A Forum for the New World Order

Here I am, on the eve of what I’ve been awaiting for for the last few months, if not my entire life, and I don’t feel it. I’ve lost whatever muse drove me here. I’m thinking pills again. I don’t wanna feel this. I’m crashing.

My brain’s made up of chemicals. My pills activated my chemicals. They bypassed whatever triggered my chemical dysfunction, but they let me feel again. And when that stopped working, I thought “well, that was nice while it lasted”, and deteriorated.

I saw Obama televised in 2004 at the DNC. I told nay-sayers he would be our next president. I was told to stop thinking such nonsense. So I took that crazy idea and put it away along with all of my other dashed hopes. Pills took care of the hole once occupied by hope.

I didn’t watch the news after Katrina. The president is a narcissist. He believes his own lies. He kills and tortures. And we put him there to rape our country. I’ve known the certifiably insane. I know hopeless when I see it. I know their techniques for overstepping reason and gaining allies. No reason left to fight. Nothing left to hope for. The Twin Towers were wired for controlled demolition. There, I said it.

Obama came back. It looked like he might win. There’s no way. Those psychopathic bastards will find some way to make sure we stay hopeless. But I remember remember on the 5th of November Matthews read my mind: “I want to help him succeed.”

I recognized the opening at the top of my brain as truth. I felt like a child. I crawled out, painfully, like a screaming baby: “this changes everything, everything, everything, everything”. I was drooling with wide-eyed, open-mouthed realization. I was seeing hope transformed into a shining futurescape. I exposed myself to it. I took off the clothes of my shame and stood in the middle of it. I wanted it to touch every cell in my body and consciousness. Because without my pills and without my clothes all I have is hope.

I saw my death and wasn’t afraid. I believed in Christ. I believed in myself again. I believed in my own brain, taking its place in a sea of brains; creating knowledge of a better way of being. I let go my knowledge of things like fear and shame and war and hate. I tuned to the frequency of space: our only hope for appreciating what we’ve squandered on Earth.

And people told me to get back in my hole. Well here I am. I didn’t even realize I had fallen. But I have. So, congratulations.

I’ll never know what caused my brain to turn on me this time. I’ll pretend to hope as long as I can. Until then, I leave it to Obama. I’m in awe of his strength against such odds.

Michael Moore hit the nail on the head in this interview with Larry King about the auto industry bailout:

And I mean those guys that were testifying today, one of — the Ford chairman is making something like $22 million a year and his company lost $2 billion last year. The G.M. chairman is making $15 million a year. His company lost $39 billion last year. And he’s rewarded with a $15 million payout.

I mean this is — this is just absolutely insane.

But I’ll tell you what it really has proven to me, Larry, is that these guys, after all of that stuff they’ve been telling us all these years about go capitalism, free market, free enterprise, they don’t believe in any of that.

They don’t believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want — they want socialism for themselves. They want a handout…

KING: Yes.

MOORE: …and a net for themselves. To hell with everybody else, but give it to them.

KING: As…

MOORE: And I think, really, what we’re seeing here right now with them, with the banks, we’re seeing the end of capitalism — the end of capitalism as we know it.

KING: Has…

MOORE: And I say good riddance.

KING: As Mel Brooks…

MOORE: It hasn’t helped the people or the planet.

KING: As Mel Brooks once classically said, where did we go right?

The rich have this view of poor people as a disease, and not knowing their take on disease, I can only assume their strategy is to ignore them and maybe they will go away. The homeless don’t make it on our census sheets. They’re not counted among the current unemployed. Their story has been untold for decades. Unfortunately that is nothing new.

Our “Free Market” social contract has been to agree on poverty as a casualty of a system skewed to protect corporations over individuals. The agreement gave the Middle class ammunition in their inevitable confrontation with poverty in their communities (assuming most Middle-classers can’t afford the upgrade to a gated community); the justification for dismissing the poor and homeless as lazy, drunk, or worse.

