The Woke Elephant in the Room

Honestly, I hesitate to write something public about this. But I think it’s necessary, for myself & anyone reading, that I try to articulate exactly where I feel I sit & why. To do that I’m going to need to explain a bit about my past.

I was raised in a middle-class home, the son of an Australian with roots to Ireland, & a Sicilian immigrant whose parents migrated to Australia when she was five. My upbringing was a cocktail of Sicilian & Australian, (think The Godfather without the killing, add an Australian accent & 90’s aesthetics). I went to a school that was extremely multicultural. At a guess, we probably had people from over 40-50 countries; mostly immigrants or first generation. There was actually a group of kids we used to call “The Whites”, that were mostly Australian kids with roots back to colonization. All this is basically to say that I was exposed to an amazing amount of diversity of culture growing up & that I am talking about Australia here, the 51st State of America.

I also spent the lions share of my early 20’s in a terrible depression. I was so horrified with the world that I had found myself in after having lost my faith in God, that I became desperate to search for answers to the existential anxiety in my life. During the search, I read a lot of philosophy, did a lot of psychedelics & thought about the world as much as I could. Ultimately this is what I came up with as a result.

Life is Like…Super Hard Bro

Life is an unbroken chain transmitted through time via germ cells (sperm & egg), & biology has a horrifying side that modern humans do a great deal to shield ourselves from. That the revelation about the nature of matter is true, we sit inside of a quantum soup of incalculable particles governed by simple laws of physics & mathematical principles created by humans but modeled through logic & repeatable experiments. As far as we know, we are locked in this games & there is no way out. We are doomed to be conscious of all of this, yet most people opted not to think about it because its implications are very bleak.

Human history has been the chaotic struggle to realize these facts about the world & work together to continue the lineage of life & consciousness itself. If you view history not as a story of characters in a drama, but as animals, becoming self-aware through trial & error. A lot of human behavior makes sense. It’s easy to see how humans can become irrational, self-serving & bloodthirsty under the right conditions. It’s also easy to see how we can love, serve & care for one another in inverse conditions.

Right now, we are in a bottleneck in human history. Ever since we solved The twin Nuclei Problem. We have unconsciously accelerated our ability to master the world in terms of the extraction of resources exponentially. We are about to run out of runway, & this is where the source of our collective anxiety comes from.

So what does any of this have to do with wokeness? Well, I think woke ideology is a poor substitute for religion, & it acts in the same way as a classical religion, with an infrastructure, priest hood & dogma. It allows individuals who feel powerless to say their prayers, repent of their sins, scapegoat their problems to one demographic & go about their lives without having to address the real elephant in the room. That most people don’t know the facts I stated above, or their implications properly.

What is the core implication? That it is not a question of if we can save ourselves. It is always a question of how long we have. This sets the parameters for everything else. Including your individual place in the world. How you deal with the implications is up to you. Most people, including myself, are stuck in a dopamine mouse wheel that keeps us all distracted from our own individual problems, & therefore unable to think clearly or help each other effectively.

There are so many real, horrible, history-making problems out there in the world. There are bad actors, & bad incentive structures & shit has gotten so complicated that no one mind can bear all of it. But one thing is for sure, banning washed-up celebrities, changing words in brands that are deemed problematic, demonizing people for cultural grievances does absolutely fucking nothing except give a false sense of accomplishment. Likewise to the people who shit post to “cuck the libtards”, the entire online game is insane & pointless. The truly downtrodden & vulnerable in society don’t give a fuck about black squares on an Instagram post. They are just trying to survive each day, in a cold, cruel, atomized world we’ve created for ourselves.

This entire, insane, childish game the culture is engaged in is an exercise in collective denial about the actual state of the world. One where geography & class play a much greater role in the chances of success than anything else. One where the once tribal ape that lived in tight groups of 150 close friends & relatives, is now living in a 6×4 white painted room by themselves, watching other people in 6×4 white painted rooms entertain each other on tiny screens.

The Cultural Decadence of Modernity

There is something so scary about waking up knowing that you wasted your life, & the more I examine my own life the more poignant that feels & the more I look out at the people around me — mostly strangers faces on apps, portrayed abstractions — the more depressed I get. Everyone I swipe passed or every Instagram story or even conversation feels so…fake, & jaded, & cynical, & humorless. I am just as guilty. I’ve been sucked into the machine. If I’m honest I’m afraid of being ‘too’ authentic. I can be to an extent but I always get the feeling that I must maintain the ambient level of plastic wholesomeness constantly put forward like I am always at a damn job interview. That dreaded fucking mantra “Good Vibes Only” comes to mind.

These vague feelings themselves are becoming clichés. Even the rage against the machine raging against the machine feels cliché. It gets me lamenting about the idea of truly groundbreaking art. For me, film & Novels. There was a time where these mediums genuinely changed the way I saw the world. The ideas carried in a book like 1984 or even a movie like the original Star Wars; they created a cultural phenomenon, these abstractions moved atoms in the physical world for decades into the now. But when I look at films today, even most TV shows I am filled with a black murky rage that crashes against the stone wall of numbness in my soul. I’ve never understood those people who watch terrible shit as a guilty pleasure. Cigarettes are a guilty pleasure, these shows — e.g The Bachelorette — rot your brain spiritually. Ten years lost to smoking is nothing to the years lost to bullshit reality TV. 

