Dry humor, or wet seriousness for the new year #4: Hold everyone’s hand, Part 2

 

I imagine a nicer world where no one respects what anyone else thinks. Absence of the hypnotic consensus that has perennially gotten the world in trouble. Some philos­opher writes about the significance of Beauty or about Morality as duty, and we’d think: “Why should we care about that person’s ideas? I will conceive my own.” A physi­cist derives, from theoretical mathematics, some fantasy about super­string’s eleven dimen­sions, and we laugh: “Thanks for the joke.” Nix the musi­cian who assumed the legitimacy of punk rock – which arose from some neurotic camps’ mindless acceptance of some rebel-without-a-clue’s defiant mood – then branched off from it to create something even more false-derivative and effete. It tickles your fancy – that’s nice. But then you commit the error of joining a Stepford community that wants to believe there is some­ cultural value to the latest artifice.

Picture these independent souls in this new world! No slave-chains of assump­tion, no fanatical beliefs rammed up a mass rectum, no mobs, no movements, no genocides. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck claim, boobs that they were, that we feel because we think, and listeners say “Forget that. I can see in myself that’s not true.” Boys and men don’t have the macho attitude, which they would never have accepted after mid-adolescence. No one loves and believes and follows a Hitler or Trump botch.

What makes human beings’ urge to live the collective, the groupthink, a passiv­ity where there might instead be pause and consideration and the originality that is the essence of the human? Psycho­path­ology is the fundamental cause. A child must grow in the parents’ soil and may never, then, be strong enough to deeply question their gift of poi­son. Her mind and feeling core in hiber­nation, she will no longer be the “central actor”* of her life. Others’ thoughts will become her ground, her authority.

There is really little humor here, dry or otherwise. Our species has a second nature, as deep as the first, of the hive mind. Hundreds of thousands standing together falling to limitless siren calls. “U.S. criticizes Israel,” as if entities instead of individuals exist. A majority of Republicans, slaves of Oz, reject reality, reject their minds, which is the meaning of their lockstep delusion about the election. Are we all one? Is there a universal common bond? The idea has long been implicit, but I believe it needs to be rethought, down to the marrow.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/10/spartacus-was-odd-oppositional-defiant.html. Footnote.