[502] Hate By Any Other Name

Is there a single, more motivating,
more prevalent, and more accurate assessment of why humans do
anything than out of hatred? Know that I ask this sincerely, and am
not just trying to stick with some theme for the sake of it. When the
tides feel like they’re turning and the world you knew starts to
become unrecognizable, I feel I must argue that it started with hate.
While the only truth may be change, the more significant facts seem
related to what accelerated or provoked that change. I’ll argue
two-fold; I’ll describe why I think it’s hatred, and I’ll speak
against those who would claim it’s about love.

I want to add an initial caveat. For
the sake of this argument, I’m forgoing any presumptions about
“balance.” I think it’s an artful word often employed to swallow
bullshit. Anyone who wants to point to the grayness of life and
decision making, needlessly leaning on “how complicated it all is”
or the amount of give and take involved I’m not going to find
persuasive if merely asserting that is the extent of your
argument.

So, as I often do, I want to give examples big and
small and hopefully throughout history. For a small example, consider
weight, both loss and gain. For me, when it comes to loss, I’m never
more motivated than when I think about how much I hate and constantly
make fun of ridiculously out of shape or gargantuan people. Claims
about my immaturity or civility aside, all I have to do is think of
each successive pound gained and the amount of things I’m ignoring,
forgoing, or hating about myself to get that large in order to zap
away my sympathies. I don’t mean to unfairly clump moms, people with
conditions, or the otherwise basically healthy person who finds
themselves gaining as they get old.

For the above, I consider
culture. Why is it when an area adopts a “western diet” do they
start to die earlier, find all forms of disease they never had, and
help contribute to the destruction of the environment? Is it because
“they absolutely love
shitty food?” It’s an easy way to state the problem, absolutely.
It’s a way to overburden our sensory reward systems and make it sound
like a good thing. But what’s really happened? I would argue, some
executive and dialogue concerning profits and the free market are
held in greater esteem than a concern for humanity or the planet.
Someone hates you. Someone with significantly more power and
influence than you can appreciate has shaped us into translating
their hatred into lovable language regarding your preferences and
presumed decision making.

Now, you get to love being fat while
pretending and ignoring just how much you probably really hate it.
You hate knowing that people like me can tell non-stop fat jokes for
hours. You hate breathing hard. You hate worrying about your health
or taking it for granted that you’ll be dead a little sooner anyway
and won’t have to worry for as long. You rely on the language
concerning sabotaged “choices” to both reinforce your sense of
ownership of your circumstances and distancing yourself from notions
of anyone behind the curtain.

This bridges neatly into a
discussion about capitalism and the free-market. It’s a religion by
any other name. Companies hate losing money more than they like to
put on some shiny veneer about some “revolutionary” and
“necessary” new gadget or food. They hate competition. They hate
notions of equality and sharing. They’ll, to their dying breath,
espouse the “morals” and “freedoms” that you lose by not
having big corporate brother to dictate what belongs in your home or
body. The Hayek or Friedman ideologues who, even when given the
chance to run their neoliberal experiments, ignore the human
suffering caused because they can’t own and be honest about the
amount of hatred they have about losing their station.

“Nation
building” is all about subverting wills and keeping people dead or
ignorant. “Energy independence” couldn’t take foot until the
profit margin could be realized. The New Deal was people reacting to
the hatred they felt towards starving and a predictable, arguably
planned, market crash. When new presidents are ushered in, it’s
because the population is often too stupid and forgetful to
understand that what they hate started 30, 100, or 1000 years ago,
and the president isn’t outside of gas stations manipulating the
price. It’s an elite hatred that condenses and protects power with
psychopathic efficiency.

Why do we genuinely have to fear a
Trump presidency? It’s not because people tap into the energy of love
or the stream of youth consciousness fighting to keep his name
relevant. It’s because hatred, blind ignorant hatred for you, for
themselves, for the history and facts they’ll never understand, is
the most powerful force. I’ve asked how so many Tea-baggers got into
congress. Racism is more powerful than any liberal idealism. Bernie
or bust? They hate Hilary,
not love Teddy and FDR. Let it all burn if you can’t get your way. Because it’s easy. Because it’s normal.
Because until we started inventing notions of high-society and
worldly-inclusive mindsets, it’s been a couple hundred thousand years
of instilled habitual hatred towards the other. It’s been ignorant
fearful animals lashing out in order to stay alive or revel in the
glory of conquest.