Culture now feels like the remnants of those new-age free love heuristics, packaged by corporations & wealthy celebrities to sell products, steal attention & obfuscate the pipelines of power. The irony is that everyone is pretty much completely aware of this, & we all kind of suspend our disbelief when we hear Bree Larson larping some social justice causes while she cleans up ten million large. Women are asked to see it as a spiritual victory for their ‘side’, men just need to shut up, they’ve had their turn as if there’s some kind of scoreboard tallying up dead people you remember in history books by gender.

We constantly abstract & project vague identity avatars onto each other based on characteristics that suit whatever narrative you happen to care about. I can honestly say it’s something I’ve never understood much, I never cared what gender the protagonist was, or skin color, or any number of randomly assigned characteristics. It’s stupid to keep score of vague & constantly moving pop culture moments disguised as activism; being fed to you through corporations which don’t care about you, the poor, the downtrodden or anything else other than it’s own bottom line. It’s more complicated than that in some ways, in other ways it really isn’t. 

To the Activists, & Influencers

One cognitive dissonance I notice over & over again is the preference falsification that occurs when you talk to someone about what they value, & what they actually value by means of their actions. Something we are all woefully guilty of. Talking of caring for ‘minorities’, but only manifesting by paying lip service to the vague amorphous faux blob of PoC by featuring a PoC guest on your platform. That person all to often has as big a following as you do, & that person then claims to speak for the experience of the entire culture or subgroup. It’s so obnoxious, meaningless. The reality is that nobody fucking cares about how isolated you felt in school because of your background, least of all the actual poor. Because they are busy stacked at zero trying not to die, while we live in the kingdom of Babylon virtue signaling on social media in an attempt to grow a brand & audience, ironically so as to not fall back into the hellish abyss. We are increasingly becoming more reliant on growing an audience to feed ourselves, or create freely or express yourself.

I think this might be the crux of my frustration. Because I’ve seen the plight of the downtrodden, not just on the street, but in the lives of close friends, & through experiences with people who are on the edge of desperation, these people aren’t the people posting on social media or at universities or even really thought about in the public square. For example, there is a massive difference between a sex worker who runs an online persona & has an Onlyfans account, & a Chinese illegal (not a moral judgment) immigrant, stuck in a cash rented house selling her body to pay rent & keep the sharks off her ankles. There’s a lightyear of difference between a black music producer with two hundred thousand followers & a black gangster selling drugs to survive. In both of those cases, they are just as privileged as any other middle-class person. This is why I keep repeating this over & over, this whole tension & revolution, which at least in this iteration of society has been going on since the Freedom Riders, & the Civil Rights Movement is actually about class. It’s morons & actual racists who continue to insist that it’s purely racial or it’s due to some abstract Kabal of the patriarchy.

I’m thinking about real people I know who post shit on their social media, mostly Australian, mostly middle class, constantly missing the point & narcissistically making the revolution about them. Holy fuck the whole thing is a joyless mess. The hardest pill to swallow for most influencers, activists & those who follow them is that they’re spineless & would never go out of their way to actually course-correct those who are truly suffering. Because it isn’t as simple as needing meditation, talking through anxiety & depression, or trauma for these people. It’s being ostracised by the law of the government for being here illegally because they fled a country where they were being hunted by whatever tyrannical, often gun-wielding threat in their own country. It’s feeding, clothing, washing, & housing homeless people who might be unbearably insane. It’s going into the prisons with a camera crew, documenting the cruelty & stupidity of the private prison system. It’s understanding the concepts behind chemistry, biology & physics so you actually understand what the world actually is. It’s actually knowing who is in government, what they are doing & who their donors are. It’s being funny, rude, witty, unstable, contradictory & not so God damned boring to pander to corporations just in case you get that lucky break with Universal. Most people speak like their being recorded when they’re in private, & post like they’re auditioning for a role in a film online.

This is something I’ve had to come to terms with myself over the last few years as a creative artist. That what I do, is not going to change the world. It just isn’t. The world is too big & my words, my beats, my films are not that important. Gone are those days when art could shake the world, the decentralized world we live in now silos us into curators of our own personal art bubble, & that’s if you have the privilege of being able to create a bubble to shield yourself from reality. So I have stopped pretending that my art means anything to the world, I do it because I fucking enjoy doing it & that’s all it needs to be. If you want to change the world, go find a homeless person & try to get them back on their feet, you’ll probably find it too hard & cop-out with the ever so common “well I should leave it to the professionals who have bachelors in social work, I’m clearly not qualified, besides it’s the government’s fault these people exist anyway”. I don’t blame you, it’s much easier to live in the bubble, rant on Instagram live about cultural appropriation, systemic racism & other high minded jargon while the world actually does burn around you, until it engulfs you too.