The User is Content

The binary is so tempting. Black. White. Us. Them. Boy. Girl. Big. Small. Loud. Quiet. Good. Bad. Positive. Negative. More than just an efficient way to organize the world, the binary is perhaps a vital tool in maintaining consciousness.

In his book In the Blink of An Eye, Zoologist Andrew Parker explores The Cambrian explosion. This ten-million-year period hosted the dramatic and rapid evolution of almost all present-day animal families. It marks the transformation from simple life forms to complex organisms. It’s often likened to the biological big bang.

But why this ten million-year span out of the billions of years that life has been evolving? Parker concludes that it was due to the development of the biological light sensors we now know as eyes. But we’re talking about minuscule sea slug-looking guys—the sperm in the primordial stew.

For the first time, a living thing could see what was right in front of it. The first thing this simple sea slug would have done with his new light sensors would be to start deciding whether the inputs it was getting were “good” or “bad.” I mean, maybe it floated around for half a million years just in a blissed-out state, letting the sun shine into its little sea slug soul.

Good or bad? I imagine this primordial decision was one of the first binaries in the development of consciousness. Now, 525 million years later, this rudimentary binary has grown into a complex system of binaries—our cultures and our cliques. Including our species’ weighty obsession with good versus evil.

Our brains even look like sea lugs.

The establishment view of gender and sex is perhaps the most famous binary of all. Men are male. Women are female. And this makes sense if our evolutionary goal is to pro-create. It helps to know what parts can go where.

But then, staring out from my chest like two eyes, my nipples seem to imply that we have got it all wrong. I should not have nipples because nipples are for breastfeeding. So, why aren’t cis-men getting gender-affirming care and having their nipples removed?

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I used to love Tom Arnold’s stupid 1996 movie The Stupids. The premise was that the whole family was. . . stupid. The plot revolves around Tom Arnold’s character, Stanley Stupid. He’s a sort of neo-conspiracy theorist who is perplexed about who keeps stealing his trash every morning. He is determined to track the thieves down.

One day, he takes out the trash and then hides in the bushes to see what happens. He watches in horror as strangers in uniform whisk away his trash.

The rest of the movie is spent watching him trying to track down where the trash goes. There is also a rather long side-plot of him trying to track down who “Sender” is, because he keeps getting letters that say “Return to Sender.”

In both instances, it turns out he isn’t as stupid as he seems: both of his hunches check out. Sender is a demonic man in cahoots with the police who burns mail in a giant snake’s mouth in his underground lair.

There are also aliens involved in the Return to Sender scheme, but y’all don’t pay me enough to re-watch the movie closely enough to explain what exactly their role is.

Stanley Stupid’s Trash Thief Conspiracy also checks out. It turns out his refuse is being stolen every morning as part of an elaborate weapons deal between the US military and an Al Qaeda/ Yakuza / Caribbean / Mob / Mafia /Nazi / Native American conglomerate.

It really is a stupid movie and the role won Tom Arnold a 1997 Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. But, like all seemingly low-brow content, it has some high-brow angles. For my purposes, it’s a commentary about the deep interconnectivity between the military-industrial complex, the police, and the apparent peace and stability of our everyday lives. And most poignantly, it highlights the gaslighting we receive when we question it all: we are called stupid.

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Hi Friends,

First off, thanks for your patience. It’s been a bit since I posted, but I plan to start a more regular posting schedule now. Two big updates for you before this week’s post.

(1) While I may not have written much in the past few months, I did contribute to the making of this child: So, that’s pretty cool and better than any article I could write.

(2) My goal with The User is Content is to unwarp society for you. I want it to be a valuable and self-aware addition to the disgusting gluttonous orgy of information we’re all f*****g about in every single day. I like doing it—even if I know it’s sometimes just hot takes. It means a lot to me that 700+ people subscribe and read my posts. To keep things consistent and post more routinely, I’m going to start charging for my Substack. Existing readers get access for $11.11/year, and this price is good forever. This offer only lasts a week, and then prices go up to $44.44/year.

Now, for the main attraction, Kids with Guns. As almost always, it was inspired by a conversation with my wife, who now has her own Substack—subscribe so she feels the pressure to actually post. The question is, why are toy dildos inappropriate but toy guns aren't?

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Against my gut, I went to a men’s group a few weekends ago. I was under the impression that, because the idea of going made me nauseous, there was something worth exploring. I was right, and I was wrong.