You will never and not fix anything until
you appreciate the depth of our cultural hatred. You will never
escape the negative feedback wheel of adopting that hatred,
protecting that hatred, and spreading that hatred. You “choose”
between Target and Wal-mart, with an ignorant smug smile while you
say “Tar-gjaaay,” you know, because you’re fancy, with the
thought that every indebted food-stamp using worker doesn’t deserve
to be freely educated or have access to healthcare because they’re
not you who’s really
had it rough and deserves
a lifestyle and attitude befitting.

One of the best tricks
that’s ever been played is getting you to adopt the attitude and
hateful extravagance of the rich without getting any of the benefits.
You think being able to afford a gym membership or to be able to
vacation once in a while is something to be proud of. Spending and
acquiring to put distance between you and your hard-fought modern
sensibilities and “the rest” who don’t or can’t access your
resources. It’s not your love of poor people that provokes the
charitable donation. It’s the hate and resentment you have for what
you have, that you know, in some important way, you don’t really
deserve.

Ask yourself what happens to people that do love.
Where do the advocates end up if it’s not in jail or to obscurity?
Dead? Often enough. Immortalized in a facebook quote, statue, or
documentary? Whoo-hoo. Manipulated and re-interpreted or reimangined
to promote the exact opposite of what they intended? If a slurry of
religious myths doesn’t come to mind, take away how easy it is to
ignore how much God hated what he had done and the award-winning
re-branding there. The language of love used to ignore the sheer
depravity and depth of the hatred. You love your country that would
rather pay middle men than keep you alive? That sends your poor to
unnecessary war? That bilks you for tax dollars while daily reports
show the rich stocking and hoarding? That literally has a paper trail
describing how they plan to keep you down? (I encourage you to read
as much as you can about the Powell memo.)

It’s the anecdote
of immigrant parents who, escaping more visible and dramatic hatred,
sought a place where they could comfortably instill the mythological
powers of achievement born out of a specific time and place. That
part itself wasn’t done maliciously, but when given the opportunity
to expand and become aware of larger forces that helped shape their
“self-made” imagine, they recoiled like the rich and said, “No!
Fuck you, fuck them, it was all about me!.”

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[501] Tales To Astonish

I’m struck by my lack of identity.

As I study more history or learn about the traits and ideas different countries hold, it becomes ever-apparent how much of “you” has been shaped in the motions of our histories. The rarely forgotten war or trade dynamics are often cited in joking or criticizing one another. The taglines in tourism brochures hope to intrigue you about a point of pride regarding a nation’s identity or self-determination. It just leaves me feeling like, with so much at play, how does one ever really define and come to accept things about their personality?

This feels like it wants to start-off sounding very high school. This is also something I often brush against in hoping to get people to unpack their language and look harder at the source of their feelings. But I want it pressed on harder and to explore the source of my own frustrations when it feels like “my identity” is being ignored or disrespected.

I sit here writing. Pull back and I’m 1 of 3 roommates, in 1 of 4 townhouses, in 1 of dozens of townhouse clusters, in 1 of hundreds of apartment complexes. Perhaps in a Nordic country this gives a sense of calm as I likely know or am related to nearly everyone in every one of those complexes. Here, I don’t know my neighbor’s names. Immediately there’s going to be a huge cultural influence regarding trust and how it can or can’t be employed.

To trust is to be able to look forward to something. It’s rarely framed in a way like you trusting your car to start. You trust your kids are going to grow up. These are things, provided there’s not some extenuating circumstance, we sort of take for granted. If we break them down in the language of trust though, it seems to provoke, quicker than anything, the question of “why?” The most straightforward answer I can think of is “because it’s generally done so.” 

If you take that answer far enough back, it tends to betray everything. Surely, you can always invent a layer of bullshit justification for the things you do, but if you’re working with an incomplete puzzle, fundamentally, you have little reason to trust anything, let alone your capacity to assess and evaluate an ingrained yet fluid personality. Ingrained in that you didn’t have to teach your eyes to see or brain to fire upon doing so. Fluid in that your tastes change, your attitude wanes, and if you’re lucky there’s always room to surprise yourself.

