Gas, Grass, or Ass(umptions)

Over the years I, being the type to point out and loudly question a pile of bullshit when I see one, have begun several essays (or rants) with generally the same question: What the fuck are people thinking? Sometimes—particularly when I’ve worked myself into a towering snit—the question is closer to, How the actual fuck can everyone be this fucking stupid?

I never get very far with these questions. Generally I end up writing (or smoking) myself calm, trailing off as I once again realize that people are probably not entirely maliciously stupid or specifically out to get me, but that they’re more or less doing their best with inadequate information and a lack of proper skills and support. And, as or more importantly, I again realize that the only reason I have (or think I have) the proper information and skills is mostly by accident rather than because She’s All That I’m all that. It was an accident of my childhood that I had a teacher who managed to get me to love reading, and it was an accident of my being to be so stubbornly curious. And it was sheer luck to be born at a time when the relevant information already existed, and that I’m capable of understanding it even a little.

Anyway. Over the years, as the piles of bullshit got way more numerous and somehow even more shittier, I kept trying to jam these incompatible puzzle pieces together so that it could make some kind of sense to me why we had one the one hand such overwhelming and enlarging piles of rancid bullshit and on the other the vast majority of the human population essentially sitting on their hands instead of helping to shovel shit. Then I had the thought that perhaps my misunderstanding stems not from people’s general intelligence, but from their general ignorance. (It puts the ‘bare ass’ in embarrassing how long it took me to think of this, since I’m forever going on about how I don’t believe people are stupid but just ignorant, and I like to believe I’m not a hypocrite.) In other words, I realized that obviously, of course, people aren’t ignorant about the bullshit itself; but most people do seem genuinely ignorant of how to shovel it. My own major malfunction is I simply don’t understand how or why people remain so ignorant, and therefore susceptible to the same mistakes and traps, when the internet—not to mention their local library—certainly has more than enough information available to enable each and every one of us to learn far more than they need to know to grab a shovel and get to work. (As I also like to say, none of this bullshit is any particular asshole’s fault exactly, but it is all our collective and individual responsibility to clean it the fuck up (and stop making more).)

So, perhaps the question I’m trying to ask is something more like, Why don’t people ever seem to question their assumptions? More straightforwardly: why don’t people ever seem to ask why? Such questions are the necessary first step on the path to doing something different, and since most of us seem to want to not be on the road we’re on, it’s weird to me that they’re not being asked loudly, publicly, and furiously. (The questions are necessary because I’m assuming you want to think about what you’re doing and where you’re going; you can, of course, just start running off higgly-piggly, but your odds of getting somewhere you want to go get quite a bit worse).

Now, writing an essay is maybe the worst way to go about answering a question: usually an essay is written to argue you already have the answer. And essays phrased as questions have an unfortunate tendency to be written by Tucker Carlson-type bad-faith propagandists (with titles like, “Are the [outside group] eating pets and/or babies?”, and the answer is always yes, even though it’s actually and obviously no), which is definitely something I don’t want to be, and am consciously trying not to be. So, instead, here are my assumptions—or rather, since I’m the curious, suspicious type, my informed beliefs. Even though I can’t prove (in a legal or scientific sense) any of them, they are the fundamental building blocks of my being. They are how I make sense of reality. Perhaps by explaining them ‘out loud,’ so to speak write, I can provide what the CIA was so threatened by in the second half of last century: a good example. (Which is not to say I’m looking to persuade you to believe what I believe; just that perhaps I can encourage you, dear reader, to question your assumptions a little more.) And then perhaps one fine evening I’ll be lulled to sleep listening to the harmonious cacophony of everyone flinging open their doors and windows and screaming out like maniacs, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” before marching out and finally ridding this fucking world of the filthy fucking burden of capitalist bullshit.

Assumption the First: I believe human beings are fundamentally cooperative, not competitive. We do not create art, pursue knowledge, or form communities because we’re trying to win something. We do these things because we want to help our families and friends and share our accomplishments. Even the wealthy want to be remembered for ‘doing good,’ which is probably a big reason why our society conflates personal wealth with personal achievement. Even though moral goodness and the hoarding of resources are incompatible with each other¹, the rich and powerful of every age have always worked—mostly successfully—to portray themselves as the social ideal. And the fact that we continue to tolerate their bullshit, despite the atrocities they and their toadies so frequently perpetrate to ensure or increase their wealth and power, is, I think (or hope), a sign of this overriding tendency for cooperation over conflict.

