7.5
The stakeholders lack intelligence, taste, artistic souls, compassion, empathy, and patience. They are beholden to their grotesque drives — they give them full rein. They have reason — they just reason toward their person and its benefit. Stakeholders are the latch that their families cannot open, for the slippery slope that it might then be removed. No, stakeholder directions must be followed til their dying day and further still into perpetuity — that is their intent. Great works are beyond them, so they do the only thing they can — they purchase what they want. But this act is only an approximation, and they know it, and this cheeses them off greatly. It doesn’t come close to the immortality of the ancient poem still taught today. That is the grand human achievement, not business or government. It is a real one, unmanufactured, unmarketed, authentic.
In a few years, street America will be hosting refugees. Stellar wind is a warm up for the rights-reduction that will happen then. But it’s not a guarantee — it’s a pattern. It’s called the abuse of preferential freedom.
It’s always a matter of what we should not have done, rather than the trap the stakeholders placed that made some choice a punishment. They knew like actuaries that some of us, some of the time, would trip it. All this global weather upheaval is new and they don’t understand it — they need some guinea pigs. They no longer burn books — they burn inconvenient fantasies. That’s enough to collapse a marketed world. All their justifying disguises the real reason, their own genetic drives.
Perhaps future man will have some Gilligan’s Professor who can wire radioactive slag to create a power plant, allowing a billionaire to sext his final Balkan mistress, via a curiously unsevered cable undersea. In that time, fortunate things will remain by accident. Destiny’s coming to scoop up the rest, where it will throw it in its overstuffed house, among the flattened mice and desiccated house cats. There the logical conclusion of destructive drives will ferociously guard our leavings, allowing no one to remove them, although it has no uses for them, other than its keeping and the feeling of control.
Better for a shark to drown by fin amputation than a Chinese man to have to eat a bowl of beans, or the cultural equivalent of wrecking the planetary biome for our bellies in any land, like all the junk science in France, which worships the cow, or the bloody Japanese and Faroese slaughter of cetaceans. “It’s our tradition, and we’d rather die than be forced not to kill.” “Well, then? Sounds like you made the choice. To the consternation of my leftie brethren there is such a thing as objective morality.”
It would be funny to combine with the militias on their peculiar philosophic ground and sick them on the government, with the goal of having zero rights-bearing citizens on the watch list. It would also be funny to join with the militias under a strict reading of the US Constitution so that the breachers of the Fourth Amendment were actually punished. It took the gays forty-something years of organizing to get lawfully married. Let’s get the militias fired up to remove the government and marketers from our private lives.
Say, this could be a way to wean militias off religion. They can be shown that the word God does not appear in the Constitution. They can be shown the country’s early coinage that was stamped not with Christian mythology but with Greek. They can be shown the 1787 papers that prove a founding principle of the US is the separation of church and state. Thus anyone who tries to add religion to the government is anti-American. And we know how militias react to what’s anti-American. These gun-cravers can be useful after all.
7.6
All of this is written with love, even when it wallows. Every “watch out” is warmed with affection and every explanation only wants to help. Strongest of all is not this book but the quiet moments of connection. These live on in memory. The young child’s heart is always open to his comforters. Big answers are not given easily. But children can sense when there’s good intent, and that can help to quell the decay built into their minds.
Everything’s bewildering and much of it is false, but not my love for you. Every day you give it back to me — that’s how I know it’s real. It props us up against the stakeholders and their ceaseless fatty blows. Whatever they believe their decree means, it’s just the run-off from the feelings that we share, that they are missing. These feelings are the real and everlasting.
7.7
Self-agency is a necessary pre-process to political change, for example. We wait for it to play out, hoping the new stakeholders will wield their power more justly than their forebears (and perhaps have the sense not to fight a war around the nuke plants). Otherwise we’ll still be diddling our pockets to pay all new fines in the same sedated streets. This is a species that can root about anything, including its impending demise. We’d dance to the sonic booms of giant asteroids coming in our airspace. The last one living will have notes on how we could’ve danced it better.
They say wine retains its body over centuries, if the corks do not dissolve. If people had that if-condition they’d moisturize their corks until starvation. Paper would power hardly anything in such a world. The richest guys would be the ones who made the cork stabilizers. Like pharmaceuticals those guys could claim research costs and charge anything they want. And people would kill to pay it. They’d pour concrete on their corks for just one more half-hour. Another century? Entire libraries would be needed to house the chronicles of cork. Language would be rich with metaphors surrounding the folk wisdom of caring for the cork. “Yeesh, that DMV clerk needs a tighter plug.” “Ha ha, you’re so right.” Or “That teenage boy at the school dance is really sweating through his cork.” “Huh. Well I’ll be gosh darned if he isn’t.”
