Two Hundred and Seventy Three

I’ve had two dreams since I spoke with Justin.  One would be remarkable enough, because I almost never dream now.

In the first dream, Justin was a monster from a Maurice Sendak children’s book.  He didn’t seem to be in the second, but there was someone in it like him—someone I hadn’t seen in years, and barely remembered—who telephoned me and asked me to join him on a cross-country road trip.

In the dream I speculated why he had chosen me, because we had never been friends.  But I’m friendly with everyone, or try to be; and often people without many, or any, real friends attempted to turn our relationship into a friendship, or something more.

Most people don’t have many, or any, real friends or real lovers, and settle for sex because they can’t find love.

I used to hear them crying out in my dreams, like souls in Hell; but I almost never dream now. 

Two Hundred and Seventy Two

Should I write about this?  Should I examine—no, dissect—my only remaining relationship?  Why not?  What else have I got to do?

Yesterday Justin showed me a Zoom presentation he’s created for our prospective clients.  It’s a well-made presentation.  The problem is the presenter.

I haven’t seen Justin in years.  We used to Skype until I got fed up with his bigotry and told him I was done with him.  Eventually I relented, but now we talk only by telephone. 

I can see from the presentation that he’s changed, and not for the better.

Some people of mixed-race ancestry have an exotic beauty.  Justin isn’t one of them.  Nevertheless he’s vain, buys expensive fashionable clothes and boasts of exercising every day—which may be true, but he's gained weight over the years and now looks soft and flabby—which makes his boasted prowess with women sound ridiculous.

As I watched him host the presentation, he stuck a finger up one nostril and started picking it as unselfconsciously as a toddler. 

Justin is one of the least self-aware persons I’ve ever been involved with.  Is there something about me that attracts people like this?  Probably not.  Most people lack self-awareness.             

Two Hundred and Seventy One

 What is truth? asked Pilate.  Only those who followed Christ believed the answer to that question was self-evident, and they’re all dead now. 

All gods are dead now, because all those who used to believe in them are dead now.  We worship the state now.  Not the real state, but an idea of the state that’s as insubstantial as a god—and that, too, is dying.

Nietzsche said in all of history there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.  I agree with those who claim he died voluntarily, but not because he believed his death would save others.  Only a fool believes he can save others by dying for them.  That’s even more foolish than believing we can save others by living for them, as Buddha did.  I think Christ died voluntarily because he realized he could do nothing to save others, and despaired.  He was wiser than Buddha

Nietzsche called Christianity a religion for slaves, but all religions are for slaves.  And whatever we worship—science or art, money or the state—no longer consoles us for the knowledge that we’re all slaves, the most foolish of whom imagine they’re masters.  So we despair.

Two Hundred and Seventy

I can’t read anything anymore—not a magazine article, let alone a book—so I went into the library and looked for one of the books I’d read when I was a child.  It would be a matter of remembering it, rather than reading it.

I found a copy of the Buddhist scriptures.

I remembered my grandmother dying on my tenth birthday.  I wanted to die, too—but instead of killing myself, I decided I would live, and try to help others.  I would become a bodhisattva. 

As I reread the scriptures, I saw how I had learned from them the words for what I already knew.  But they’re only words for children now, like the one I used to be and am no longer.

Two Hundred and Sixty Nine

To know myself and my limits, the limits of others, and of the world in which we live.  I am a part of that world, and can only be what it allows me to be.

To know that because we're limited, what we know is and always will be less than what we don't know.  What we call the truth can therefore be no more than a guess—hopefully one based on the best evidence available to us, but still only a guess, to be revised as more and/or better evidence becomes available.

To know that the best evidence available to us is not always the best evidence, and assuming it is may mislead us.

To know that what we call the truth is most useful because it enables us to act.  If we wait to act until we know the truth, we will never act.  But we must act.

Not because our cause is right, and we must fight for it even though we may fail.  We can’t know it’s right any more than we can know it will fail.  What we call right is usually no more than what we believe to be right for us—and we don’t know ourselves well enough to say, with certainty, what‘s right for us any more than we know our world well enough to say, with certainty, what’s right for it.