It’s extremely disorienting, and I’d argue probably unhealthy, to carry on like you can’t trust anything. Pragmatically, you’re not going to have a panic attack questioning the probability each time you start your car, but what if, as I fear has happened to me, a fundamental shift happens and arrests your perspective? What if you become stuck, unable to see yourself as freely obligating yourself to anything, now merely at the whims of change? It’s almost something of an argument against free will, but that’s not the direction I’m going.

I feel myself compelled. Whether it’s to write, or read, or watch, or just generally try to be learning at all times. I can speculate it came from being incentivized as a child. I can grasp at the strings of random potential conversational connections. (As it turns out, I hardly ever haven’t read at least something about what you’re into.) I can get all hippie-speak and claim some internal philosophical wisdom I’m drawing from my connection to the hive-mind. I can play faux-physicist and borrow explanations that describe me as a single neuron or experimental synapse of a higher intelligence’s simulation. But do you call your compulsions “you?”

You could as easily describe my examples in cold bio-socio-political terms. There will be a map one day of every synapse in my brain and when it fired depending on what I engaged with. Rarely do people let it sink in just how much of their approach to the world has been shaped by pop culture. I encourage you to read as much as you can about the little engine that could churning in your subconscious the next time you think you’re really making the decision. What does learning about these things really afford me? Why do “I” invite the stress of knowledge when I even know the science that says homogeneous and stupid breeds the most contentment?

The idea that I have ever arrived at a goal, for any reason beyond survival, becomes an endless speculative road. It harks, in my mind, to fundamental questions regarding existence in and of itself. Why not be some simulation meant to live out my selfish conception of the world? I’m perhaps just the latest in things the universe doesn’t know yet. Simple enough.

Why should I be frustrated that my time is being wasted when I know time isn’t really a thing? Why am I concerned about achieving some grand level of wealth or intellectual accomplishment when, the farther we pull back, the universe, let alone the world, let alone my country, let alone my town or even apartment complex is really going to blink once I’m gone? And then once all your friends die, you’ll be lucky to be properly quoted as anything that ever accurately described you or what you contributed. And you won’t care.

I don’t know that there’s some fundamental truth about the value of American elitism verses Nordic conformity that unites us all besides ignorance. It’s the ego-ridden who feel suffocated when transplanted north, and the reserved who feel embarrassed for you for sticking your neck out. People concerned with the long-term feasibility of humanity lament that content people aren’t terribly innovative or motivated. The content watch the mania of being the smartest and richest tear people apart, and often the world along with them. There’s always some opposite, diminishing, word to describe what doesn’t feel embedded in your genes or heritage.

It’s like I’m always looking for permission. I don’t know what to be really upset about. Unless I’m fabulously drunk I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do things like cry. Without a semi-constant reciprocity I have no way to describe how I value friendships. I can’t point to the precise moment I found myself capable of saying yes to initially fear and panic inducing things. Like I’m waiting for my programmer to input the coordinates of where I’m to end up next. I can claim I’m the one typing, feel each key, sound out each word, but there was no plan for this. Nor do I have a goal but to feel comfortable stopping. I could even invent a goal, like persuading you of adopting socially responsible pride. But it’d be a lie. I don’t give a shit.

I latch onto an idea of a kind of tornado. Billions of potentials swirling in the back of my head, condensed to a joke, blog, or decision to approach some topic. That “I” am the swirling, and everything I kick up and spit out the experimental results. Perhaps often if not fundamentally results I can’t read correctly or even access. I’m necessarily evolutionarily programmed to seek out cause and effect, and I operate under a grand illusion those effects are much to do with my perception or will. No matter the degree of scrutiny and doubt I interject, no matter the scientific insights I use to infer, and well independent of mystical hippie language, I’m no less compelled, and feel I have no control. I find it equally liberating and absolutely terrifying.

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[500] Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself

This is my 500^th blog over 12 years. I’ll wait here while you sound the trumpets. If I’m evidence of even one thing before I die, it’s that a lot can go through your mind, and probably most of it you shouldn’t put online.

I wanted to write this because, in this moment, I’m not particularly moved by anything. I’ve also tied my blogger account to a ton of other social media outlets and want to come across even fleetingly normal, if you’re a new reader, before you catch something that makes me look like a raving lunatic. I was building the idea of this blog up in my head, and decided to remove the stress by just writing so as to put it behind me. I wanted to provide something of a course overview of what you’d be studying in sifting through my blogs. I also wanted to talk about hate.