A men’s group: you know, men get together and are honest about their anger and their insecurity, and they support one another and hug one another and cry. It’s beautiful and it’s stupid. I felt called for reasons of insecurity. I think sometimes I think I’m broken and I need to be fixed. I have been wanting to step into my “manliness” and my patriarchal stature as the head of my ever-growing household. I thought this would help. It did, but only because it reminded me how f*****g grown I am and how much work I have done already. I can probably slow down on the personal work and just let the work work for a bit.

I appreciated the space holding, I watched grown men break down and cry for the first time in years, admitting how they were negligent fathers, lovers, brothers.

And then there was all the stuff I knew would make me nauseous: the whiteness of it all, the appropriative Native American grunts, the fire building, the relentless eye contact.

On day one I found myself inspired mainly by seeing how hurt so many people were and how so full of love I was. I wanted to go home so bad. I love my wife. I love my family, I feel at peace with them. All these men felt unhappy and searching up each other’s asses for happiness rather than in the eyes and hearts of those closest to them.

Atop a mountain that it was illegal for Black or indigenous people to be on less than a century ago, we sat in a yurt, complained about how hard it was to be a man, and never once mentioned the root of every man’s issues: Christian, white-supremacist capitalist heterosexual patriarchy.

As Jaylen Walker was shot through 60 times at a routine traffic stop and as the Supreme Court affirmed that over 150 million women should be giving birth against their will, we sat in a circle and talked about how hard it was to be us and how society didn’t give us space to be vulnerable. We were right and wrong. Instead of feeling grief for the women and people of color in our lives, what they must be going through at this exact time, and how to hold them closer, we felt grief for ourselves.

The joke of course, if it’s not obvious to you, is that it is white, Christian, male-dominated society itself that keeps men quiet about their feelings—not women, not Black people, not anyone in particular. It’s a systemic oppressor that tells them if they cry and are weak, they will not win the macho-capitalist championship. Be a stoic, shove it all down.

All these men were there because a society run by us wants nothing to do with the reality of us. Out in the world, we wanted nothing to do with ourselves. Most men don’t want to talk about their feelings with their friends and their friends dont want to talk about their feelings either.

We act as if we need permission to be honest about our feelings, but since we are at the top of the food chain, there is no one to give us permission except ourselves. Until men grant themselves that permission, they will live in resentment and take that resentment out on everyone else.

When I say white, straight men are at the top of the food chain, I feel some resistance come up “in the audience.” It’s curious that when white men are told you are powerful, strong, top of the food chain, the kneejerk reaction is to say, “No I’m not. I’m powerless, everyone is mad at me, I’m the one being oppressed.”

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The logic and emotional murkiness behind the phrase “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is probably the most blatant example of the dissonance that men live in. While we usually think of this phrase in regards to the protocol about gay people serving in the army, I think it’s not a stretch to say that much of the army’s actions are indicative of male, colonialist thinking. Like all humans, men do want to be seen, but they also live in crippling fear of being seen. This, I think, is the best way to contextualize much of the pain and confusion we see around us. Imagine an internal don’t ask don’t tell protocol inside everyone’s minds.

Are you having troubling thoughts or intense feelings? Are you feeling a bit lost, unseen, and unsupported? Don’t ask anyone about them, don’t ask yourself about them, and definitely don’t tell anyone about them. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is just another way of saying, “Shut the f**k up.”

After all, if you’re not asking questions and you’re not expressing your feelings, you’re just suffering in silence.

bell hooks was brilliant for many reasons but one of my most poignant takeaways from her teachings was the importance of using the phrase “white-supremacist, capitalist, heterosexual, patriarchy.” I like to add “Christian” to the front. More than just a phrase, these terms are invocations of powerful spirits and systems; that is why they are probably triggering you right now in one way or another. Some of you might even have a voice inside telling me to “shut the f**k up about it.” I offer to you that this voice is not you, it is the spirit of these terms themselves which do not want to be seen.

These are very, very important concepts whether you think they are “a problem” or not. They all hold deep existential symbolism for each of us:

Christian: our relationship to the divine.

white-supremacist: our relationship to our own identity

capitalist: our relationship to value and self-worth

heterosexual: our relationship with one another as men

patriarchy: our relationship to control

So, we’ve got divinity, identity, self-worth, community, and control. What do these mean to you? What’s your relationship to them? Not your opinion of them. Are you comfortable with some but not others? Why?

In the Western world, all of these terms can be nicely folded up and summarized with one word: colonizer. While many people are gaslit into thinking otherwise, it’s clear to everyone that the story of the western world is the story of colonization, and its tools were always and continue to be the Christian white-supremacist capitalist, heterosexual patriarchy.

