Eventually Truth Will Arrive

Everyone is free to have their own opinion; we can't forget most aren't correct.

Eventually it is coming.  Eventually the levies will break, the horns will blow, the oceans will boil into mist.  Eventually the tally will show and the future will arrive.  There is a truth coming; it is not something I claim to have access to, only something I can see out on the horizon, kicking up dust and swallowing the future whole.  This egregore barrels toward us, and nothing seems to stop it or even slow it down.  It grows closer, rumbles louder, and screams its many threats to us in the moments of fleeting clairvoyance we are granted unto us all.  For me, I am brave enough only to admit that I see the truth, but not smart enough to understand it. Or if I do understand it, it speaks in an arcane language; runes printed on the soul that summon visions of truth I cannot articulate. This is the lot of the writer; cursed to forever paint pictures with a typewriter. We get close, but only close enough to smell it. By the time I pass it on to you, it’s barely even a whiff.

I am scared of what cometh.  Are you not?  To say you are not scared means you are either ignorant, or that you are one of the people manufacturing the false promises of reality that are fed of the daily to the ranks of the ignorant.  If you are reading this, it is doubtful you are either.  Which is both reassuring and frightening; the fact that those who need to be reached are rendered nearly unreachable by the architecture of the strange silos we have built in the last ten to fifteen years does tend to make it all feel a bit hopeless.  But it is not hopeless, as long as we calibrate our hope to the sources that have any chance to save us.

I often want to exercise a sort of magnanimous indifference to it all; it is tempting to give myself over to the wisdom of ages that promises us that our fears are the same fears of those living 600 years ago.  But it all feels a bit unique now, does it not?  The technology from 600 years ago was still being used 500 years ago.  We now live in a time when someone using a mobile phone from just 6 years ago is considered a sort of luddite, or who at least finds their preference so anachronistic that they see it as a point of pride. 

I am certain my concerns are similar to those of my ancestors, it is a matter of scale and rapidity with which I am concerned.  I am sure that someone in 534 A.D. was worried about a great prince with a flaming sword who was prophesied to reclaim his rightful throne.  And look at that – no prince, no flaming sword, no nothing – just a meaningless life of sweeping and dung-collection until an undignified death from gnat cancer strikes him down at the ripe old age of 41.  Do I want to be like gnat cancer guy?  Why fret about changes when we all know that “nothing changes but the changes!”

This is a cope; we must cease to indulge it. Change comes not from the denial of neuroses, only the fruitless suppression of them. If we never turn the heat on under the tea kettle, it will not scream. Sure, we will always fight against the thought of certain doom that stalk after us at night, but that is fine as long as we are fighting. If we stop fighting we are abandoning our post.

To those who think you are doing and contributing nothing: I urge you to consider being more scared. To those who, like me, feel that the spectacle of the political system is pointless and aimless and inacccesible: I urge you to drown deeper in your despair. Deeper, deeper, deeper - we have to dig deeper. We cannot placate ourselves by rising upward. The more fervently we go skyward to avoid the tyrannical gravity of this world’s predicament, the more we fail to build up the steam necessary to blow the kettle. So come on, don’t try to fool yourself - go ahead and say it:

“I’M SCARED AS HELL AND I AM GOING TO TAKE IT SOME MORE!!!”

Peter Paul Rubens ‘Two Satyrs’, 1619

You must be scared, terrified, unnerved, disgusted, and hopeless. Why such a mandate, and why now? Now more than ever, I say, because if you cannot drum it up in yourself, the places to find it are rapidly drying. A question: have you noticed that the people who seek to sanitize our fiction are the ones who are most likely to soil this world with the fiction of their ideology? Those who do not allow things in their films or books, even as adversaries, even as things to fight against, even as realities we must contend with - are these not the most vile, hateful, petty, and mean-spirited people you know?

Ask yourself this - which group do you think has more “in-fighting”:

1. A group of theater kids on a weekend retreat of live-action roleplaying of an Edwardian Horror Mystery.

2. One hundred adolescent and young adult men playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

In a certain way, you could make a case for #2. After all, this lot is more likely to make bold assertions about one another’s mothers and what they’d like to do to them, should they have the opportunity. But this is more like jousting than in-fighting; when I say in-fighting I mean the sort of sniping that leads to destabilized power hierarchies, the boycotting of certain activities based on the behavior or language of someone deemed responsible for those activities (even if completely unrelated). Of course it is #1. If you can’t picture it yet, imagine that someone at the LARPing camp makes the INSANE error of suggesting that the inciting incident for our horror mystery could be something grotesque; perhaps a violation of the physical or sexual nature. As eyes go up, they immediately see their mistake and begin to hedge, recoil their line they have just cast, but it is too late. They said the “thing” and now they have to die.

Because we no longer acknowledge that bad things happen. To do that would be to propagate other future bad things, because if people even witness bad things they are going to do them - even though everyone leading such a witchhunt would never own up to being the type of person so easily duped by such a subliminal psychological suggestion, they still have to send this person packing from LARP camp just in case there is someone who is idiotic enough there to be fooled by someone who has perpetrated the crime of suggesting that horror ought happen when depicting horror.

Those who LARP…the irony of role-playing a utopia. To see what it was like to live as a 2024 worm-brained progressive but also with different hats and pocketwatches. What happens to all of the demons we exercise through fiction? Why has the meditiation on evil lasted so long, only to now show itself to be a bad medicine for society? What is the cost of sanitizing our plays and movies and games until everyone in them - bad good or other - all of them are “good.” What happens then to the part of us that needs to face that darkness, that shadow?

You already know. The shadow never gets faced, never gets exorcised or taken for a walk. It builds and builds like snot on day 3 of nyquil, until finally it is sneezed out all over some hapless dolt who doesn’t know that you can’t say certain words in front of the 30 year old kids that will soon be congress. This project of theirs - to sanitize our imagined worlds so that we can make the real world follow behind - it is so utterly doomed to fail I struggle to even explain why. It is like explaining why diarrhea smells. But there is a part that goes less examined; the fact that the group most adamant about “following the science” has no scientific backing for this strategy.

How did we get to the idea that “preventing people from seeing or hearing about bad things” actually leads to “people doing less bad things?” Not only is there no justification for this, there is plenty that suggests the opposite. For example, consider that there was a time in which people wouldn’t ask people if they were contemplating suicide for fear that they would then be triggered to go kill themselves. What have we found? Only that this was utterly wrong, that anyone thinking about it was already thinking about it, and that simply asking was for most people who felt that way a relief and an unburdening and a permission to admit this horrible refusal of life flowing through them.

The more we eliminate the virtual interface with evil, the more we have to find that evil elsewhere. Is it any wonder then, that those who watch movies and television shows where racism and abuse and violence do not exist, are so very prone to then looking outward and finding new evils where they do not exist? We should be seeking utopia in reality, knowing we will never find it, rather than seeking utopia in fiction where it can simply be “proclaimed.” That’s easy. That’s a cop out. And the more they seek this cop out, the more that fiction and non-fiction switch. The more that these psychotic fleshy busy-bodies make everyone around them the soap opera, placing upon Marge at the front desk some sort of dark motive because she complimented someone’s hair to be nice. Doesn’t she know the history of talking about certain people’s hair?

No. She doesn’t. She’s busy watching Law and Order SVU. And so should you. Keep facing the terror, and the more you do the less you’ll go searching for it in Marge. Eventually the truth about Marge will be revealed. Believe it or not, there is an objective truth about old Marge, and one day we will know it. And the one who keeps that tally will not be swayed by the non-omniscient perspectives in the room.