13.4
When something’s running out, it starts to drip. Imagination bursts into the outer world. The codices have skirted round this moment. Shoulders have been turned for us. We face another way. Circumstance is different here. The plants all look like they could use some water. There seems to be an inorganic odor in the air that’s everywhere one steps. The sun sets earlier in this direction, even when it’s summer. Every other storefront is repairing autos. The garages are all open and they sound like congers of combustion. Howsoever far we go, we find it’s farther still. The reins are fallen, flopping on the ground, dragging through the dirt. Seja cara dela, he thinks. Those are the reins of uncomplexity, she thinks, and she is right. She is hoping that they will not shred intact long enough that she’ll complete her ride. She will extend this to her future family whereas he takes up the theme of disillusion and sets it to the long remainder of his life. He drinks too much, seeks out the company of addicts. He is surprised and hurt when inevitably they let him down. It is perhaps a victory that he didn’t lose his naivete. This only does him good in retrospect, however. For the present he tries every remedy apart from IV drugs. But his inability to understand the individual coupled with the depressive way his shoulders turned meant he never had the kind of access to an unintended consequence that would make him fine with living in the limitations that lead to success, without feeling he’s destroying that uniqueness within him. He’ll learn the hard way that there’s no redemption in a substance, one area where mythology is useful for those whose strong family units reared strong family eunuchs. As most unfit survivors of wage slavery will do, he’ll find peace in serving others, though he’ll figure out a way to serve his ego just as well.
Our hero demanded of our heroine to bring him big passion. She wouldn’t ever be aware of it. Class put a rapier in the old homestead, left it humming en plein air. It threw the sun’s reflected rays around. Fencepost nails had caught it in a glint and passed it on. Leaves absorbed it and appeared behind the ears of those who utilized initials in their names.
The chassis chrome is regal on a sunny day. It blended in when it was overcast — lachrymosity depended on the weather. It changed symbolically from a marker for the fallen to the inspirational. Generations after had not the such strong feels as those who made it through the war. Where their forebears had privation, they enjoyed sufficiency. Where their fathers grew up short, they approached two meters. The buildings from the prior centuries were totems of their strength, such as they could count it. All the stuff all strewn about they recontextualized. Identifying markers were erased by new technology. Appliances were stripped. Chemicals went to a lab where they were combined into harmless gas and slurry, which took up a lot of space but at least was inert. Plastics were compacted and dropped in corralled regions of the sea, where microbes had evolved to eat what would not decompose. Having spread to all the rounded corners of the globe, the microbes were grown in concentration in these corralled regions. All the concentrated plastics made a replenishing buffet for this helpful creature. Once it had rid the world of bottles and moved on to box containers, folks began to worry it could be a threat. But when its source of food became exhausted, the creature just died out, in droves, across the globe. It did not go extinct, as some few plastics still were made, on the fabled markets that go wherever people do. It got everything back up to snorted snuff.
The crazy and the triggered had to separate their garbage, an indignity that did not soothe them, for it removed the fangs from their destructive noncompliance. The disregard for how they felt was certainly unwholesome. How dare a chore be added to their lives? They in turn demanded power to increase their self-esteem. They sought more followers in spheres their flesh would keep them out of. What a goal it was to bring the eyeballs in. It could be comforting, electrons in their fingers changing pixels on a screen. They didn’t have to stand for selfish labeling. They pointed to the market, took their inspiration there. Twelve members of our hero’s clique, including his old roommate, would turn out like this — any twelve, it didn’t matter which.
Standing there in flat Nebraska, waiting to confront her at her parent’s home, our hero couldn’t put the pleasing memories where she had flown from them. For years they couldn’t keep their hands off one another. They got kicked out of a bookstore for heavy petting in the aisles. The searchlight cops pulled up behind them late at night in lover’s lane. It was hard to answer blinding questions nude, retrieve ID from shorts thrown all around. Our heroine would work him over. She’d giggle at his chicken skin. There were cinemas and churches, baseball fields and woods, anywhere where there was no one else around. They didn’t know it was a drive — they saw it both as love. They hardly ever called each other by their given names. They had a certainty in one another that did not need overcorrection. They never took the bearing of the somewhat desperate who say babe in every sentence and are ready to agree.