It helps me to write a paragraph about what comes up for each term. Here’s what it looks like for me:

Christian: I think of my Jewish roots but being raised in Florida and attending a Christian school. I think of how my experience of the divine was not at all present for the most formative years of my life. I’m only now being introduced to it, so I feel very much like a child who has just been told “there is a man in the sky.”

Up until now, the divine has been presented as soulless Bar Mitzvahs and genital mutilation at birth.

In my life, family, and community, we didn’t pray together, we didn’t meditate together, we didn’t say grace, there was very little time to elevate above the mundane. So, my relationship to the divine is…new.

white-supremacist: While I knew about the Holocaust and the plight of the Jews, I’m white-passing and spent most of my life hanging out and feeling close to white kids.

Though, in retrospect, I see that I was drawn more closely to Jews and never felt fully safe with white (often Christian) kids. It makes sense, their parents were at home saying things like, “Jews killed our savior.”

I’m now confident, sitting in a yurt for a men’s group for instance, that I can point out the Jews and the people raised Christian just by looking into everyone’s eyes. This makes me understand a certain level of aloneness I have felt my whole life. My relationship to my racial identity is also fairly new.

capitalist: I run a company, I love spending and making money, I’m no communist, but I am a casual anarchist. I would feel more excited than scared to see it all burn down rather than continue the way it’s going. I feel that my personal value being related in any way to money is problemat…

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The term “awakening” is super loaded these days. New age people use it to signal they have elevated above the sheep, religious zealots use it to signal some sort of process of enlightenment in regards to their God, and conspiracy theorists use it to delineate between those who see the truth and those who don’t. It often contains within it a harsh judgment of others, which always makes it land as kind of a sticky, pokey, and mean concept.

I don’t believe in an innate awakening, or that there is a discreet reality we are supposed to wake up into. Everybody’s awakening looks different. Some people are even waking up into worlds that other people are asleep in; that’s okay, it’s beautiful in a hodgepodge kind of way. I think the most important part is that one can identify that they have themselves woken up from a slumber—not necessarily that everyone else is sleeping, but that you had been sleeping and now you feel awake.

Even before I had these terms, my life moved like this. I felt it most strongly with relationships. After breakups, I’d feel like the person who was in that relationship had been sleeping the whole time and now a new Josh walked through the world. Other events like this include psychedelic experiences, observing violence, and reading books by fearless writers who seemed to wake me up from a slumber (Marshall McLuhan comes to mind).

One place where I truly felt a real awakening was in regards to my penis. Other than “ew, uncircumcised penises are gross,” I never really thought deeply about the shape and form of my member until my oldest sister was giving birth to a boy. On the family text thread, there was a lively discussion about whether or not to do it. Lots of news articles and scientific studies and various rationales were passed around.

Here’s a quick roundup. Circumcising lowers the chance of:

* HPV

* HIV infection.

* Penile cancer

* Cleanliness

There is no other medical reason to circumcise.

Let me break those down real quick:

* Almost the whole population is going to be vaccinated soon, and the prevalence of HPV is going to go down immensely. Also, I have HPV and am circumcised, and I am fine.

* HIV infection: these studies were all done at peak HIV infectiousness and in sub-Saharan Africa where sex-ed is a completely different story.

* Penile cancer: This one always makes me laugh. Penile cancer is SO, SO rare. 0.001% of men get it, and I guess circumcision lowers that rate by a few percentage points.

* Cleanliness: While some Jewish texts imply it’s for cleanliness, even if this were true, there is more access to showers and soap now than there was, say, thousands of years BC in the damn desert.

Regardless of all the nuance on this above, none of these are good reasons to circumcise nearly every single male born. Around 85% of sexually active men are circumcised. The circumcision rate is thankfully declining year over year.

Since the medical reasoning doesn’t hold water anymore, circumcision is squarely a cosmetic surgery. The new (pedophilic) rationale is that “a boy’s penis should look like his dad’s.” If that’s the case, a plastic surgeon should be doing it. As someone who only has one testicle (I will talk about it in another post sometime), my son’s genitalia will probably never really look like mine so that reasoning doesn’t even stand in my situation. But the question still stands: How is it that we live in a society whose top priority at the joyous miraculous birth of a child onto this Earth is to chop off the tip of their dick?

Awaking to this particular truth—that I was genitally mutilated almost immediately after arriving on earth—fills me with grief and fear of the medical industrial complex, of my family, of my ancestors, and of the harmful effects of mindless traditions. Since there is no medical imperative to circumcise, it means that we do it for “tradition.”