I wonder why we create. Lately, I’ve been thinking it comes from hatred. I think the harder you hate yourself, the more creative you can be. I phrase it as “hating yourself” because of a line I caught on a random blog that said “All hate is self-hate.” This, incidentally, is an idea I can agree with, and have written about in the past. Undoubtedly, the things I hate about life or other people are things I’m guilty of as well.

I find hate inspiring. In fact, most of what I write is a reflection on something I hate. “I” as a collection of hateful thoughts projected about the world, presumably because I think I would do it better or have some evidence in my own life as to the value of progressively differing. Once we move past the word itself you start to unpack the dozen tiny things about a conversation or excuse that bolsters the feeling. You dig up the history and cultural tide that has framed your discussion. With any luck, you start to engage with people who aren’t going to blame you for the hatred you’re feeling, and then will try to understand where you’re coming from.

I started writing because I hated how a boy was treating a girl I liked. I continued writing because I hated what I was learning about religion and how people spoke to each other. I found mountains of hatred exploring how “loving” family and friends treated the offerings and people in their lives. As I get older I get to hate what I used to have and changes I can swear are making us worse off. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop hating silence and excuses, be it for hangouts and texts or how you treat something of greater consequence. I once described myself as always feeling “on.” It may be stated another way, that I’m always aware of what I hate.

That awareness begets need. I need to write. Whether I pat myself on the back for 216 followers on one profile, from hearing admissions that you like to get drunk and read my stuff at night, or from some other form of emotion or connection you’ve found in me, I’d still have to write. It’s why I’ve always struggled to consider this “content” like I sat down and formulated some plan to keep you engaged. Like I wanted to perversely promote as much as genuinely share how fucked I was feeling. The utility I’ve found in putting it all “out there” to be scrutinized line by line verses being a ball of stress and confusion is incalculable. Detailing where you’re coming from and hope to go, even when you can see how it can fail, isn’t mindlessly stumbling through the dark needing to fear the unknown.

Any line can ring a bell. That’s something I consistently over-look in my criticism of the amount of “content” coming in from self-promotion junkies. In a significant way, you are what you’re beholden to. If you’re controlled by deadlines and desperation, before I care about some product you’re hocking, I see you selling the value of deadlines and desperation. I feel like I’d have to stop writing if that were me. Lying, if it’s not to save my ass from something terrible, is torture to me. This is where the blow-hard ironic bad boy goes “Yeah fuck these shoes, but they’re paying me, so buy them. It’s part of my schtick to shit on things before I sell myself out, so they’re cool with it.”

I’m after the right kind of attention. I don’t want to Kim Kardashian my way through Twitter “impressions” and delicately staged Instagram photos for likes. Popularity is a dangerous tool we seem to lunge after without a second thought. Why achieve “celebrity” status when you actively attempt to reduce yourself to something wildly unworthy of being celebrated? How attached do we become to our “brand?” How hard are we fighting to keep the pleasantries up by tailoring ourselves to what we think people will like?

I’m different. I don’t throw up my middle-finger and scream I don’t give a fuck in a socially irresponsible way. I just know how I feel when I feel it and talk. And that, I wouldn’t mind getting more popular. There’s reality television and professions of “realness” abound. I stand in contrast. I invoke only the small lens from which I can see the world. My persistent ask is for other people to do the same.

Within this reintroduction, I hope to promote the idea of change. I hope to always change in significant, but not arbitrary ways. I was a fairly picky eater, and loosened up. I’ve made countless statements with regard to my shallow nature, but am fairly acquainted with alcohol. I ridiculed Candy Crush and Miley Cyrus and eventually had to admit they were not the enemy. I used to believe in what I grew up with, be it about family or love, and I can honestly say I’m better for having reasoned through many terrible assumptions that I think we are still culturally strangled by. I think the human mind needs the idea of progress even when the universe suggests balance or eventual obliteration.

So hello to new people I’ll be courting through a more active sharing, and hello again to old readers who never or rarely do or speak to anything I ask, and wonder why I’ve found a new rigor for self-promotion. I hate much about the world, therefore I must hate much about myself, and I need it to be talked about like I talk about it.

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