After love there is the other. What the other wants is plain once their nature is revealed. Some hang on long enough to be gifted with that revelation. It’s the target’s way of acquiescing. As long as they receive their expectations’ due, they’ll stick around. For the one who wants to be there that info’s vital to determine how the desperate portrayal will proceed — when he knows who she really is, he can tailor his behavior to give her what she wants, not as in possessions but as in the type of man. This is the baby league of asps that most of us engage in. Of course it’s not a calculation, it’s making that dear partner’s dreams come true. This gets called romantic, it’s what makes cliques squeal in envy of compassion. It’s taking place outside of conscious thought. Self-behavior modification activates the reward center. It is the biggest hurdle in society — how to manage these subconscious drives so that individuals are as happy as they’re able and the planet isn’t harmed when circumstance should turn against them — with the byproduct of managing the drives that kill a lot of people, plants, and animals, and overheat the biosphere. Then folks won’t cry as much, which eases life for people that they make.
13.5
Then there is the branch, necessary exploration. Custom users bring their houses along with them. There’s no need for something to return to. They hike not along a finely flowing stream — they wade right in. They drag their heavy soaken denim through the carving water, slipping on the rocky bed, taking shin-shots from the broken branches spearing by. There’s always one dead bird to turn the stomach at its sight. Stepping through the water turns up silt and so it is opaque. The plodder does not sense the colony of crayfish that his boots have fricasseed or the tadpoles that escape into a hidden catfish maw. It’s always gross to see digestion. It’s for the good the sausage casing’s covered.
A sport is there for anyone who seeks to turn another’s broken feelings to a thicker wallet. And a profit-driven culture dangles an advantage to us all. When the way the shoulders’ facing turns from magnified to blurred, seek a crowd of people. Ape the stupefied til one gets to where they’re going. There will be something there to take one’s mind off of one’s problems, something dumb and popular. There should really be a cause besides the market. This is on the list of things that go unmentioned on the most-seen screens. But since the people own the airwaves in the US, such ideas are permitted on the screens of little scope.
People can be told a lie and they’ll believe it. This is a damning flaw. It is well exploited by the minority who give free-rein to their drives and thereby keep control. Most people can’t reach beyond the short-term thinking they were blinkered with by evolution. They’ve given up their privacy through abdication, by reveling in posting who they are and where they can be found, whom they’re talking to, and which corporate mouthpiece they are preferential to. Propaganda’s honed to great efficiency on the conclusions of such data. It’s effective and it works. When the people begin to value more the word of mouth, then propa-g moves into the mouths of the characterless-with-an-audience, who take money to repeat what they are told. Propaganda phrases are for sale, and those without character speak them in their videos. They are as obedient as parrots. Propa-g also moves into the mouths of purported people, really just sophisticated chatbots paired with a human handler to give a natural reaction to the bots’ nonsensical constructions. Bots draw from lists of phrases that have been shown to work in similar targeted groups. Assertions and trolling questions are as useful as compliments to effect a desired outcome. These abhorrent practices on the free and open internet do not revere its starting point — they are founded in our primate past, made viable, and put to scabrous use.
There is a lot (“A lot. More’n ya think. A lot.”) of marketing right now about AI. There is no such thing as AI. Artificial intelligence is a conscious machine. There are no conscious machines. As soon as something is propagated under a name in which it’s not, the Orwell-sense starts tingling. Why are all the junior Goebbels hyping up AI? We don’t know yet, but there’s an educated guess: to make folks go along with what will harm them. Looking forward to being told what that will be!
13.6
Look to what else can be. Enticements to spend will no longer be effective. This will cut down on a swathe of propa-g. It will be worth a laugh when every stratagem of junior Goebbels marketers fails utterly. Folks will wave and wish them well on their way out of the office building, carrying a lidless box with sticky notes and a browning plant inside. At least they will have universal basic income to rely on.
Race cars will have art on them, T-shirts will lack logos. The only logos (knowledge) will be in the education system. Everyone will in general relax, enjoying longer stays within the blissful state of stress-relieving sighs, collapsing on a couch after horizontal exercise. They’ll find more comfort when they’re not indoctrinated. They’ll hardly dwell upon the flaws in their appearance. Anyone who tries to sell them something by inducing insecurity will waste their corporate money til they finally give up. Every target’s missing the capacity to even want to fix something so intransigent. It’s the communist’s kinky shudder manifested! People will name and love the box car that they’re issued! If they need a truck because they’re always hauling foodstuff and construction, they may make a trade! Peacocking will arise in paint and trim, not in the mass production of new models! No painting on the roofs though — those have to be white-washed! Resources will be saved for our descendants! It will be agreed upon because human beans will lack the thrust to have it any different! And because in this panacea, evolution was the cause, we will not be bored unceasingly by finger-wagging moralists and the insatiable lamenters!
The only time we pick up and move on without hesitation’s when the circumstance was out of our control. Thus we’ll readily forgive the outside forces before we ever will ourselves. Blame must be inscribed and ever-channeled. But this will calm down also when we lose the unchecked urge to gobble. Just a brake is what we need for such unconscious forces. It’s certain many fewer of us will run ourselves cartoonly off the cliff’s lip like some senseless malcontents. Happiness will be elusive still, but a general contentment will come with each newborn’s basic income, which sets them up to harvest their own consciousness. Then they will pollute the moon.