I mean, I’m not the first person to point out the absurd numerical advantage we the poor and downtrodden have over the rich and their shit-licking bootheels, nor am I the first to point out that the “unproductive” rich siphon their wealth from those who actually do the work of making and maintaining our societies (Adam Smith, for one, said this, right in the first couple chapters of The Wealth of Nations, which are the only chapters anyone reads). We would all be genuinely better off, and in so many diverse ways, without the rich and their shit-licking bootheels hoarding all our resources and holding us down. But of course the answer is, unfortunately, not as simple as ‘removing’ (eg, to an island pedo penal colony, or into rocketships fired into the fucking Sun) the rich and their shit-licking bootheels and redistributing their wealth. I mean, even just trying to answer the question of how to do such a removal and redistribution is enough to start the kind of arguments that can lead to wars and genocides, and afterwards we (the survivors) would still have to decide who gets what('s left), which isn’t exactly a less violent question. That’s why, more or less, revolutions based on seizing power before ‘fixing’ things only ever end up creating a new, even worse group of assholes who replace the previous group. Knock down a king and get an emperor. Knock down an emperor, get a dictator.

Anyway, my point is, it’s generally easier for us to collectively bear the burden of useless managers and landlords and politicians and assorted rich chucklefucks (so long as we’re reasonably able to get by), than it is to come up with a collectively agreeable solution to the problem of what to finally do with them and all their absurdly huge piles of shit. The problem is not impossible, but it does require nearly everyone’s informed participation if it isn’t going to simply result (again) in replacing one group of assholes with another. And that level of cooperation and coordination requires a much higher general level of education than we currently have. (Don’t hear what I’m not saying: I’m not saying the average person is stupid, I’m saying the average person is under-educated, ie, ignorant.)

Being educated means being able to think critically, to understand other perspectives and motives, being able to communicate effectively; being educated means learning how to listen, see, evaluate, consider, and understand (as far as possible). Being educated means undertaking a life long journey toward an impossible ideal (fully understanding everything); it is not the formulaic or algorithmic result derived from a finite collection of facts. By gaining (some) understanding of our selves and each other, we gain the empathy which seems to be required for good-faith cooperation with strangers on a large scale, and that is required if we are to replace the current group of mentally ill hoarders, sociopaths, and assorted evil-doers who like to refer to themselves collectively as 'the elite' with no one and instead build an equitable society not based on hierarchical domination and non-consensual exploitation.

We need to empathize before we can trust, and we need trust to overcome the fear of chaos that we believe strangers will bring. Without trust, we have an unfortunate tendency to start making demands and threatening violence, and that inevitably leads right back to cops and lawyers and bankers and politicians and insurance salesmen and all the other con artists and hucksters who promise snake oil and cure-alls, which are the exact problems we are (or should be) trying to overcome. That we keep getting bamboozled by right cunts and absolute tossers proves we’re certainly capable of trust. (To say we put our trust in untrustworthy fuckwits only repeats something we all already know far too well: that we have a fucking tendency to make mistakes.)

So while we are fundamentally cooperative, I think it’s that ‘stranger danger’ fear of chaos that’s keeping us from making the leap of faith that would be required to rise up en masse and overthrow the regime: that watershed moment the Reddit commentariate all revolutionaries seek to provoke among the people and which never happens. Ironically, if we were more competitive maybe we’d also be more willing to throw all our hopes and dreams into the bloody combat of violent revolution. The downside of cooperation, of course, is that most of us would rather endure injustice than make a fuss (especially if the injustice mostly happens to people we don’t know and won’t meet, and who are already noticeably different from us).