Whose Tradition?

Nearly all anthropological studies of circumcision both in Jewish and other lineages go back to blood sacrifices. Modern people feel—with our big fancy medical laboratories, white coats, and sterile hospitals—that we have somehow left the pagan spirit world behind us for the storybooks and religious texts. I’m here to tell you with complete certainty and clarity that it is alive and well, out in the open, and nowhere near the fringe. Circumcision is a great example of this.

While conspiracy theorists make wild claims about liberal pedophilic death cults, their children’s dicks are being given as blood sacrifices every day. I might sound like I’m perhaps exposing a conspiracy of some kind, or perhaps like I’m using a metaphor or extreme language to get a rise. I’m not. There is 0, zilch, zero, none nein, absolutely no reason to circumcise your child. But we do it anyway. Why? Pump me full of all the forced logic and inane rationalization you want:

* A man’s dick should match his sons!

* It’s cleaner!

* We’ve always done it this way!

In the words of S.K. Hellsten in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

From a human rights perspective both male and female genital mutilation, particularly when performed on infants or defenceless small children, and for non-therapeutic reasons can be clearly condemned as a violation of children's rights whether or not they cause direct pain. […] If we allow parents to decide what is best for their children on the basis of the children's religious or cultural identity, we would have no justification for stopping them cutting off their children's ears, fingers, or noses if their religious and cultural beliefs demanded this.

So why do we continue genitally mutilating young boys? Well, we send people to war to sacrifice themselves for freedom. We send people to work to sacrifice themselves in order to have their basic needs met. We send people to school to sacrifice them for awakening.

Sacrifice is an initiation into a new world—a sort of forced awakening. People who have gone to war and died or gone to war and returned have been initiated into a higher level of patriotism. People who go to work their whole lives and accrue wealth are elevated above having their basic needs met. People who go to school and accrue knowledge are elevated above the common thinking person.

Here, I think also of people who are forced to have c-sections because their babies are “breech” or the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck, even though there’s no medical or scientific reasoning behind these beliefs. These people are being told that their power, their bodies, and their children’s bodies, belong to something outside of them, something they must comply with.

There is freakishly almost no nuanced debate about circumcision, it’s just accepted as a nearly universal medical need and anyone who argues against it is made to feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill. But female clitorectomies are universally and rightly considered abhorrent forms of mutilation.

The only conclusion I have landed on is that our society operates as some sort of death cult with sacrifices and all, and we are made to sleep through the torture for some greater good.

That’s why we are obsessed with shows and books about cults: we can’t believe what is possible when people are brainwashed. It’s of course always pointed out in these cult documentaries that there is nothing special about people in cults, they are just like us. They just made the mistake of falling asleep in the presence of nefarious forces.

What forces are at work here which make so many people send their children to get the tips of their dicks clipped off?

At both the symbolic and physical level, from the second we are born, we are beholden to some greater being—perhaps the medical industrial complex or something bigger—and it quite literally wants our blood because our blood gives it power.

I obviously did not circumcise our son, and the generational curses we feel that action—or inaction—broke are immense. He’s not uncircumcised, he’s natural. The shape of my penis is unnatu…

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A new study came out that confirmed something many of us have known for a while: the idea that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” is absurdly vague and unscientific. The study basically shows that over a wide swath of data, there is no relationship between someone’s serotonin production or receptors and whether they are depressed or not. A big caveat here before I have a field day on this finding is that it is a single study—technically a study of other studies—so it shouldn’t be trusted as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But, it seems pretty damn damning and has us asking: “So what exactly do anti-depressants do?” I’m going to need psychiatrists to show their work.

For years, we’ve been gaslit into thinking that telling a diagnosed depressed person to “just be happy,” was somehow this massive faux pas that showed our ignorance and insensitivity; it’s categorized up there with using a racial slur. While I’m happy that mental health is starting to be taken more seriously, sometimes it’s taken a bit too seriously. Depressed people have become a protected class of humans—corralled in with people affected by bipolar disorder, the autism spectrum, and other—God forgive me—actual brain disorders.

Here’s my take as someone whose therapist has diagnosed me with “low-grade depression.” If there is a chemical imbalance, it’s merely a reflection of a societal imbalance. Depression is a bouquet of un’s that the modern person must suffer under: unrested, unhappy, unfulfilled, unpaid, unsafe, and so on. “Low-grade depression” is just another way of saying, “Today, you’re doing just an okay job at reconciling a ’happy’ life with the complete s**t show we call civilization.” Severe depression on the other hand—can’t get out of bed style—is just another way of saying, “Today, you are completely unable to reconcile civilization with your needs as an individual.”

