The State of Things

One reality of life that many people are not aware of is that things we think happened a long time ago did not, in fact, happen a long time ago. For instance, if the oldest people in any generation live to see 100 years, end to end there have not been even three full generations since the founding of the United States. Geronimo, the famous Native American resistance fighter, was still alive when Bob Hope, the famous comedian and talk-show host, was born. Harriet Tubman, famous emancipator of people enslaved in the United States, died only the year before the start of World War 1.

When I was a child (like around six or seven) and saw old movies or TV shows in black and white I literally thought that people somehow only saw in black and white and that somehow we had color in our modern life, having never been told how film and television actually work. Seeing old footage of World War 2 and World War 1 in black and white gives them a sense of ancientness that is unfamiliar to our contemporary sentiments, but the fact that they are filmed AT ALL is a testament to their recentness, as it’s only been a little more than 100 years since the invention of film. By any measure, if there are still people alive today which witnessed something it was not long ago at all, and there are not only still people alive who were born during World War 2 but who actually served in the war! If not even a full generation has passed, the events are not part of history but are still, in fact, contemporary.

Another wild fact about the World Wars is that they were only separated by about twenty-one years, and children born at the end of the first war were recruited into the second to fight and die just as they reached drinking age. Since both wars had tightly related causes I am of the opinion they were not at all separate conflicts but one single conflict bisected by a short pause, and the conflict was a major catalyst for the following dysfunction of generations since and massive unresolved trauma which set the stage for our current state of affairs as discussed in my second book, The Perfect Child. Growing up we were then taught about such world conflicts and the atrocities which occurred during them as if they were done, over, and part of history, ostensibly to prepare new generations to avoid such awful tragedies. Yet, predictably, we find ourselves again fast racing toward civil unrest and international conflict as if the entire machine over the intervening decades had not been designed to thwart it. So what went wrong?

The entire function of every effort to promote civic stability has been the spread of ideas, ideology, and knowledge meant to enlighten people that they may be wiser and more worldly to thus prevent wars and conflict and bring up productive citizens which do their part and support civic society. But this is also the very point of failure because the authors of these policies and ideology do not understand that it was and has never been ideology which drives conflict. No person on Earth wants to engage in conflict without a tempting or favorable risk/reward assessment because engaging in conflict, no matter the severity or scope, risks tremendous loss if we lose, so the stakes must have less or comparable risk than what will occur without conflict. This is a basic survival instinct possessed of all humans, and even as young children when we can sus out a situation and decide whether an action is more likely to get us the toy we want to play with or ten minutes in time-out. Adults more easily make these assessments and do so all the time, such as remaining in a dysfunctional relationship or getting out, not taking a new job unless it pays better, or giving up bad dietary habits when the consequences grow to great to ignore any longer. Instead, the entirety of society and institutions have been ignorant (often willingly) to the real cause of all geopolitical instability, which is people’s material conditions. At times such as this with relentless inflation, unaffordable housing, and ridiculous healthcare costs we can all easily understand that being stressed economically compels people to conflict, and yet over the last several decades the powers we have erected to run our governments and societies have instead fixated on people’s ideology while mostly ignoring entirely their material conditions. A practical and very specific example of this problem is the entire anti-smoking campaign in which the government has spent literal billions of dollars in taxes derived from tobacco companies attempting to convince people that smoking is bad for them instead of using that money to relieve people of the stresses and nutritional factors which lead to nicotine addiction. Indeed I don’t think the government is even interested in understanding addiction biology, so when alternative nicotine products like e-cigarettes and gums come on the market their use skyrocketed and the government hasn’t accomplished shit (to be clear I don’t personally think smoking is such a big deal). The failure to resolve nicotine addiction occurred because the material conditions of people who smoke never changed—Well, that’s not entirely true because there was in fact a major decline in smoking from about 1995 to current day, and what happened in 1995? Famously the advent of the internet, which served to connect people to each other, and because social inclusion is a major stress relief for humans we see an enormous decline in stress associated behaviors like smoking, crime, teen pregnancy, etc., since the advent of the internet because it helped alleviate some material stresses by providing access to social inclusion, information, and opportunity which is otherwise impaired by our car-centric infrastructure and lack of third-spaces.

So, the entire function of every effort to avoid catastrophes like the World Wars and the Holocaust have failed because they were almost entirely fixated on insubstantial ideology and propaganda rather than actually alleviating people’s stressful material conditions. In fact, those conflicts also started for the same reason, yet we as humanity have not actually realized this in spite of it occurring time and time again, perhaps because we are too busy listening to the establishment tell us what they think it is? Add in problems like the increase in metabolic disease and people are simply enraged at the struggle daily life has become. The far majority of human beings are good people and desire nothing more than social cohesion, peace, and stability, and refusing to facilitate that will always, always result in cataclysmic civic upheaval, no matter the time, place, or ideological indoctrination, as has throughout the entirety of human history, because no person can eat ideas or sleep with principles.