Second assumption: I believe that all living beings are as deserving of the unhindered ability to pursue lives of their own choosing as we are, and this includes not just animals but plants and fungi as well. Obviously the range of choices and the ability to choose differs greatly among and between living beings, but I don’t see why that would change the inherent right of all to do what they can as they will and without undue interference from others. I do not believe that the entirety of life was created merely to serve or benefit us, nor do I believe we are at any kind of apex or peak of evolution. As we have learned in astronomy that the Earth is neither the centre of the solar system nor the universe, I believe we should learn and internalize the fact we humans are not the main character on this planet². We’re just one animal among many, in a world teeming (at least for now) with life. And I think we have a moral obligation to the life we share this Earth with to be as ethically accommodating as possible, because regardless of the titles we choose to bestow upon ourselves (like ‘smartest’), I have yet to be convinced that what makes us different from other animals also gives us the right to use and abuse them as we please. Beyond the more or less immediate needs of survival, I don’t see how any animal has any right to harmfully interfere in the lives of others. And, in fact, outside of humans, most living beings do seem to live by this moral and ethical code: you don’t see lions, for example, forcing the gazelles to do manual labour in exchange for a plot of grass free from depredation by lions. Nor do you see some gazelles hiring lions to run protection rackets on other gazelles. Animals may have territories which they try to protect, but they do not attempt to acquire so much territory that they endanger the livelihoods of others, nor do they run crying to hide behind legal systems for protection when it turns out they can’t protect what they ‘own.’ If the non-human animal world had an overarching code, it might be something like “to each according to their ability, from each according to their inability.” It’s certainly a harshly utilitarian ethic, but it has the benefit of being honestly and fairly applied without exception. But it is also a code many animals adapt their way around through cooperation. For example, elephants seem like they’d be willing to break the world to protect their community’s children. And if we could ask them, I’d bet they would agree with this version of the code: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” This code would result in a much more enjoyable world for all living beings if we humans could ever manage to orient our societies and lives around it. (To be sure, I am not advocating for unadulterated Marxism, or any kind of Marxism, or even communism. If I was going to advocate for a political system that everyone should live under—and, to be clear, I’m not—it would be some kind of Murray Bookchin-esque ecological anarchism. I am also not claiming elephants would choose to be Marxists if Marxism was explained to them, but I will say that elephants have not come up with a social paradigm or built a society which destroys even the possibility of community as we have.)

I admit applying this code comprehensively presents a serious problem when it comes to domesticated beings. While I do not think domestication (the usurpation of a living being’s control over its reproduction) is morally right, I do not see how ‘undomestication’ could be any morally better. To attempt ‘removal’ of domesticated species—ie, wholesale slaughter, or genocide—cannot be morally good. To set them all ‘free’ would cause a global environmental catastrophe of truly absurd proportions, and would likewise be immoral. Any attempt to breed the domesticity out of them also seems like it would be an ethical, moral, and logistical clusterfuck. And then there is still the morally relevant fact that we depend on many different domesticates to survive as much as they depend on us. We have co-evolved with them now for an evolutionarily significant amount of time. Perhaps I am committing the same error as ‘moderate whites’ did in justifying segregation, but I don’t know if there is a way to give up our control of the reproduction of domesticated species in a way that wouldn’t cause a further and perhaps worse ethical and moral disaster. Of course, I am not saying we shouldn’t attempt to radically overhaul our industrial agricultural nightmare: ‘factory farming’ is not only unethical and immoral, but outright evil. And, in the (rapidly approaching) end, it’ll be suicidal, since it’s as insanely destructive to the environment as it is a moral atrocity to Nature. Similarly, the way we carelessly breed dogs for our pleasure rather than their well-being is often straight-up eugenics, and must be stopped at all costs as soon as possible. But to wholly give up our dependence of domesticates like sheep, corn, and dogs entirely? Is there no middle ground where we may still enjoy the benefits of their produce and the love of their companionship while respecting their rights as living beings to pursue a life of their own choosing, such as it may be? Can our relationships with the plants and animals we’ve domesticated ever be consenting partnerships rather than forced enslavements? (I genuinely have no answers to these questions and they really bother me, but perhaps an ethical yardstick could be whether we’d be willing to control the reproduction of our own offspring in the same way or not. In any case, we should think long and hard about this.)

Perhaps consent is the wrong word to use in relationships between species that do not share similar minds and are, at best, limited in their ability to communicate with each other. But I think we will have attained something very alike to consent, something morally equivalent and equivalently urgent, if we ever manage to share this planet with all the other living things here in a way that doesn’t result in their mutilation, degeneration, and destruction.

My third assumption is that the well-being of the individual is relatively unimportant compared to the well-being of the group. I got this from evolution: it is the individuals who must suffer potentially lethal mutations in order for the group to benefit, and the group’s survival is more important than the individual’s. Of course, most mutations aren’t any more dramatic than, like, an unusual amount of hair, some slightly odd teeth, or a weakness for certain chemicals, but in any case it is up to the individual to bear the consequences of life’s fun little lottery.