Boys would take their corks for granted, but on growing up their relationships would be fraught with the inability to listen in an argument. Worrying that they’re corks will pop, they’d have an excess of misplaced rage. They’d possess a greater than average number of pet peeves, and apply great significance to them. They’d overly resent disruptions in their routine, they’d be selfish lovers, and their self-destructiveness would be such that they’d engage in activities like unprotected fencing that would accidentally (through subconscious causation) do damage to their corks.
Girls would also suffer the adverse affects of the over-fixation on their corks. They’d become assassins. Any boy who approached them without showing the same interest and concerns over their corks would receive humiliation, gossip, and teasing. Boyfriends who didn’t respond with appropriate levels of emotion to trivialities would be slandered and set-up. Acquaintances would have to behave as though there were cameras following these girls around at all times. They’d get pregnant early, in a penetrating act of rebellion against their corks. In turn with what life brings them they’d end up leather devotees in animal-like pleasure. They’d swear off obsessing over their daughters’ corks but find something else in their appearance over which to needle them.
7.8
A person’s two-stop vacation flight isn’t going to fall out of the sky no matter how bouncy things get in the last row by the bathrooms, the worst place for turbulence. There hasn’t been an American commercial crash in 11 years [as of 2019] — that’s tens of thousands of flights without a hitch. Well, tens of thousands of undignified slights, cattle-like treatment, suffering the thoughtless behavior of hundreds of strangers, including a whole new batch of power-tripping mediocrities with the tin-pot power to ruin someone’s week, being looked at like the passengers are criminals. Well they’re not criminals. That’s what statistics say, and they’re right. No one wants to be made to feel inhuman just because they want to go somewhere.
Security theater is harmful. It’s another neurosis-inducing tactic done willy-nilly with no repercussions, no law to protect our greatest asset, our own psyche. The very thing that pulls us from the ranks of the lower animals is readily and needlessly assaulted by government and business. Absorbing this, we turn around and give it to our family and friends. The hurtful pattern helps divide us whereby we are more docilely conquered. Like the free market this is not conspiracy but merely the pathetic result of individual drive for power.
Actuarial tables are proof the aggregate is real. We exist within it. Spiritual planes are nebulous — the only plane demonstrably above us is the aggregate. There are a dozen narrow driven men gumming up the arteries of life, creating chaos, wreaking havoc, and the aggregate accounts for them too. It predicts they will be there. Such men destroy lives but they’re justified by numbers. Every game has parasites and thieves. The good are given limitations, and consequence if they exceed them. The bad are driven to harm people, animals, and the environment. It’s predictable not when and where but that they will act so.
The finer things in life are demarcated in the favor of the already-possessors. What grand imaginations they have, to think their present will stretch into eternity. Yes in some ways stakeholders are the most magical of thinkers. Combine this with a wolven ruthlessness and we got ourselves formidable opponents. By some hereditary accident they manage to be closer to australopithecus than even prize fighters.
The wheel turns explicably. Resentment reproduces asexually. Smudged and scratched lenses are handed out for life. Our lives are enacted according to the odds. Life is spent within a range of probability. Everything occurs or does not occur by the invisible hand of rank statistics, which measure nothing more than human drives.
Better goggles would reveal the brick we’re headed toward. upstream of that are held the stakeholder’s belongings. He will not give them up. He has the power to decide and the fellas to enforce it. We have the better story but they have the short-term steel. Being as our lives are short, the steel is a deterrent. For this is a primal motivator. It gets us out of bed and hunting for a morsel.
Everything that spackles over boredom, done enough again, itself becomes boring. Our minds outpace our environment by about a factor of a mille. Types come in suits. They have wants and needs, but more important they have mandates. Flags clog everybody anyhow. A tribal structure can withstand the Yellowstone Caldera. Willpower is finite beside it. Replacements all are shivering. Twinkle time was fast approaching.
7.9
The sage of Metal had a gorgeous cape. Dark riffs erupted from its silken stitching. A font of hellspawn bubbled from its sleeves. Of course it had no tassel. Its collar was stiff and tall like stakeholder penises. It was to gain incredible insight into one’s subconscious, because one’s most secret wants would come frothing to the surface and lash the body into action. Someone was going to be real.
Putting on the Metal robe is a gift of new reality, the kind that’s most desired, that of insane pleasure. There’s the power of directing a crowd, and the euphoria of amplified music and ritualistic drumming, where the performance is in some way a conversation with the player’s favorites, the ones they’ve studied and internalized, and finally there’s the harmony of thousands of people all vibing together on the same frequency, and the great washing-over that occurs with that. This too makes for a formidable opponent. One wants to punish the perverse sucklings, and the other wants to join them. Every performed passage is like an extinction event. Emerging, we pick one and continue as though everything’s the same.