Rare earth elements are scattered through the belt of asteroids. They will be smelted on the moon and shipped back down to us via cargo shuttles docking at the apogee of lifts on filaments. We know how to do this — we just need the oomph that the above change in programming will give. The new wealth and technology this influx of metals will entail is reason enough to go ahead with it. We’ll resolutely put our jewels to other uses. And nearly none will ever suffer today’s widespread morbid delirium, anymore, again. Controls will not so quickly top us up with more.
After our heroine took her leave tearfully, without saying so, our hero had to go downtown, in California, but the streets were filled with running, and the cars all had to wait, and they filled the air with their excretions, and one can see how simple is the world, from plankton respiration to the heaving chests of marathoners, from worm fertilization to toxic waste. Everything’s emitting, body sweat is salty, the skin is crossed with lines and pierced with hairs, it seems to come from nowhere, this mineral-laden coolant, and all the footfalls vibrate in the knees, and life becomes a refusal to give up, rather than the strive for benefit. There is the unrendered to consider. All the faff and fluff has no interest in the toll on runners, unless they have a ball they are scurrying to put into a goal.
Interest lands where there is a chance of personal gain. Being around beauty and being respectful toward it does not wipe out the hope that someday contact will be made. The most shocking idea for the mass of men is that beauty might of its own accord want something lacking in it. The louder they insist their spouse is beautiful to them, the harder they are trying to convince themselves, for repetition is a talisman that girds the face of doubt. Beauty is so singled out that it seeks complacency in numbers. It’s never certain who’s around to be offended.
They’ll saw our cannons into simple pipes, hook them up to people’s homes, and find something toxic to run through them. There are no studied side effects after all this time. Either we can never know or we’ll never want to. Much is launched by will alone and when it’s insufficient, it’s rare that things get done.
Glamour performs walk-ons in our world. A freezing sharp inhale is the sound of its arrival. Impatience is its vibe. It has but forty-five commandments that it expects to be obeyed. Those who can’t do figures in their head will yet memorize these dote-iful demands, lickety split. Everyone’s conversant in beauty — they needn’t have it to be so. Stimulation holds our weak attention span.
Everything’s a product of the sand. Baby feet are tanned by walking outside with no shoes. Given any choice, we’ll likely choose the beach. Rebounding waves are motioning “come back,” it’s clear we have been on the beach before, in fact we grew up there, it would be nice to have a memory of that, and others to explain mycelium, and how we might connect to that, as fuel when once we are post-conscious, and why it is that not every remain’s not at rest, when instead we split what we know into ten thousand parts, each with its own experts, and every one is set to argue, and all the space we gained is taken up, and there’s no dislodging without arms, so suddenly we find no view in any way our shoulders turn. This is new reality, this is unencumbered glee, the kind that we will be a part of, but never ourselves feel, for the rush goes by before we can retrieve our ID from our shorts, and all resistance is stacked up in the livery, blockaded from the tumult of our lives.
Had not a friend asked of her to lend her scarves and baubles? And had not our heroine lent her raiment sans recrimination? Had her friend not only kept them, but never mentioned them again? Was this not a blackhole operation? Is it not mandatory servicing to exercise one’s drives the least that they can get away with, before they’re driven to self-harm? Are they not engaged in mental harm, the bulk of it directed inward, while the spillover eddies when the tide goes out, which excess lays in wait for the physically directed, i.e. other people? Might she be permitted an allowance when those she’d rather didn’t traipse all through them receive a taste of her inner anguish? Since we all have it to one degree or another? Generations back to the great rift have rowed upon these tides.
13.7
We need to go, right now. A better life is just there waiting for us to apply a few agreed upon, provable conclusions. Just to apply them. The problems they will solve will have a benefit that will indisputably outweigh their unintended consequence. Our task is to modify the economic system to one that is beholden to the people, rather than the one they wage-slave in today. Social beings create markets. Some markets are for gain and some for share. But the markets auto-generate. It would be futile to outlaw them. Even in the most repressive, totalitarian nation, North Korea, there are widely known black markets. Even torture called security will not put a halt to markets. The wage-slaves always find a way to trade. Markets are a function of our drives.
We keep on butting up against this point, our harmful drives. How to calm or else erase them? There have been some suggestions in this book you’re reading. Other conclusions may be drawn from points that we have made. The conclusions are not kind. But are they kinder by a fraction than the harm we live in, yoked to the drives of those in charge who will not stop extinction.