“If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change…” – Audre Lorde, in conversation with Claudia Tate
Easy collective action alert: Friday, February 28, there’s going to be an economic blackout. No buying ANYTHING—which means you can still stream the b and the shipwrecked sailor record or read Vine, since both are free. Also, beginning next Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, Black faith leaders are urging a 40-day boycott of Target. Here’s an item in Columbus Dispatch. If you can quit M&Ms for 40 days because your Youth Group leader said it would bring you closer to God, you can quit Target for 40 days to wag a middle finger at the re-segregationist movement. Because that’s all anti-DEI is. A return to segregation.
As I’m trying to come up with an idea for this week, I reading/giving feedback on a piece written by my beloved . It’s taking real, conscious effort to not riff off the what Bob’s talking about, but I did want to put down a few more thoughts reflecting on the Broken Earth Trilogy. Couple that with a book I’m reading for either this Friday or next that is upsetting me so much I’m not sure what to do with myself. Not to say that book is a bad book, or that anything within is any more harrowing than anything I’ve read before—it’s neither. I just feel the same kind of unbearable, hopeless sadness for the author of these essays as I did for the scientists who broke the Earth in the Broken Earth Trilogy. They’re very different situations. One comes from extreme privilege and power, another comes from a world trapped in the delusions of polite white supremacy. Both, however, point to this yawning, wide hole lurking at the center of a lot of people, maybe everyone. It’s a hunger for perfection, for “just so”-ness. It’s a hunger for a frictionless existence.
Our Animal Brains and A Post-Scarcity Society
Everybody’s upset about something. 40-someodd years ago, Douglas Adams wrote that human beings descending from the trees was “widely regarded to be a bad move.” 10 years ago, Nic Pizza Lotto had Rust Cohle say “human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution.” I remember friend’s Facebook statuses from 2014 saying “well it couldn’t possibly get worse, right?” We were talking about Youth Group leaders up top. I remember them never shutting up about how we live in a fallen world and it was falling more. One asshole even said humans were de-evolving. Point is, someone’s always suffering, someone’s always looking a cessation to that suffering.
A lot of sci-fi is concerned with post-scarcity society. It’s worth coming up with examples, but it also takes column inches, and boy—you wanna talk scarcity, you wanna talk column inches, am I right, guys? Anyone here? Royko?
Seriously, tho, briefly: Star Trek, WALL-E, The Broken Earth Trilogy, that one meme where there are flying cars and clean parks and smiling people walking around and the text reads “what the world would look like if we’d executed the slaveholders after the Civil War” or whatever—all of those are concerned with post-scarcity. Here’s an r/sciencefiction thread about post-scarcity, if you’re looking for book recs. Here’s a great column for Cracked from 2010 that lays out why post-scarcity while maintaining capitalist order necessarily includes a lot of bullshit.
What I am wondering—I, a white son of a surgeon living in the richest country in the history of the world—am wondering if post-scarcity and human nature are fundamentally incompatible.
Jesus Said The Poor Will Always Be Among You
Martin Luther King said he wouldn’t get to the mountaintop. Moses said he wouldn’t see the Promised Land. “Picturing happy Sisyphus, one must,” or however that saying goes—and all that was long before Douglas Adams was writing. There is always going to be a struggle, and we must take joy in the struggle.
When I first read Jesus saying “the poor will always be with you,” my idiot child-brain was like, “okay, but you’re God, why don’t you, like, change that concept, man?”
Are you a bad person for finding joy in the most brutal of times? Are you supposed to be, as I saw one Bluesky user argue this Monday morning, treating your social media posting/interacting like the people manning the phones during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are you taking your eye off the ball if you stop doomscrolling and go see a movie? Are you selfish—or worse, capitalist—if you promote your book on the same day Trump decrees this, does that?
We cannot imagine the solutions to our problems, we cannot conjure a better world, if we are always rolling around in the muck. And we especially cannot conjure a better world if we think that paradise awaits at some undetermined but definitely there point on the timeline.
What State Of Mind Are You In?
A big thing I want to try to prevent myself and others from becoming is Men Who Complain. The great David Roth did a whole column about “Men On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” talking about right wingers. “The result of [feeding the right wing anger machine] is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank bigotry blasting from a thousand gilded hydrants at every hour of the day…these imperatives only run in one direction—louder, uglier, more confrontational, further out, more.” There’s a centrist version of this, there’s a leftist version, there’s an apolitical version. Those versions are less nasty. Less likely to get everyone killed. Those versions still boil down to Men Complaining. Shit, People Complaining.
What I’m saying is: even when everything is terrible, we cannot be complaining all the damn time.
The book I’m reading right now is about racism, written by a white-passing Black woman. It features the sorts of revolting scenes and revolting people you would expect. At one point, the author and her husband are trying to join a social club that everyone else in their lily-white neighborhood belongs too. They are denied membership in the sorts of cowardly, buck-passing hemming and hawing that you’d expect from the bureaucrats in Kafka’s The Trial. It’s disgusting, but at one point, I couldn’t help but feeling, “this is why you don’t join fucking suburban social clubs, they’re full of the type of fuckheads who join fucking suburban social clubs, what are you doing even wanting to be wanted there?” Now, I recognize that’s not fair of me. I’m not letting the suburban social club fuckheads off the hook, but I’m *almost* equally frustrated with the author. Perhaps it’s my city privilege showing. If I don’t like a few of my neighbors, they are only one of 77,000. I can find others. It’s different when you’re in, like, a suburban subdivision. Still though.
When are you full? When is life worth living? The people who broke the Earth in the Broken Earth Trilogy were looking for an unlimited energy source, an end to scarcity. Is there ever an equilibrium? Is there ever a point when we see the world for the imperfect place it is and think, “well, this part sucks, but this part does not, and on the whole, I’m coming out ahead?” We are so good at focusing on the bad, so terrible at appreciating the good. I am atrocious in this manner, for the record. Things have helped me improve: mindfulness, raising a child, quitting drinking, exercising more, taking up cannabis. But I am writing this blog over the course of two days, trying to shake myself out of feeling like I am stuck in some sort of purgatory. Trying to shake off some crushing negativity. Trying to see if, by telling it to you, I can make it true.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris