We had one of our someday-famed 'arguments' (and by 'argument' here, I mean a 'dialog which seeks to change the nature of Truth', not a fight) today, just an hour or so before we had to leave so I could get to the airport after my 11-day visit to ObS (the boyfriend). That alone should raise some warning flags: tensions were running hot, if not yet consciously so. I should have shut up. We should have shut up, but the dynamic was different. His roommate, whom I adore, was there, involved in it, may have even precipitated it by snatching something I said and bouncing off into an entirely new vector, one that led to the argument.
Though I definitely got into it—I'm quite passionate about my own informed opinions, and hopefully, appropriately wary of my 'uninformed opinions'—I didn't get angry. Ok, I did, for a few moments there, but only because the things being said by ObS and his roommate were cheap shots, definitely not up to their individual calibers, not worthy of the points being made.
Life 50 miles from the Mexican border (it's somewhat telling to me that I didn't instead refer to it as the U.S. border) is certainly different to life at the head of a peninsula, where the air is moist and there are too many cultures for any given us-vs-them axis to remain at the fore, and I should have accounted for that, of course.
But as is so often the case, I believe San Francisco, bounded as She is by water on three sides, a mountain range on the fourth, is an Experiment. A social experiment, or at least a non-stop set of sorties into unknown social territory. In San Francisco, we get to try things out, knowing that our successes and failures generally tend to remain in the first-order. By that I mean that if some social experiment fails, we call it a failure, or we call it nothing and modify it to try something a little different. Second- and higher-order ripples tend to poop out when the hit the city/county borders (e.g., a failure of a particular does not usually become extrapolated to a general condemnation of Liberals, a badge of shame for the Democratic Party, or some other stupid-ass bile someone like Ann “The Cunt” Coulter might spew).
Lost in the desert, a prevalent and stable us-vs-them axis has formed, the so-called “illegal” immigrants vs. the people “who deserve to be in this country”. Given the social poles that have formed and been reinforced over the years, it's oversimplistic—well, just plain wrong—to call it racism. The anti- and pro- sentiments are more about thinking with the stomach, and general desperation of too few resources for too many human beings. By the way, future despots, the easiest means to accomplish a divide-and-conquer tactic is to remove resources. Ask the Republicans.
All this, in retrospect, adds up to a lengthy dialog that probably would have been more productive in a different time, in a different place and with a different starting point. Retrospection is a beautiful thing, though, and it's completely useless.
Topics shifted, there was no real discourse, and though nothing was said that was later regretted, I did have a rather striking realization.
Feel free to chuckle to yourselves or post to the world what a total slow-ass boob I am for seeing this just now, but the Important Realization was this: Individuals don't count anymore.
Institutions, which have increasingly adopted a rabid dogmatic pose, have sucked in the unsuspecting, the unobservant. And have worn down most of those who did suspect, who did observe, by their relentless proselytizing, suborning Human Ideals in favor of Economic Recovery, General Prosperity, Stock Performance, Good and Evil, Sin and Salvation, Americans vs Others.
Religions, Governments, Corporations, any well-defined group with well-defined rules, any body which favors rigidity over pliancy, any institution which chooses the literal-static over the abstract-dynamic, any economic entity which squeezes too much wealth through too little an orifice. They're all the same.
I was accused of trivializing the lives of soldiers in combat and simultaneously Canonizing any given individual immigrant, even as I spoke of valuing all human beings equally, at least at some fundamental level. What gives? I thought.
Was I not heard correctly? Was I not believed in my statement about humans?
Then I realized that I had criticized the military at some point in the past, and in saying Not Nice things about the DoD and the military at the organizational levels, it was implied that I was somehow demeaning the individuals contained therein.
This was the exact point of realization, that these days it is often indistinguishable to talk of an organization separate from those individuals contained within it. The Organizations have won, have subordinated humanity and channeled the energies for their own self-interest.
This should be no surprise, I know, because the Catholic Church figured that one out a long time ago. And they learnt it from the Romans before them. A model which elevated the concept of the individual only to feed off the increased energy of Pride. Think of the Matrix without all the harvesting equipment.
It's depressing, really, to think that Propaganda works not only when wielded with the club of Everlasting Torment, but on the level of More. As in “I need More than my neighbor”, and the thinking stops there.
Has it really come to this? Where we pin ourselves to some random organization, surrender individual rights—hell, surrender individuality—in favor of the group being stronger than any one person?
I have often held the soundness of a given Idea up to a set of two tests: scalability and reproduceability. The latter means this: does this pattern/idea/notion appear in different, non-related contexts? The former, scalability, means this: does this pattern/idea/notion hold at levels much larger and much smaller than at the given context?
A fair scientific/physical/mathematical example is Phi, the Golden Ratio. But as Einstein said, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not apply to reality.”
A real-world example: Good Will, where I would define it as the short-hop faith that doing the right thing will be beneficient to everyone, one's self included. That I see everywhere, from holding a door open for a stranger, up to the current Right's fascination with same-sex marriage being better for everyone.
Such patterns are what I would call Natural, even Inevitable. Unless, of course, extraordinary measures are taken to keep disrupting them, preventing their return to a Natural prevalence. I see the right-wing cartel doing this, from Fat-ass druggie Rush Limbaugh, to the dispossessed-of-intellect Sean Hannity, to the dispossessed-of-spine Liberals in America, to that duplicitous Cunt Ann Coulter, all the way up and all the way down to W. I see it in the Republican Party, the Roman Catholic Church, the rigid hierarchies in military organizations, in the people who can look no further than their own petty and no-so-petty greed, expecting assistance for themselves, but entitlements for no one (else).
Oops. Found another Natural Pattern.