Non-commerce-based societies, those we demeaningly call “primitive,” have almost no incidents of depression. We “civilized” folk are told we need to be richer, prettier, healthier, and happier than our neighbors and parents or else are failures. And then, with that as the stated goal, we are set “free” in a labyrinth of a society that makes achieving these ends nearly impossible. The ends and the means are dumb. Non-commercial societies, on the other hand, are more focussed on actually pertinent goals like dancing for rain and cultivating a relationship with the spirit realm. That sounds like a joke when I’m saying it, but I mean it seriously, those needs are more pertinent to life on Earth. And peace on Earth. No wonder we are a depressed society—we are being paid to forget our needs.

To make matters worse, scientists—and by that I mean psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies—then have the audacity to claim that the epidemic of depression is caused by a vague chemical imbalance that is mysteriously affecting nearly everyone. How bizarre! Oh, whatever could it be making so many people feel unhappy in the very same way all at once?

There is nothing capitalists hate more than talking negatively about capitalism. They complain about their spouses, their cars, their family, their houses, the interest rates, their coworkers, their jobs, their politicians, and the media, but don’t you dare critique capitalism—the ether in which all of the above is immersed.

So, while I’m being gaslit into thinking it’s offensive to say that depression is not a real illness, I’m also over here grieving that people diagnosed with depression—especially those who really identify deeply with their diagnosis—are actually the ones being gaslit. They are being told by white coats and our collusive society that their issues actually belong to them, that they have no external causes, that something is wrong with them and their brains, that they need a pill or to do some sort of work in themselves to get better. Telling a depressed person just to be happy is rude, but not because it delegitimizes depression, it’s rude because the society that says “hey, being happy is your goal” is not willing to make any efforts to make that happiness achievable—it’s gaslighting at its finest. And that’s the last time I will say gaslighting in this post, promise.

Instead of searching for the perfect concoction of pills that will make life bearable like some sort of dystopian Aldous Huxley novel, why don’t we harness that depressed energy—which is really just anger at the way things are—and change the society around ourselves to be something that feels better? Even if that’s just in our friend group. You don’t need to start a revolution, you just need to stop involving yourself with people, places, and activities that don’t bring you and your community deep joy and peace.

Chasing real rather than cheap pleasures will, in the long run, make you less depressed. I won’t say it will make you happy—our society has peddled the happiness myth for centuries and I won’t do that to you. Happiness itself is a trap; suffering is a reality we must greet with open arms.

It’s worth noting I don’t mean simply chasing pleasure via shopping therapy, drugs, sex, and productivity hacks either, I mean becoming truly aware and self-sufficient in regards to what makes you triggered into your depressive states and what brings you strengthened dopamine pathways. You can even do the same exact things: shop, have sex, do drugs, and be productive, but you can do them with the awareness that happiness is not and cannot be the goal.

Art won’t save you. Pills won’t save you. Meditation definitely won’t save you. The only thing that will save you is a real connection with those around you, yourself, and the way you spend your time every day. How do you value yourself? Is that value achievable every day? It’s not easy, and it will never end. Contrary to what you’ve been told, there is no retirement except death.

If you’re feeling depressed like I am, consider perhaps that you’re in a shitty and abusive relationship with a toxic society.

Have a good week.

As always, I end my posts with a picture of my breakfast and picture of my baby, who currently has Hand Foot, and Mouth disease and it’s horrible to watch. It will be over soon and he will be fine.

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Until recently, I don’t feel like i ever learned how to truly grieve. after relatives died, when wars began, when terrorism struck, when someone in the family was sad or struggling with feeling contentment, when someone was sick, i felt as if there was no outlet. while there was space to be sad, it always felt like something had to be done about it—distraction, cheering up, “perspective”. My dad once told me that “grief is personal.”

Looking back I think what he really meant is that everyone grieves differently. i was left with a sensation in my heart that grief is unwelcome, and that it is a personal obstacle i have to overcome myself. the grief, i can see now, does not belong to me. In thinking back, what i really hear my father telling me is “i feel alone.”

there is no grief without other people, it is shared among family systems, communities, society, the whole universe, and those places outside of it. grief itself is sadness for our separateness.

my mom asked if i want to celebrate july 4th with her. I said it’s a more “throw blood on american flags kind of feeling.” She said she understood and proposed we maybe get together and just “celebrate life.”

That familiar feeling arose in me that my grief was not welcome here.

