There are so many things to talk about right now, and I really feel like talking about none of them. They are all deeply important but there’s just too much heaviness right now, and I feel like trying to get above it for some air. It seems like all the issues that are on the minds of people right now, from Ferguson to Gaza, divide along the lines of micro and macro perspectives. Some want to focus on individual accountability and others want to talk of systemic accountability. I’m always after at the spot between the two.
What do these perspectives share? What, if anything, is a prevailing attitude that can be found on both levels of day-to-day life that we know and the philosophical realm of observing our institutions and how they function as macro-entities? The prevailing attitude of our culture, I would argue, is one of instant gratification. It bleeds into all of our ways of life. I think we all get that about our consumer culture immediately. We want high-speed internet, fast food, express lanes, pay at the pump, EZ Pass: so much is engineered to give us the sense that we are saving time and getting what we want as quickly as possible. The whole joke that gets tossed around about “first world problems” is usually anchored in this idea. We get mad at our phones or pissed off because our sandwich isn’t exactly the way we wanted it. But, is this true of the impoverished of our first world too? We are mostly a first world nation, but not all people of this country belong to that moniker. Surely, drugs and crime could be categorized as instant gratification and it is rampant in impoverished areas, but I think this is where we need to stop and think for a second.
Let’s return there after my point about instant gratification at the macro-level. There are many who look out at the gross injustice of the world, the collusion of government and capitalism, the lack of social service, the shady dealings of the financial sector, and they connect the dots to see a grand conspiracy designed to extract wealth from the masses, cause social unrest, flood our minds with misinformation, and generally speaking, work toward a kind of global totalitarian dominance. When one adds to this the aggressive military stance of the United States and the recent revelations about the NSA, it is god damned hard to not see it this way. But maybe it’s slightly more nuanced. Terence McKenna once said, “The real truth of the matter, the real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control.” I like this idea. Some would maybe say that it’s cowardly to like this idea, that I’m not facing the facts. But, really, those facts are never really facts. All those dots always lie just shy of connecting, so maybe we are missing something in the forest through the trees, so to speak.
When we indulge in conspiracy theory, we are seeking narrative. Our world relies on narrative. We must make a logical story out of everything. Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? These are the prime elements of satisfactory truth for our world. Even as I try to peek above it right now, I can’t entirely transcend it. I can paint you a picture of the wall that exists, but that won’t lift you over it. “Don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.” What if everything is as nonsensical as our own lives, both inner and outer, but maybe even especially inner. When we indulge in conspiracy theory, we separate the conspirators from our world. There may be echelons of wealth and power that I will never understand, in the same way that some exist below the margins of the first world, maybe some exist above it. The .5th world, I guess. But, there’s something wrong with this idea. It’s too supervillain-esque. It deifies those with power, even if they wind up as some kind of demonic demiurge.
Is it ever really like that though? Every time a corporation decides to plow down a rainforest, it’s because someone, somebody, some individual looked at a proposed profit and decided to take that instant gratification and forsake the health of the planet and the greater good. The same is true of mortgage fraud and insider trading and backroom government deals and funneling money into the military and stealing natural resources from third world countries. Those individual choices based on individual desire, based on an individual notion of what it means to be successful, what it means to survive or thrive, create a mounting force. That force I think can be described as tiny vibrations that keep on multiplying. The jeweled net of Indra also works as a metaphor here. Indra’s net is said to have a jewel at the center of each link of the net. Each individual jewel contains a reflection of every other jewel. This is how culture works. Each tiny little individual vibration affects each other individual. Some individuals echo that vibration, maybe at different octaves or different keys, but at some point, the individual vibrations become one larger vibration. We call it the status quo, the zeitgeist, the paradigm. It’s the net. It is a larger entity born out of smaller acts. We are helplessly trapped inside this structure because too many do not understand how it works. Without understanding its functionality we can’t perform maintenance.
With this view, the impoverished of America look like the runoff of instant gratification. As you move further outward, further from the epicenter, you find all of Earth affected by the way America operates on instant gratification. Farmers, factory workers, fish, birds, animals of all kinds, heads of state, heads of religious orders, all have been touched by and seem to be oriented by this profound force. So my point is this ultimately: instant gratification is not a sustainable way of life. We need to look no further than our own fellow citizens to see its ramifications. We need a new way of life. The irony is that I think the only way this could possibly happen is to remove the sense of individuality from our perspective. We are not alone. We are not even separate from the Earth. We must recode our thoughts and language. We must step back and regain humility and commonality. We must demand this of ourselves and each other.
