Michael. Dear Michael. Of course it's you, who else could they send, who else could be trusted? I... I know it's a long way and you're ready to go to work... all I'm saying is wait, just wait, just-just-just... please hear me out because this is not an episode, relapse, fuck-up, it's... I'm begging you Michael. I'm begging you. Try and make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness. Two weeks ago I came out of the building, okay, I'm running across Sixth Avenue, there's a car waiting, I got exactly 38 minutes to get to the airport and I'm dictating. There's this, this panicked associate sprinting along beside me, scribbling in a notepad, and suddenly she starts screaming, and I realize we're standing in the middle of the street, the light's changed, there's this wall of traffic, serious traffic speeding towards us, and I... I-I freeze, I can't move, and I'm suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I'm covered with some sort of film. It's in my hair, my face... it's like a glaze... like a... a coating, and... at first I thought, oh my god, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic - embryonic - fluid. I'm drenched in afterbirth, I've-I've breached the chrysalis, I've been reborn. But then the traffic, the stampede, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I'm thinking no-no-no-no, reset, this is not rebirth, this is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death. And then I realize no-no-no, this is completely wrong because I look back at the building and I had the most stunning moment of clarity. I... I... I... I realized Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the... the-the-the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity. And that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The stench of it and the stain of it would in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath and I set that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe that I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time. And Michael, the time is now.
Arthur Edens in the Hollywood film Michael Clayton
Everything is wrong, and everyone knows. The world we've created and the way things are, our Earthly reality, the status quo, in the broadest sense, cultural, social, political, environmental, psychological, spiritual, ontological, is fucked, and it's our fault. It isn't working out for humanity and our unfortunate, innocent, hapless cohabitants. These conditions are not acceptable.
For these notes to make sense to anyone else, first I should mention that I'll be alternating between two modes of language: one premised on the notion that duality is real and meaningful and that there is such a thing as good, bad and a fucked society, and another that totally rejects that idea in favour of a hypothetical, imagined world of Oneness, wholeness, and non-dual meaninglessness. Meaningless because without defining things and concepts by what they are and what they're not - that is, dualistically - it's impossible to think and there can be no reading about ideas that I can't have. I believe that on the highest level of consciousness there is no preference for good or bad and no such thing as right and wrong, there is only that which is. Nature doesn't seem to recognise our values of right and wrong. Nature is killing viciously as the lion and dying painfully as the zebra. Everywhere we look nature is eating herself, and there seems to be no justice. There is intelligence and balance, but no evidence that our anthropocentric, dualistic ideas about right and wrong and good and bad have any relevance to her.
Lately I've been thinking big about big issues, ones that are way too big for me but I've kept on it anyway - so far, anyhow - and going to meetings with other people who are just as laughably, hopelessly deluded as I am or just as visionary and irrepressibly, uncompromisingly optimistic, depending on how you look at it. This isn't like other activist groups I've been involved with, which are happy to tackle one issue passionately. They want to change the whole world starting right now, starting with the whole thing and leaving the little stuff for later, when we have time. I'm talking about the people who have sprung up around the ideas of Jacque Fresco, a new movement for the 94 year old's not-so-new concepts, one whose existence and popularity is due in no small part to Peter Joseph's film Zeitgeist Addendum. If you haven't seen it, you should. Go here right now and watch the first video you see. Anything I might say here is frivolous bullshit in comparison, so you'll be missing nothing and gaining plenty. You're on my bullshitting ground by the way, this is my first intellectual excretion on this site and I'm hoping it will make me feel better. This will be where I let my hair and my pants down and take as long as I need to expunge, and you're just weird if you watch.
I truly believe that you're all insane. I'm not being facetious. I'm serious now, I mean it. Recently I deeply understood my own insanity, deeper than usual anyway and pretty clearly considering I'm insane. It may have been more of an acceptance than an understanding. Actually, that's definitely what it was because I can't trust myself to properly understand anything at all. But I know it's real, and I trust that my former illusions of sanity are false, and that any future ones will be. I cannot possibly be truly sane given what I've been through and what I was born into. And I want to thank you, the world, for giving me this gift, for it was verily through you that I truly saw myself.
But despite our insanity I do believe there's hope. It begins with realising and accepting it. It's time we wake up to ourselves and start thinking about remodeling our society in a sane and humanistic way, so that it actually works, and keeps working, sustainably, in harmony with our environment. If we can create those conditions, no one else will be born into insanity and a whole new era will begin to emerge for humankind. It's a lot to ask of the dumbest, most irrational, most anti-social, most counter-intuitive primate lifeforms ever to spring from the loins of the Earth, I know, especially since we're having so much fun with stuff like raping the planet, murdering each other, caging, torturing, medicating and poisoning animals before eating them, genetically altering our tomatoes with fish genes, littering the landscape with radioactive, DNA-mutating depleted uranium, etc. But when you really think about it, none of it is much fun anymore.
Some people don't like to describe themselves as religious, but there is one religious institution which everyone lives by, worships, and has unshakable faith in: money. We are all Moneyists. I've put a fair amount of time into studying our insanity and who benefits from it and while it's true that there are other religious ideologies behind some of our worst behaviour, in the end even they are products of the religious-monetary zeitgeist. We were born into an illness that has shaped us for millennia and made monsters of us. If you are part of the system you are benefiting from this madness in some way. Religion and money, and the religion of money, seem to be two of the main causes and symptoms of the sickness. If you don't yet fully understand how the modern mega-religion of Fundamentalist Monetaryism constitutes one of the primary foundations of our collective insanity and how it has derailed and undermined our social evolution, you need to learn about it. You could start here and go from there. Or if you're pressed for time, you could watch this short Youtube video.
We will either make it as a species or we won't. If we don't change course it's better for the planet that we don't. We need to find a way out of the pricing system and learn to manage the planet's natural resources wisely and intelligently, which will be difficult and maybe even impossible given that we all have the sickness and we're all insane. I'm convinced that the most viable system is a Resource Based Economy (RBE).
I wonder what real sanity would look like. This is where I'm going to put my ideas about it as they come. Ideas about sanity from the depths of madness.