America’s Upper class now has more capital than any of us can even begin to wrap our heads around (Bernie Madoff just walked away from having to account for the $1,000,000, disguised as jewelry, he laundered to his family). What do they know about working for a living? What do they know about keeping a budget, making ends meet, or being self-made? It really is just easier to understand their economy in terms of an elite socialist niche, carved out for about 5% of Americans, under the guise of a “Free Market”.

Only the Middle class offers a realistic study on Capitalism as it’s been exalted. It’s the last group to walk the Capitalist line, follow the Capitalist rules, and prop up the Capitalist banks. This army marched long enough to spin their neighbor’s decline in the same way they spun poverty: to apply labels of laziness, drunkenness, and insanity in order not to empathize and potentially fall down with them. The Middle Class’s race to the bottom is marked by broken families, rising substance abuse, suicide, and a nice, stucco exterior.

Earth to Middle Class: Stop pretending you ever had an invitation to the American Capito-socialist orgy. Such an invitation comes with a shining, super-socialist safety net should you decide to run your own little Ponzi scheme. I don’t know about you guys, but my safety net is currently my Dad. What’s his?

Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

—ADAM COHEN, New York Times Editorial Observer

As is my current style, I’m choosing not to fear the future and instead find promise in emerging knowledge. I think science fiction paints a traditionally morose picture of the future in a way to warn us about the dangers of using new technology unwisely. However, I don’t think we need to look into the future at all to see negative technological manifestations. What we can be sure of is that negative forces aren’t sustainable, and our species’ survival instinct will always at least try to overcome them.

One recent emerging technology is the ability to read minds, essentially. To some, this ability raises ethical questions a la Minority Report. It’s true that such use of technology is dangerously possible. But when we fear for such possibilities, we’re ignoring the more insidious ways in which we suppress human freedoms without new technology.

Consider indictment and conviction. Our legal system is imperfect at best, and imperfection promises that innocent people are put to death unjustly. Consider brainwashing. In a way, it’s a technology unto itself. Technologies that facilitate brainwashing (marketing, “news”, and religion) merely speed up and streamline the process. Brainwashing has effectively taught us to accept these systemic casualties. It has convinced us that there is a black and white answer to good vs. evil, and that if some people die unjustly in order to ensure the “real” evil is put to death, we accept that we must break human eggs to make human omelets.

So, what’s the difference? Our prison population is becoming hard to ignore in the way we’ve tried to ignore the more innocuous landfill population. Why should we be scared of a mind reading technology that might better quantify the concept of criminal justice?

I would argue, in a broader sense, that we wouldn’t focus such technology simply on convicting fellow humans. Although we consider computers to be very fast, we’re limited in how we interact with them. In order to get my thoughts into this blog, I’ve needed to speed up my typing ability to keep up with the thoughts in my brain, and alas, some of those thoughts don’t make it to the page because of what I’ve trained myself to believe is the process of (sentence, paragraph, thesis) formulation. But what about the thoughts in-between? Wouldn’t that reveal something more about what we as humans are trying to communicate with each other?

We’re concerned about mind reading, either out of embarrassment for what really goes through our minds, or out of the implications of being caught thinking something terrible. But if we’re more progressive thinkers, our awful thoughts might be the result of recognizing the atrocities inherent in our world, to the possible end of directing more energy to eradicate human suffering.

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It’s true. Punk lyrics regard paranoia and lonely iconoclasty. They’re talking about cutting through the cloud of lies that surrounds us and seeing truth and being frustrated by a system seemingly insurmountable to change. I don’t know how else to put it, but they’re our youth movement’s lifeline to transcending humanism. Our children really are our future.

ADDENDUM
ALL art is transhuman, only punk is transitionally centristically transhuman; more immediately available to the to the public at large who haven’t delved into prefer it to the aspects of transhumanist musicians who operate in a more cerebral state, and are by definition therefore, less accessible.