Not because we can trust ourselves to know what’s right, or even what’s right for us.  Certainly not because we can trust others to know what’s right, much less what’s right for us.  How many others agree with us and/or how many others we agree with isn't proof that either of us knows what’s right. 

We must act because only by acting on our beliefs can we know whether we're right.  We must act because not to act is not to be.  We must therefore persuade ourselves that although we don’t know everything, we know enough to act.  

But most of us don't.

Even if most other people agree with us, and/or we with them, that’s no guarantee that they will join us in doing what we both agree is right.  Most people find the struggle just to survive difficult enough. 

I no longer think about killing myself because I consider myself already dead in every way that matters.  I now exist as most people do, doing no more than is necessary to survive.

We know, as soon as we know we’re alive, that we’re part of something greater than ourselves—something we don’t understand, much less control, any more than we understand or control ourselves.  We also know it’s broken, therefore we are broken.

Our history is a record of our attempts to repair it, and ourselves.  Both have changed, but only in small ways.  Each revolution merely replaced one ruling class with another, equally parasitic. 

It may or may not be repairable; but as most of us no longer attempt to repair it—are, on the contrary, damaging it even more—there’s nothing fools like me can do to repair it. 

Only fools love others more than they love themselves.  We should let them die, if that’s the punishment they think they deserve, and accept that this life, in this broken world, is all we have.

Mine was the last generation that believed it was possible to repair this broken world.  When I was young, what struck me about my peers was not their optimism, but their naiveté.  They underestimated the magnitude of the task, so they declared victory and gave up.  

I try to be content with the world's ruins, and the ruin that I now am, without regretting what we could have been and done and resenting them for not being and doing what they could have been and done—accepting that they've given up, so I should, too.

I used to tell myself that I wanted to die with them, but that’s a lie; and my self—whatever that is—is tired of lies.  I want to live, but not in this world.  This isn't living. 

All our dreams are dying, as are those who preside over them.  Trump and Biden remind me of the senile old men who pretended to rule the USSR during its last days.  Everyone in the USA waited for them to die, knowing their empire would die with them, and imagining we and our empire would then be free to remake the world in our image.  But I knew that when their dream died, ours would follow. 

Americans endured Trump throughout the pandemic not despite his inaction, but because of it.  They saw that behind his painted clown's face was a death’s head skull.  With his pretense of youthful virility, Trump is the perfect figurehead for  a dying empire pretending it still rules the world.  Now one senile old man will succeed another, just as Chernenko succeeded Andropov.

Two Hundred and Sixty Eight

Americans didn't vote for Trump because they didn't know he’s a con man, but because they did know.

Most Americans are conformists, chafing against authority and making heroes of those who successfully defy it, even when they're outlaws like Jesse James.  Not because their laws are unjust—most Americans have no more sense of right and wrong than their masters do; all they know is obedience and disobedience—but they prefer less violent heroes, if only because the punishment for disobedience is less severe.

Most of all they admire a successful con man, even when they’re the victims of his con, because he exposes the hypocrisy of our society.  It's tiresome pretending this Potemkin village called 'The United States' is real.

Like all successful con men, Trump has a sense of humor.  He lets his marks in on the joke, and they love him for it, even though the joke's on them. 

He mocks the myth of the self-made man as well as the myth of the clueless, self-centered rich man when he says he started out in business with nothing but a small loan of a million dollars from his father.  He mocks his own victims/supporters as well as the society that teaches them to be victims when he says he loves the poorly educated.      

His opponents claim Trump is America’s Hitler.  He's actually the man German industrialists thought Hitler was.

They thought Hitler was only a con man, an opportunist whom they could buy and use, when in reality he was a fanatic.  Trump really is only a con man. 

For a while this clown amused us with his antics, diverting our attention from the crimes of our masters; but now that comedy has turned to tragedy, it's time for Pantalone to exit the stage.  

Trump has shown his supporters what they would do if they had his power, and most of them—not all, but most—don’t like what they see, so it’s time to install a more conventional figurehead.

The MSM tell us all our troubles will be over when Trump is voted out.  What will Americans do when they realise Biden is just a colorless Obama?  Probably nothing, as usual.

Two Hundred and Sixty Seven

A ruler is only one man, powerless if people refuse to obey him.  Why, then, do Americans tolerate Trump?

Most complain about him, but they do no more than complain.  

