enough to pay for two families of four to stay alive, with a pretty solid bit of extra on top.

Let’s round up to 20. Billion. Dollars. In a lifetime. Living lavishly. Let’s tack on an extra 5 billion to that, so it’s a neater figure. 25 billion dollars is more than enough to live a life most of the world can only dream of.

Elon Musk’s networth, at the time of writing, according to Forbes, is four. Hundred. And eighteen. Billion. This is after it’s dropped almost a billion dollars, by the way.

$418. Billion.

This Nazi motherfucker, this cunt machine, this spoilt son of an emerald baron, this absolute shitpile of a human being, who fucks anything that moves, this transphobic piece of utter human fucking garbage, this piece of shit has enough money to live the most lavish of lifestyles for sixteen fucking lifetimes.

Moving on swiftly, before I genuinely crash out from thinking about it any more:

Billionaires are bad because they cannot possibly spend all that money. Once it’s in their pocket, it stays there. It removes money from the economy, so everyone else has to scrounge over the leftovers. They swim in pools of money, too full to fathom, while the rest drown in seas of debt and crushing poverty. They inherently make life harder for everyone else.

I’m deep in the hull of some enormous vessel, wandering its narrow passages of black steel and rust. Something tells me I’ve been here a long time, endlessly descending into dead ends, turning around to find other ways which in the end lead only to still more ends. // I choose instead to wander these cramped routes which in spite of their ability to lose me still retain in every turn an almost indiscreet sense of familiarity. It’s as if I know the way perfectly but I walk them to forget. // Suddenly I sense for the first time ever, the presence of another. I quicken my pace, not quite running but close. I am either glad, startled or terrified, but before I can figure out which I complete two quick turns and there he is, this drunken frat boy wearing a plum-colored Topha Beta sweatshirt, carrying the lid of a garbage can in his right hand and a large fireman’s ax in his left. // “Excuse me, mind explaining why you’re coming after me?” which I actually try to say except the words don’t come out right. More like grunts and clouds, big clouds of steam. That’s when I notice my hands. They look melted, as if they were made of plastic and had been dipped in boiling oil, only they’re not plastic, they’re the thin effects of skin which have in fact been dipped in boiling oil. // I’m here because I am deformed, because when I speak my words come out in cracks and groans, and what’s more I’ve been put here by an old man, a dead man, by one who called me son though he was not my father. // he intends to drive that heavy blade into my skull, across the bridge of my nose, cleave the roof of my mouth, the core of my brain, split apart the very vertebrae in my neck, and he won’t stop there either. He’ll hack my hands from my wrists, my thighs from my knees, pry out my sternum and hammer it into tiny fragments. He’ll do the same to my toes and my fingers and he’ll even pop my eyes with the butt of the handle and then with the heal of the blade attempt to crush my teeth, despite the fact that they’re long, serrated and unusually strong. // In fact maybe that’s why Thumper had called me, because this exquisite looking woman had out of the blue spoken my name. // me chopped up into tiny pieces, spread and splattered in the bowels of that ship, and all at the hands of a drunken frat boy who upon beholding his heroic deed pukes all over what’s left of me // for the first time, I have a choice: I don’t have to die, I can kill him instead. // her face glows with adoration and warmth and her eyes communicate in a blink an understanding of all the gestures I’ve ever made, all the thoughts I’ve ever had // the ax she still holds, the ax she is now lifting // while I’m bleeding and dying, which now doesn’t compare at all to the feeling inside, also so familiar, as the atriums of my heart on their own accord suddenly rupture, like my father’s ruptured // at least, at last, it will put an end to the far more terrible ache inside me, born decades ago, long before I finally beheld in a dream the face and meaning of my horror.