Let Your Weary Feet Be Your Anchor
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Keseyian notions of institutionalized oppression, systems of control with no real master or figurehead. It seems too convenient to blame the government or the rich or the educational system or our families for these problems. Problems are what make us human, after all, but everyone is after this state of permanence, where everything is expected, every situation handled expertly, with a minimum of fuss. Entire industries have sprung up to service this impulse, which has been greatly exasperated by the acceleration of our media charged society. Power struggles have become fetishized; birthing various sexual subcultures, all defended under the pretenses of personal liberty. But at their core, when we engage in acts of bondage or domination, for example, we are in fact validating our own self-made prisons, upgrading the psychic facility like we would their physical counterpart. The dom just as subjugated as the sub, all bent on some release that forever lingers out of reach.
It’s very difficult to pinpoint the origin of our fucked up, postmodern condition. We purport to these ideals of enlightenment, peace, progress, but we’re not so far removed from the slavering beasts that perpetrated witch trials, holocausts, inquisitions, et al. Politics package the sides in grab-n-go bundles, philosophy on the run, no thinking involved. Why bother? It’s all at our fingertips for one low monthly fee.
We are in serious jeopardy. And not just the usual suspects, the obvious villains, like recession and climate change. We are overrunning the Earth, and we raise our kids to be the same dumb, multiple choice consumer droids that we are. We keep the rich rich and the poor poor. We cut monies allotted to public education to beautify opulent, privileged neighborhoods where kids go to private schools. But even they are victims of their own aberrant drives and vapid ambitions. What is there to have that is of any true value? Everything has a price, and if the spirit exists, surely it too can be bought and sold.
Individuality is a marketing tool, the prow on a black ship navigating the cosmos, waiting to puncture other planets on its unwieldy tip. Such a sexual metaphor. But once we’ve fucked the world we will do our very best to fuck the cosmos, and it will shrug and we shall fall away like so much dust from a derelict mantle. And the corpse of our ship will drift and wither and erode under duress of the void-winds, never sure of whom its captain ever was.
Captain, if you are there, hear the mutiny at your cabin door.