Some march in the streets, protesting his lawlessness; but when they’re beaten and/or shot by the police they don’t arm themselves and fight back.  Why don’t they fight back?  I’m a pacifist, but not a masochist.  If someone tried to kill me, I’d fight back.  And why do the police, who swore an oath to uphold the law, obey our lawless president?

Trump’s opponents and his supporters both predict that if this crisis continues, civil war will break out.  His opponents predict it will break out if he continues to flout the law, while his supporters predict it will break out if people continue to protest his lawlessness; but Americans have even less stomach for opposing their rulers, however lawless, now than they did in the ‘60s.

In the ‘60s, when we marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, I hoped it was the beginning of a reform movement—but only the beginning, because our goals were so modest.  And the results of our protests were equally modest.  The Vietnam War did end—not because we marched, but because our rulers decided the war wasn’t cost effective; and we won black Americans the right to vote—a right which was already theirs under the law­—not because we marched, but because voting had become nothing more than a symbolic gesture of support for the status quo.  Both were no more than symbolic victories—but even symbolic victories so terrified our rulers that they’ve been fighting to undo them ever since.

Every war the US fought since the ‘60s has been part of our rulers' ongoing effort to cure us of what pundits call the ‘Vietnam syndrome’—the reluctance of Americans to go to war.  And they succeeded.  The US is now waging numerous wars, both declared and undeclared, but no one marches to protest them because Americans have become inured to endless war.

The movement died because we finally understand that the American empire can’t be reformed, can't become the republic we're taught it already is.  No empire can be reformed, because its only law is the will of its ruler(s).

Some compare Trump to Hitler.  They claim Trump was elected because he deceived the people, just as some Germans claim Hitler deceived them (although most Germans claim Himmler deceived Hitler); but every leader, not even but especially one we call a dictator, can only lead people where they want to go.

Germany was the first modern industrialized nation to have a welfare state.  Bismarck created it in order to forestall revolution from below with a revolution from above; and he succeeded in placating the German people for a while.  But when the German republic failed to deal with the Great Depression, Germans realized their republic, like the empire it succeeded, was a fraud, a government that would not or could not govern.  They supported Hitler because he destroyed the faux republic and recreated Bismarck’s welfare state, albeit one that served only ‘real‘ Germans by confiscating the property and exploiting the slave labor of 'nonAryans'.

Hitler’s American counterpart isn't Trump, as his opponents claim, but FDR.

In Cæsar's time, civil war threatened to destroy Rome, just as in FDR's and Hitler's time the Great Depression threatened to destroy the world.  Cæsar saved Rome, and forestalled revolution, just as Hitler saved Germany and FDR saved the USA, by doing what the government would not or could not do.

The welfare state is not socialism, as some claim; neither is it national socialism, as others claim.  It’s the last stage of capitalism—which some call 'state capitalism'—an attempt to save a decadent empire from collapse. 

The age of revolutions, whether from above or below, is now over because we learned that revolutions against empires only replace one ruler, or ruling class, with another.  They can't reform a decadent empire, much less replace it with another political system.  They only further damage an already damaged system, hastening its collapse.  Cæsar knew this, as did Bismarck, Hitler and FDR.  

FDR boasted that he'd saved capitalism; but only for a while.  He didn’t try to reform it, because he knew it can’t be reformed.  He only patched it up.  And now it’s obvious that it can’t be patched up again.  That’s why we rejected Bernie Sanders, the reformer who wanted to revive FDR’s welfare state, and elected Trump. 

As soon as FDR died, our rulers began dismantling his welfare state because they knew, as we now do, that the USA is so corrupt that any attempt to reform it will only hasten its collapse, as Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the USSR hastened its collapse.  

Our rulers hope that if they do nothing to change it, the American empire will last their lifetimes. Après moi, le deluge.  But the rest of us don't want the empire to last our lifetimes.  Most Americans are so disgusted with an empire which pretends to be a republic that they chose Trump to destroy it, just as Germans chose Hitler to destroy the faux German republic and Romans chose Cæsar to destroy the faux Roman republic.

Destructive he is, but Trump is not a dictator; nor does he want to be one.  He’s a narcissistic buffoon who wants only to be loved and admired.  America's Hitler is yet to come.