Of course this feeling is accompanied by the knowledge that her household didn’t allow for grief either, and also the knowledge that she is doing the best she can with the tools she has.

To me, grief is a celebration of life, it’s allowing yourself to feel whatever comes up…and then allowing yourself to feel whatever hard feelings arise about those feelings….and so on and so forth until you’re in great reverence to your weakness and power at the same time. i am infinitely powerful, i am infinitely powerless, this is what it’s like for me to see the god in my self.

i feel ill equipped to exist on this july 4th.

i’m grieving jaylen walker, i’m grieving the policemen who used him as an outlet for their grief and handcuffed his lifeless body—even in death they didn’t trust themselves to see what they had done, what all their pain and anger looked like externalized.

I can’t blame my parents, or their parents, the story of america is misplaced grief; independence rather than interdependence.

The grief of my privilege is knowing i’m powerful in many earthly realms but often feeling powerless in the realm of spirit. On earth, i see the victims of this grief—often black, brown, or wombed—experiencing the flip-side: knowing how powerful they are in spirit but feeling powerless in earthly realms.

and when i feel into this, a cathartic image arrives where every being shares one another’s grief rather than keeping it to ourselves.

alas, as long as the judeo-christian white-supremecist capitalist heterosexual patriarchy doesn’t grieve its spiritlessness and claim responsibility for it’s earthly power with grace and acceptance, and until we renounce its effects on us inside and out, this violent s**t show will continue.

i hope to spend the day welcoming grief into my heart and into my home.

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It kind of feels like the world is falling apart. Just the other day I was feeling pretty down and so I put on Brené Brown’s podcast for some white-lady positivity vibes. She started by saying, “I’m losing my mind, I’m in such deep struggle, and I can’t access any joy.” And then I turned it off.

Regardless of your political affiliations, the last six years—starting with Trump and continuing now with the threat of nuclear war—have been a battering ram of destabilizing, polarizing, and exhausting challenges. It seems to me that nobody is sure what the rules are anymore, or who to listen to. The divisiveness we talk about in American society is often dumbed down to Democrat/Republican, but this fails to take into account that this divisiveness is occurring globally.

Honestly, I’ve written books faster than I have written this post. I had tons of trouble crystalizing my intentions here. It’s still a bit all over the place but I feel like there is value in the journey.

If it feels to you like some key threads of society are being unwoven, I hope that some of my observations in this post bring depth—instead of fear—to that sensation.

Let There Be Smite

I’m sure many conservatives feel like they are living in an upside-down world. After centuries of banishing people according to Biblical and Western (read: White) rules, the tables have turned. Now people are banished to the outskirts of society for behavior that used to be tolerated or even expected of them— being racist, sexist, violent, or just insensitive. These were all borderline virtues in the previous paradigm, so imagine waking up one day and being told all of your virtues are actually sins.

Conservatives mockingly call it cancel culture, but they are only bothered by it because they are forced to see with their own eyes the dreadful and ineffective style of conflict resolution that they themselves popularized. You know, the style of communication that dictates if someone has a different vision of society from you, then you must smite them.

In any society, accusing people of breaking rules seems necessary in order to keep people in line and keep the threads of society tightly drawn. But, if rules are applied rigidly or violently, you get authoritarianism, fascism, and other controlling -isms. While the mere idea that you need to “keep someone in line” kind of makes me cringe, I do believe that rules are what make a community strong—anarchist, democratic, fascist, or any other social organization needs their rules followed for cohesion.

But it seems to me that all rules are inherently conservative. That is, they conserve an agreement from the past. In that way, cancel culture is highly conservative in its guffawing about the correct way to be and think. It’s nothing new—it’s just an equal and opposite reaction to “traditional” culture. Is it more morally defensible? In my estimation, yes. But does that make it less evil? Not necessarily. The impact is more important than intention.

This is true, in part, because the shadow side of community rule following is non-consensual body and mind control. When a person in power or a group with political power sees a rule being violated, how do we address it? Often by controlling the person’s body or expression as retribution—banishing them out of the city, jailing them, stoning them, firing them, or canceling them via dissolution of their community connections and livelihood.

This is a tangential follow-up article to my previous post about non-violent communication and how anger and blame are reasonable feelings to have. So, in this post, I want to explore the concept of written and unwritten rules and how we have been taught to treat people that break those rules.

This installment got a little trippier than I expected because I needed to get lost in the weeds for a bit to figure out how exactly language—the main enabler of rules— came about and why.