The land the US took was worth a lot intrinsically. The First Nations thought so, so deeply, that what the ordained thieves lived by seemed insane to the natives. We’ve proven sharing is a necessity for evolution. Still, private property is important. Without that we have Dr Zhivago — a terrible regression to a lower way of being, the destruction of art, and the chaining of the human spirit. Communists killed intellectuals, artists, scientists, and teachers, and don’t forget it. They badly rout everything that’s not in their dogma (like all dogmatists). For despisers of religion, they sure didn’t mind using the tactics perfected by the Constantine Xtians. Communists and religious stakeholders love brainwashing, demanding fealty, humorlessly following edicts, and total devotion. They loathe critical thought, proven evidence, speaking out, talent, exceptional ability, the natural urge to barter, the desire to improve, self-interest, subjectivity, unique anything, multiculturalists, and above all logic.
Yet there are a few good ideas in Marx and Engels. Capitalism must be critiqued and furthermore it must be limited. Otherwise it runs until it picks up enough speed to run over the people, stripping us of our humanity, poisoning our environment, rending our quality of life. It’s clear that there should be a salary cap on business. Once somebody reaches a certain level of wealth it must trigger incredible material rewards, and, all the wealth above the cap must go into social programs, scientific research, health care, and infrastructure, with a sensible fair taxation that will continue to pay for the bulk of people’s needs. The incredible material rewards for making, say, a billion buckaroos, includes exclusive travel, property, sexual gratification, the holy grails of one’s hobbies and interests, elective surgery, the party to end all parties, their own island, and much more. Such benefiters of capitalism can compete with each other to see who can max out the most often! That person gets to be feted all the time! And so on.
With every person having a decent place to live, enough food, and clean water, the need for all types of militia will lessen. Military budgets can then be cut enough to fund universal basic income.
8.0
Presently our hero’s vehicle was stuck in traffic, on his way from California to Nebraska to win back our heroine, to reintroduce himself into circumstances she had fled from. He thought his smile would in-person persuade her. He hadn’t considered that if she wanted him to meet her parents, for example, he would’ve been invited in the first place. Anything like this that flitted into his mind, he discharged with prejudice, like jet turbines pointed at a moth. He justified himself — Montagues always were impulsive. Et le objet de désir, ever welcoming their gesture, was quick to adopt her new reality. There was no reason the pattern would not be repeating. Except for the one point he had not plumbed, the importance to her of her flight. If hers had been impulsive, sure, that was one thing. If the act meant something to her, though, then he was on a balance. She’d have to weigh whether his act, the rudderless surprise, meant more. His goal then was to manipulate the scale. He’d come in old fashioned with the flowers and the box of choco-lates. He’d get down on one knee. Then he’d walk the line between cool and jovial, the manner she’d responded to before. Then he’d listen — really listen. He’d cop to anything. He’d apologize, and mean it, and promise change, and mean that too, and even follow through on it. Of course all this hinged on a particular syllogism — that she still saw him the same way. Because if she didn’t, she definitely would not feel the same.
He held onto the story he was telling himself, that she left to handle some death in the family and wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. Yes, when everything’s ephemeral, stories ground us. When the ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, everything’s a metaphor for holding on.
He crossed the state line of Nebraska, getting near her now. He had the urge to walk up to her with a cigarette a-flappin from his lip, lookin bad, except it’d be unlit. It would unbalance her to see him like a smoker, so he had the advantage, which he’d only use for peace and love of course. They’d grown their home so tall and wide already, he was sure she’d want to get back inside. The day side was accompanied by the night side and he was willing to hang out in both. It was all magnanimity with him. Which was in place to mask his creeping desperation. Horrid thoughts were striking him, like maybe she’d discovered a new way of painting. She’d talked about it plenty. It would be just like her to leave California and launch into the next big thing, a new triumph in the galleries. No, of this idea, he could not be a fan. The shallow, jealous side of him was afraid of her success, a simple macho bull. She’d be exposed to new guys, cool guys, guys in the biz, guys in the know. Guys who could maybe do her career a favor, and never dream of taking something in return. He did not want all that for her — he was only concerned.
The first thing he’d say to her after their apologies and promises was “I never cheated on you,” so that he could hear her say, “I haven’t cheated on you either.” He hoped. But his saying this would just upset her, since she’d hone in on how this was what was important to him, rather than those concerns she thought he ought to have, thus lowering him in her estimation. She’d further tell by his wide and contradictory speech that he was willing to portray any role, in trying to please and satisfy her, according to whatever she responded to the best, which would be tinged with that old desperation, when the only thing she wanted was for the young man (so to speak) he was to match the man she wanted. But that may be someone else, a different construct. As soon as she had that thought, before she left, she pushed it away. As far as she knew she left for other reasons than just him. But those did not explain her silence in Nebraska. She hadn’t intended it but now that she was out of California, the right thing seemed to be to group it all together, including him, and leave it all right there where it was. When one’s right thing is change, and the other’s is not change, which one happens is the one that sets somebody free.
Soon they’d weigh the poignancy of their respective actions.