No Illusions (About How Bad It Is)
No Illusions
I think the hardest part about discussing the wretched state of affairs in what we call the “western world” is getting people to understand that I’m not employing hyperbole or speaking in metaphors.
When I talk about the “fraud economy,” America’s “forever wars” or “neofeudalism” these are not merely abstract terms. Western economic colonialism, mass incarceration and prison labor are not like slavery, they in fact are the driving forces behind modern slavery. We really do live in a corrupt globalized oligarchy. The human species really is facing down the opening stages of an impending mass extinction event. We are being lead by crooks, mass murderers and narcissistic liars who are themselves wholly beholden to the ruthless demands of capital – these things are all as real as penitentiary steel. Speaking frankly, there really is no question in my mind that if you’re reading this there’s a pretty good chance rich people actually are trying to kill you in a very material sense, and probably for something as meaningless as a marginal increase in share prices on the stock market.
Unfortunately however, while people are in the process of decolonizing their minds, and shedding the reactionary assumed ideas our society imprints on us before we can even think for ourselves, the material must be approached by many as largely symbolic – if only to get past the horrific inhumanity of it all and gain some sort of handle on the information.
For example: at first, it’s easier to understand say, the discussion of housing rights, property speculation, and rents in a figurative context. You tell yourself that landlords, bankers and speculators aren’t really leaches and murderers, or thieves and extortionists; these are hyperbolic comparisons designed to highlight injustice for the untrained observer. To be clear, I’m not criticizing people who are at this stage because I have been, and will continue to be, caught in this type of stop-gap, self created perception bubble on numerous issues throughout my life. This is a crucially important first step for the left wing or radical thinker – it helps observers come to a place intellectually where they are prepared to realize that it is not actually metaphorical; that indeed, there’s something deeply, violently amoral about the concept of rents and housing as property.
This is because when you really drill down and examine the evidence, you quickly discover that all of these terrible accusations are in fact true in an absolutely literal sense. Homelessness kills people, tears families apart and destroys millions of lives every year. There is nothing metaphorical about the growing number of “tent cities” in or near every major urban community in the United States. There is a very real human cost involved with the extraction of rents in our society and that cost is paid not only in cash, but also in psychological anguish, biological deterioration and the sociological impact of countless bright futures snuffed out by the twin tyrannies of wage slavery and property speculation – the list goes on and on, I’m really barely scratching the surface here.
Indeed you can take the argument much, much further without any real effort at all. Most competent history students will realize that on a macro level, the right to own and profit from the possession of land has lead to endless military conquests, brutal colonial exploitation and numerous outright genocides in the relatively brief history of Western European capitalism. If that feels a little esoteric, just examine the ongoing carnage created by the 2008 global financial crisis – an economic meltdown caused primarily by deregulation, rampant speculation with cheap institutional credit, and outright bloody fraud in the US housing market. There’s certainly nothing figurative about the bank repossessing your grandmother’s house or for that matter, the trillions of dollars in bailout money the US government used to reward Wall Street with for destroying the economy, wiping out pension funds and plunging millions of people into crushing poverty, practically overnight.
In my mind, once you realize that horrible shit, anyone with any sort of human empathy, self respect, or social consciousness is really only left with two choices: you can either decide to ignore the god awful truth for as long as your brain can take it, or you accept it in a literal sense and hopefully, resolve to expose, oppose and eventually abolish the practices that are actually killing people just like you and me as you read this. Rents are of course just one example; once you begin to understand that our society is driven by unregulated capitalism, that war is a business, that colonialism never ended and so on – the experience can be utterly paralyzing without the psychological buffer created by the fantasy that these ideas are all merely figurative expressions for more tolerable forms of injustice. Eventually however, you’re going to run out of magic tricks to keep your brain from processing reality and only then will you and I truly be able to communicate with each other freely, without the barrier of make-believe distorting our discussion.
I guess sometimes I just get frustrated waiting for other people to get that far in the process.
– nina illingworth