The Third Chakra

I’ve always had a complex relationship with language. I love it, I do it for a living but I don’t trust anyone using it—myself included. I simply don’t trust that language is an adequate technology for explaining the wealth of information that rises up from the depths of human consciousness. Do you? When you’re sad do you feel like “I’m sad,” fully expresses the reality of your feeling? What if you wrote a whole book about your sadness—would that even come close to the resolution and truthiness of the feeling of the sadness itself? In this way, language seems dull and inefficient to me. I’m perpetually concerned with being misconstrued. At its very best and most exacting, language is incredibly limiting when it comes to expressing the fullness of actual experience.

In Tantra and Hindusim, the Third Chakra —often associated with the voice as well as listening—is really one of the most revered ways to commune with the divine, through chanting, recitations, singing, and listening. I know this is true, but for some reason, I still have a blockage from really achieving bliss through song or writing. For so long I’ve lived in the paradox of being a poet, singer, musician, writer, and editor who also thinks music and poetry and words are dumb and useless. I feel a very physical and metaphysical boundary in front of me. Why?

In part, I think I’m skeptical about the power of language because it comes so powerfully easy to me—and that scares me. My creative valves seem wide open but I don’t quite feel like drenching everyone around me. I feel like if I used words and my voice to their full potential, I would ruin the world—or worse, create a better one.

While that might seem weird or cocky to say, I feel I’m speaking for everyone. Honestly, I think in one way or another we all feel this terror when it comes to art and expression. We are all so close to realizing we are gods. I think perhaps that written and unwritten rules are the structures that stop us from feeling like gods with each breath. Gods, after all, do not stand in line.

Chanting and singing and writing words may bring us closer to the divine but will they ever break us through the boundary and show us the truth of our divinity? Will the miracle of life ever truly be captured in a song or poem?

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Our Hallucinatory Reality

In the philosophy of consciousness, there is a term known as the rich phenomenology experience. All of us have a rich phenomenology experience. This exerience tells us that we are fully perceiving our surroundings. When we walk down a busy street, we have the phenomenal sensation that everything, every person, every street sign, and every color is being fully perceived and analyzed. This feeling makes us feel in control, but it’s an illusion. If someone were to stop us and quiz us on our surroundings, we would mostly have pathetic results. Suddenly, the street signs you felt so aware of would fall like sand between your fingers and you’d maybe be able to remember one or two of the signs, maybe only the size or color of another. The resolution would pale in comparison to the resolution you experienced yourself having.

This means that much of our peripheral vision is just a hallucination. Our eyes perceive disparate things and we fabricate a cohesive experience.

This is because our brains are energy-saving devices. They don’t waste time processing everything, they process what they think you need in order to be safe and achieve your goals. I believe this chasm of experience, and the innate requirement to lie to ourselves in order to “get s**t done,” is externalized in the form of written and unwritten rules.

I believe that this personal version of a rich phenomenology experience emerges at the collective and societal level. Societies must lie to themselves a bit in order to stay safe and get s**t done. As such, the hallucinatory nature of our peripheral vision is analogous to the illusion of certitude we have about w…

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I recorded this article podcast-style (I even made a song) if you’d rather listen to my sweet voice. Just click the play button above. I know Earth Day is the 22nd but I am posting today because think I’m going to sit out of this year’s festivities.

As you have probably read about in countless memes and tweets, the IPCC released another damning report saying that the next few years are critical if we want to stop climate change.

This triggered an array of cynical memes and posts about how while we were all talking about Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars and sharing our TikToks, the world was literally burning. Most of the people sharing these memes have such shallow historical memories they forget that just a week ago, they too were posting, clicking, and reading about Will Smith’s slap. And therein lays the issue with environmentalism: it’s completely out of touch with itself, which is a nice way of saying it’s delusional.

1.Empty Threats & Bad Marketing

The threats are simply not meaningful. How many IPCC reports does it take? How many headlines? We have been threatened nearly every day for decades now—clearly something isn’t working about the way this thing is being marketed.

I’ve felt for a long time that conservatives and Republicans are far better at the publicity and marketing game than their other half. Democrats are too well-meaning and earnest to be effective with marketing. While Obama named his landmark statute “The Affordable Care Act,” it was the Republican’s originally disparaging “Obamacare,” which eventually caught on.

As such, environmentalism’s first failure was calling it Climate Change. I honestly can’t think of more uninteresting term. If the Republicans wanted you to save the planet they’d probably call it TOTAL EARTH ANNHILIATION not just show us pictures of seagulls with oil on them. Instead, we get “Global Warming,” a term so dull that Dennis Miller can get on Fox News and disarm the entire argument by saying “Two degrees? That’s the Global Warming? It’s okay, I’m always a little cold anyway.”

