Reaching For Never-Was

I have long been convinced that I am not from here. When I was eight, that meant I thought I came from an alien planet. In the throes of spiritual ecstasy in my twenties, I thought it meant I came from a higher dimension. Yeah, being schizotypal is really fun!

But knowing why I do some of the weird things I do — or, specifically, pathologizing them — doesn't change my disjunction, or my experience of it.

A recurring theme of my disjunctive experiences — the best way I can avoid saying “when delusions take the wheel” — is a fervent sense of better, or what I sometimes call utopia. I mean, if you and I can find the emotional energy to be nice to each other sometimes without needing to balance it out with Purge Day seems compelling evidence that maybe a world order characterized by genocides and tyranny isn't necessary or inevitable. Why should I believe any claptrap about the immutable greed of human nature when I am preternaturally inclined to bid people up at their yard sales? Oh, that stack of DVDs is ten dollars? Hell, why not make it twenty? Physical media is a dying art, after all! I am acting against my economic interests because it feels right to do so in this way, even as my academic background is in neoclassical capitalist economics. I paid rent in college by teaching people about the theology of supply and demand graphs. Why the hell am I not a rational actor? Because nobody is. It's just propaganda.

Especially in such unprecedented times, nobody can tell you how to live. Nobody has lived like this before, ever. For most of human history, you could more or less hand down your way of life to the next generation intact. Cultures and institutions evolve, and crises transform periods, but nobody splits an atom overnight. The neolithic lasted a while, providing a continuity of material conditions to innumerable peoples for thousands of years. That isn't true now.

During the 2008 recession, my father advised me to join the CIA. After all, my grandfather briefly directed its predecessor, and my ancestors have served imperial powers and settler states for centuries. I mean, my god, I've been here for five hundred years and I'm the color of yogurt. That isn't possible without genocide. I already knew America was, on some level, incredibly evil. I knew about the Triangle Trade, the Trail of Tears, the villainy of the United Fruit Company, the installation of Pinochet, the struggles of Haiti and Cuba and Nicaragua and Bolivia and Jesus Fucking Christ the slavers have been running death squads across Turtle Island for generations. In that moment, as my dad tried to argue that the CIA would be a fine employer for someone of my character, I realized he had no grasp on the values of the world around him. He understood how to go to the grocer and how to watch TV and how to pay taxes, but he was not intellectually capable of grappling with the ethical realities of modernity. He was echoing my ancestors, whose civil servility rested on the presumption that, well, the Empire may have its rough spots, but I'm alright and not particularly cruel, so maybe I can do some good in my thralldom. It kept the animal of them warm and fed and safe from the river of blood they washed in. That isn't ethical thinking. That's dog behavior. As all my ideas about my economic future quaked and crumbled, my father was telling me to lie down and not bite. Too bad I'm a bitch.

…

How can we realize a future we don't believe in? It's one thing to say you want better, but actions need details. The paradox is that the very cruelty we oppose has damaged us, scarring and traumatizing us, limiting our ability to comprehend the specific nature of a just society, no matter how much we desire it. But the desire matters more than the comprehension, to some degree anyway. You must believe better is possible in order to discover the path to it, or else you will never earnestly seek it. Walking that path begins and never ends, no matter how many lifetimes traverse it.

Now of all times, it seems ridiculous to prognosticate based on human pasts. Oil, silicon, plutonium, lithium; industrialization and mass computerization, ubiquitous connectivity and trivial access to global comms, not to mention the Sixth Extinction, all signify the massive ongoing transformations we are living through. Who can say what the future holds for us, or what we might realize in the future? Cruel masters worship an accumulative numerology while threatening the continuity of the fucking biosphere with powers that mortals have never ever held. But you're absolutely certain that those powers can only be abused, because European empires are especially evil? Villainy dwells in the human spirit, that much is indisputable to me, but it is not invulnerable. Its dominance is ephemeral. Just as a thousand years ago, the atrocities of the pale devil were unthinkable on these lands, in a thousand years, they will be like myths for people that know better.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon bemoans how the issue of borders undermines liberation movements. Once you kick the colonizer out, they will eagerly negotiate a truce with whatever faction will entertain their most important precepts: property and extraction. Survivors of these national struggles were suddenly thrust into regional squabbles all over again, as the colonizer's land relation remained and played on the covetous nature that they themselves had fomented. Fanon seemed to estimate that if we had a way of talking about a different land relation in terms of systems and practices, and perhaps more critically could force the colonizer to abide it, we could get around this problem, unifying liberation movements across borderless nations.

Now, ask yourself, do you have a model of alternative land relations that could, say, run a planetary grocery network? Does anyone? I don't just mean nationalization of industries or subsidies or price-fixing. I mean an order that practices neither prices nor borders, neither tariffs nor taxes as we understand them. The trick, I think, is that you don't need that order or that model yet. You just need to know it could exist, that the consciousness which could conceive it can be cultivated.

This process of asymptotic cultivation is sometimes called the Eternal Revolution, which is a haughty way of saying, “Let's do our best today and do better tomorrow!” You don't have to understand the end state because there is none, just the process of discovering, nurturing, and living more compassionate ways of life. There is only the endless pursuit of doing right by each other.

But that pursuit isn't saccharine, it's militant. It isn't positive affirmations in the morning and mindfulness at night, or isn't at least that. It's building trust and material community. It's sabotaging imperials, their operations and their infrastructure. It is erecting and enacting institutions that can step up into the vacuum of governance held empty by police and settler governments. It is rebuilding roads, bridges, homes, and lives. It is weaponizing one's inherent dignity to cut a way out of the belly of the beast.

It is the strength to reach for what never was.

…

Maybe someday, rationalism will figure out what makes my experience of reality so unusual. Maybe I'll learn why I have such vivid senses of places that don't seem to exist, or dreams that come true, or a sense of displacement that makes the whole world feel alien, but it won't need to explain to me my belief in the possibility of better. I have found it in people of countless walks, the moral gravity that makes despair hurt because you know without knowing that it is needless. We could have better, in this life, in this world. We can be better for each other, I have no doubt. I have faith.

The next time you catch yourself thinking you might conclude something about the future based on human nature, question who taught you of that nature. No thought is truly independent. Reject the assumptions you were given and accept that the future cannot be known. It can only be created.