There are quite a lot of ramifications to this assumption. I have an extremely tolerant (some might say reckless) attitude toward other people’s choices. I support everyone’s right to choose pretty much anything they want, with the single exception of choosing something another living being didn’t consent to. This tolerance goes well beyond abortions, sex changes³, and suicides. For example, if some white trash pile of shit decided even the very sight of non-white people was intolerable to them, I’d fully support their choice to move somewhere with a bunch of like-minded loose buttholes where they can live out their reprehensible racism in peace and quiet. (As in, peace and quiet for the rest of us.)

I understand this kind of tolerance seems extreme to most people, but I have a question that might change your perspective, dear reader: How many laws do you think it’ll take before there aren’t any criminals? Because I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of governments (eg, the US) stopped counting how many laws they have a long time ago, and all of them still have criminals (eg, the US government). So maybe instead of trying to control every single person’s beliefs and behaviours, we could just leave the people we disagree with alone? Is accepting the fact that different people really are different really so extreme? I’d also like to point out that the kind of crimes people seem most afraid of (ie, violent robbery, rape, murder, etc) are either quite rare, caused by a lack of social safety, or are not in any case prevented by laws, which along with the police can only respond to a crime after it has been committed (and they made a whole movie about how doing it the other way is wrong). To prevent crimes like robbery, provide social safety. To prevent rape, provide community. To prevent the mentally unwell from harming themselves and others, provide healthcare. All of these things will dramatically, miraculously transform human society for the better; none of them, however, alone or together, will prevent every bad thing from ever happening to anyone ever again. But to imagine that everyone’s lives and attitudes can be compartmentalized, regimented, and adjudicated into an orderly structure that never in any way becomes disorderly is the fantasy of a mal-adjusted child. Diversity is disorderly. Nature is diversity. I do not believe it is possible to put everyone and everything ‘in order’ without killing a very fundamental part of ourselves, the part that connects us to Nature, and I think it is well-fucking-past time we stopped trying.

Another ramification of my belief in the relative uselessness of the individual is my relaxed attitude toward death. What I mean is, while I don’t want to die, I recognize that death is the inevitable outcome of my being alive and I have as much control over becoming dead one day as I had over becoming alive in the first place. Of course I try to get the good nooch, exercise (for the mind, body, and soul) and sleep, but that’s more so I can live well rather than somehow not die. Don’t get me wrong: I would fucking love not to die, since I’m pretty sure I’ll still have a lot of unanswered questions and loose ends when my time comes, and it really burns my britches that interesting things will continue to happen after I’m gone and that we only get roughly—if we’re lucky—eighty years to experience such an incomprehensibly vast miracle as existence, but regardless of what I want: death comes for us all.

The group, however, can survive beyond our individual deaths. In fact, it is not at all uncommon for the death of an individual to positively affect the group’s survival: that’s a basic part of how evolution works. But even more immediately, the death of, for example, the sick and old can benefit the group by satisfying a predator’s hunger, or enabling faster travel to a better (ie, more survivable) location. And, while I am explicitly not advocating violence against anyone, it should be pretty self-evident that the death of someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos would probably have many more positive consequences to humanity as a whole than their continued survival does, at least as long as they keep doing what they’re doing. Even if the death of Donald Trump (by natural causes) only concretely resulted in the presidency of J.D. Vance, it could still have the extremely important but less tangible benefit of deflating the cult of personality around him, which could create the mental and emotional space his die-hard supporters need to walk away from something that in many cases they’ve thrown their lives into turmoil over and still be able to save face (I think Trump’s violent insanity is very clear by now to many if not most of his supporters, but I also think the rest of us forget how far most of us are ultimately willing to go to avoid and deny the possibility of being humiliated in front of our friends and family; similarly, I think we underestimate how powerful and intoxicating the urge to cause an abuser harm can be in someone who’s been abused, and uneducated rural white people have certainly been abused (although certainly not by immigrants or non-white people or gay people or women getting abortions or religions that aren’t Evangelical psuedo-Christianity or pretty much any of the other folks they blame, except for government and big business). The often uncontrollable urge to lash out ignorantly at something that is perceived as harmful is most definitely not limited to racist white people.). However, by itself, the death of any individual—or the actions of any individual—, even a fascist oligarch with immense power and wealth, only affects the trajectory of humanity (ie, the group) insofar as it affects the actions of many other individuals. Think of it like atoms and molecules: some atoms and molecules, mostly by random chance more than anything, are vibrating furiously with energy (ie, they have a lot of power). But all their energy only matters if it causes other atoms or molecules to vibe on their level; if they’re out by themselves in the vacuum of space, literally nothing will happen pretty much no matter how furiously they vibrate (unless we’re gonna Randall Munroe this hypothetical and assume the atom/molecule can vibrate to the point of becoming some sort of universe-consuming singularity).

Anyway. My point is we all die, and it’s fine. I mean, our individual deaths are like meteor strikes straight into the lives and souls of our families and friends, and it certainly takes one hell of an effort to stumble around and try to make the emotional wreckage fit back together so you can somehow carry on after something like the death of a loved one hits you, but it’s also normal. I’m not arguing that we should celebrate death (although people certainly have, and if you want to—and you’re not about to start killing the unwilling—I’m certainly not going to stop you), but I do think it would be to our benefit if we as a society recognized death as the inevitable outcome of life, in the way corrective lenses benefit those of us whose eyeballs are less cooperative than average: it would improve our perspective.

Here’s my perspective: because of the fact that individuals are guaranteed to die but the group/s they are part of is/are at least potentially immortal, and because of the corollary that no individual can have a ‘full’ life without at least some support from their group/s (ie, some kind of social safety net, even if that just means your immediate family), along with the fact that most of us want to help each other out but don’t want some limber-dicked cocksuckers ordering us around, it seems to me the most sensible solution is for each of us to get together with our family and neighbours and collectively work to make the groups we are part of both as locally self-sufficient and as gently cooperative with neighbouring groups as possible; and to do this even in the face of our inevitable individual deaths, because it seems to me that being willing to die for the life you’ve built is a pretty good indication that it’s a good life to pass on. Because I assume that when you’re tucked into your deathbed, wherever and whenever that might be, you don’t want some braying ass of a person to have a reason to stand over your remains and loudly point out all the piles of bullshit you could of but didn’t do anything about.

1 Despite annoying people continuing to jibber-jabber about finding a precise definition of moral goodness, I have yet to find any serious alternative to what I like to call ‘neighbourliness,’ or what might be called responsible compassion (or compassionate responsibility). This isn’t something I came up with; it’s more or less the common thread that runs through most religious and philosophical thinking (at least as far as I know). Explaining this fully would take more than a footnote of course, but basically: seek understanding, do the best you can, and do as little harm as possible. We live in a big but definitely finite world, which is full of other living beings that have as much inherent right to be here as we do, but that we cannot (yet) communicate with. Even communicating with other humans is difficult. Communication enables compromise and consent, which are crucial to avoiding unreasonable and unnecessary violence. So to ensure that our children may inherit this miraculous world (and inheritance is perhaps the entire point of life), we must learn to be accommodating to all those that make up this world (and likewise wish to pass it on) and this necessitates empathy toward and a willingness to make room for those we do not (yet) understand.

2 I also believe the universe must be filled with life, although I don’t think ‘advanced’ aliens have ever been here, at least not recently (in a geological sense) or in any way that made any serious impression (ie, left any evidence that we’ve found). Maybe they’ve done a drive-by or sent a few probes through our solar system, but that’s about all I’d be willing to believe without a lot more evidence. That we haven’t found any such evidence of extraterrestrial life yet seems to me a consequence mostly of our inexperience in looking, and perhaps in the inadequacy of our technology, rather than the lack of things to find. The universe is unimaginably vast, and we are unimaginably minuscule in comparison. It would not surprise me at all if it turns out that all the ‘advanced’ life out there anywhere nearby has been actively avoiding us until we grow the fuck up and learn to conduct ourselves properly (in fact it would not surprise me to learn that somewhere out there is an alien bartender taking bets on how long it’s going to take us to figure our shit out, or if we ever do).

3 Let me first say I fully support everyone who finds themselves in the colourful shades of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. Someone’s sexuality is as irrelevant to their innate humanity as their eye colour or hair style. My issue is purely on the vocabulary: genitals are sex organs, so therefore changing your genitals (which I totally support!) is changing your sex. Furthermore, gender is a social construct, and thus cannot be operated on surgically (except metaphorically). I understand the hesitancy to use the word ‘transsexual’ because of its ugly past, but I think it could be reclaimed (if for no other reason than the Rocky Horror Picture Show) although that’s not really up to me. That is the entirety of my opinion on this matter. Be who you are, fuck the adults you want to fuck (and who want to be fucked by you), and tell the haters to go fuck themselves.