I get the IPCC is just doing their job and that scientists must keep doing science and releasing their work and that this is an important piece of the puzzle. But, the science is also in that science does not convince people of anything. If it did, everyone would eat healthy, no one would smoke cigarettes, and we’d be healing the planet.

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A good primer on this fact is in the book The Righteous Mind which discusses how there is so much political division because we all seem to think that some data or arguments are what convinces people of things when in reality it’s compassion and tolerance which opens the door for understanding, not IPCC studies, think pieces, and PowerPoint presentations.

Even former Vice President Al Gore understood that. While An Inconvenient Truth was pretty much a PowerPoint presentation, in the follow-up An Inconvenient Sequel (plug: I edited and produced the NY Times bestselling book for it), he changed his tune, and instead of all science, he featured a much more effective psychological route: money. He featured Republican mayors of Texan towns who—even though they didn’t believe in Climate Change—implemented solar farms for their cities and reaped the financial and political benefits. He appealed to selfishness rather than reason and he made it such that it doesn’t matter whether people are convinced Climate Change is real in order for them to be part of the solution.

When are journalists and activists going to realize that endless reports about how the world is ending are actually having the opposite effect on their goals? It reminds me of Facebook in late 2016 (right around the time I deleted it) as I watched well-meaning liberals with a poor understanding of marketing psychology sharing endlessly about Trump and how he was going to ruin the world. If they had stopped for a moment to realize that Trump and his followers love when liberals get outraged and that it is quite literally what feeds them, they might have instead taken a different tactic, one that didn’t focus attention on an enemy who thrives on attention. A good primer on this phenomenon is George Saunders’ essay, The Braindead Megaphone.

The sooner Climate Change marketing gets a bit more of an edge and leaves the science to scientists, the sooner we’ll see people actually helping stop this train.

That brings us to our next concern, I don’t actually think we can stop this train.

2. Human-Fixed Climate Change is a Hoax

We didn’t personally create climate change, we can’t personally fix it. There is a reason we love superhero movies; it’s great to watch one person or a small group of amazing people save the planet while everyone else just goes about their lives. In the paraphrased words of my visionary friend Edmund Zagorin while discussing AI, “any plan for the future which requires mass human behavior change is dead in the water. It simply won’t happen.”

I often write and think about the incredible gymnastics that many of my fellow citizens, friends, and family will go to in order to not think about capitalism. In another amazing show of how effective Republicans are at their jobs, in many circles, even very “progressive” ones, it’s kind of taboo to critique capitalism. Actually, it’s worse than a taboo, it’s passé, it’s cliché, it’s boring. And even in circles where critiquing capitalism and stanning AOC and Bernie is more acceptable, very little of that conversation becomes self-reflective. It’s kept at a distance as if capitalism is some external system that we are not part of. Since Capitalism is a system of control around human relations, it only makes sense that our interactions with everyone from our life partners to our dry-cleaners to the homeless guy on the corner are deeply steeped in its control and its rules. Until we question how our every decision has been prescripted for a system that does not benefit us, we will still just be part of it.

This is exemplified most clearly, to me, in watching kids volunteer to pick up trash on the beach. While some may see enterprising young people taking the future into their hands, I see the burnt ends of an economic system that incentivized environmental torture for centuries and now is weaponizing our guilt about taking part in it. One of the largest companies on God’s once-green earth is Coca-Cola, a company that literally bottles sugar in plastic around the globe for no reason. Once their sales plummet them into non-existence and/or the executive board realizes how unhelpful their existence is and disbands voluntarily, then I will be able to say change is happening. Until then, the kids picking up their trash on beaches make me very, very, very sad.

We collectively caused Climate Changed. Wait, wait, let me qualify that: the previous few generations—you know, the ones that said people should give birth laying on their backs, marijuana and mushrooms were harmful to society, and Coca-Cola was refreshing—they caused Climate Change. We are just the burnt ends.

This idea that we should be picking up the trash on the beach and its related delusion “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are all, to me, symptoms of being in an abusive relationship with a control system we did not construct in this lifetime. Corporations should be the ones reducing, reusing, and recycling, not us. Corporations have now started to actually pay people in far-off countries to pick up trash on the beach in order to have good marketing collateral and save face in the US. While I actually like that plan because, until they stop producing waste and just burn through all their savings paying people to clean up their damn mess, it’s an abusive cycle where they still win while the planet loses.

There is this charade that …

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