There are a lot of optimists sleep-walking through life. Some realists who are too aware for their own good. And fewer sociopaths who believe in neither and rule over both. They play the optimists to drive consumption and they humor the realists for entertainment. And the gravy train keeps chugging along into a nuclear sunset of inevitable disaster.
Floods, food shortages, locust swarms and a pandemic. Scientists and statisticians seem to be the only ones who are not surprised. Being a rationalist is the most cruel of fates. You spend your whole life screaming at deaf people behind a glass window. Even if they vaguely understand your message, they don’t like the tone.
During the Lockdown and now coming out of it into even more danger, people seem to only have one frequency: ‘Let’s stay positive’. Positive thinking is what got us here in the first place. All the mining and driving and eating and discarding and wander lusting to no end, not even individual satisfaction. The amount of entitlement it takes ‘stay positive’ in June 2020 can only come from sociopathy or complete illiteracy. This; of course, means spiritual illiteracy. Academic literacy as we have seen can make a person even more dangerous.
Even if one is not scientifically inclined or not even conscientious it is abundantly clear that each one of us is taking a lot more out of the earth than giving back to it. How positive does one have to be to think this will somehow work out? Systems are designed for profits but most purchase decisions are still personal.
The Pandemic was born out of 3 sins:
1. We let China build a brutal opaque dictatorship as long as we got to do good business with them.
2. Mindlessly dizzying travel and recreation. Do people really need to fly over several European countries every weekend to see football matches?
3. Criminally under-funded healthcare systems that serve only the privileged and that too at a premium.
Profiteering has reached such heights that further growth can only come from erosion of human rights. Yet it took a pandemic for many of us to realise the extent of poverty in this country. And hopefully even the extent of our privilege. Yet we won’t sit in the luxury of our homes, we cannot sit still even for a few moments. Something inside us always feels incomplete and jumpy and somehow you know it will always feel that way. But we keep trying the same things, tranquilizing it with most dangerous of substances: Denial; often marketed as Positive Thinking.
Unlock is essentially a tacit understanding between the dealers and the junkies to have a little fun while it lasts. Let the old and weak perish…for profits; often marketed as ‘The Greater Good’. Of course, people have to get back to work, to earn money and man is a social animal, still somehow socialism never works.
But even in the unlikely event that the lost world of Louis Vuittons and Ducatis and Swiss Holidays comes back — If you have somehow escaped any major misfortune thus far in your life with a rare mix of privilege and positive thinking — you will still feel jittery and incomplete. Because you have not embraced the totality of human experience. Suffering and despair are a big part of life, perhaps the most meaningful part. But your motivational gurus and overlords will not allow you the dignity of even acknowledging reality and how dire things actually are. And you can’t even blame them. Positive Thinking is a fragile illusion, you have to work full time to maintain it.
