Dumb brutes--even the intelligent ones, like (presumably) Brett Kavanaugh, are still just dumb brutes--and they're popular and powerful. Humans are but apes, after all, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised. In fact, when I'm feeling down about the species that's how I cheer myself up: how astonishing it is that great apes have achieved what humanity has! We should be amazed by our talents, not by our amoral mediocrity, since what would you expect from a hairless ape except mediocrity?
But I'm not finished with the mediocrity yet. A few days ago I was in a car that grazed the door-handle of another car as it pulled out of a parking spot. We stopped to make sure there was no damage to either, and were about to leave when out of the other vehicle, originally hidden by tinted windows, stepped a gorilla of a man livid with murder in his eyes. "You bumped my car!" We apologized profusely and pointed out there wasn't a scratch anywhere. No matter. He was inconsolable. So we left, lamenting that such creatures as this gorilla existed--by the millions.
"It's mine! You can't touch it!"
"Get away, this is private property!" "But I'm just eating a sandwich on the edge of this courtyard--the sidewalk is two feet away." "It's private property, you're not allowed here." The hostility and paranoia that suffuse the capitalist mind are pathetic to behold. Chomsky mentioned once that all his neighbors' houses and cars were outfitted with alarms, in a neighborhood where the worst thing that had ever happened was that a pet cat ran away. (In Chomsky's house, apparently, they didn't even lock the door. My god, what recklessness!)
Wherever there is atomization, there is sickness. It might be the sickness of "Don't step on my lawn!" or it might be the sickness of "Don't blame me, I'm just following the rules." Or the sickness of hating the Other--the Jew, the Muslim, the immigrant, the liberal--or of pursuing profit at the expense of workers, communities, the natural environment, and life itself. The manifestations of alienated atomization are infinitely varied, from the pointless, stupid honking of car horns in cities to the bureaucratic mass murder of "the unpeople" by the U.S. and its client states. I ought to be numb to it by now, but somehow whenever I encounter the sickness again, every day, I still shake my head at the cruelty and predictability of humans.
In general, I've lived much of my life in a state of resentment at the smallnessof our species, the moral and intellectual smallness. There's a cognitive and affective dissonance that arises when you spend a large amount of time immersed solitarily in "high culture," overawed by the mysteries of life and the universe, by the grandeur and inconceivable beauty of the human brain, of existence itself, and then look up from your writing to see a world in which, say, the most embarrassing fools can become intellectual celebrities--Ayn Rand, Thomas Friedman, William F. Buckley, Ann Coulter, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson--or in which luck and subservience determine destiny, and rationality and courage are almost always punished. Not to mention the stupefying small-mindedness that, for example, sentences a teenager (black, of course) to 65 years in prison for having participated in a robbery when he was 15 that resulted in a police officer shooting his friend to death. Life comes to seem utterly picayune and pointless, the very opposite of majestic and beautiful, when it's lived in such a world as this. A world in which the fate of millions can be determined by the merest accident, like a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that installs the reactionary Bush rather than the centrist Gore in the presidency. How can anything really matter in such a farcical, accidental world?
(Indeed, it's an accident we still exist at all, considering how close we've come many times to terminal nuclear disaster.)
And then one starts to sympathize with, e.g., George Carlin's nihilism and misanthropy. Late in his life, Carlin said the following in an interview:
We're on a nice downward glide. I call it circling the drain. And the circles get smaller and smaller, faster and faster" And we'll be gone. And that's fine, I welcome it. I wish I could live a thousand years to watch it happen. From a distance, so I could see it all.
Interviewer: Does it depress you?
No, it lifts me up. It lifts me up because I gave up on this stuff. I gave up on my species and I gave up on my fellow Americans. Because I think we squandered great gifts" And that's why I'm divorced from it now. I see it from a distance" I said, "George, emotionally you have no stake in this, you don't care one way or another. So watch it! Have fun!"
It's all a farce, so just enjoy the spectacle!
That's the temptation, the "sinful" temptation. And it seems that many, many people have succumbed to it, have become wholly cynical and apathetic.
I might have succumbed to it too, feeling alone, disdainful, if it weren't for my discovery of"yes, Chomsky. He helped prevent my "downward glide" into the depths of Carlinian cynicism. In finding someone who validated nearly all my instincts and intuitions, but who sharpened them and elevated them to a level of virtually complete objectivity, I felt both vindicated and somewhat forgiving of others' faults. For it was clear that Chomsky was far above me in most respects, and yet was well-disposed toward humanity and hadn't "lost faith"--so who was I to lose faith or wallow in disgust? I didn't have the right to. And since then, Chomsky has served as a moral and intellectual guide--not an infallible one, but a pretty reliable one.
I suppose part of the explanation of my "hero-worship" is that I have a somewhat religious temperament, a mind oriented towards transcendence and desirous of objectivity, and I've never fully made my peace with the nonexistence of God. I've wanted objective confirmation of my worth--as we all do, only I was especially preoccupied with the ideal of objectivity or truth. Simply living in the world wasn't enough; I wanted to transcend it, to penetrate mere appearances and understand, or even coincide with, something timeless and absolute. Something like "God."
To say it in more mundane language, perhaps the only thing I find fundamentally interesting is objectivity or rationality. Or truth. Error and mere subjectivity are everywhere, predictable and boring. People are so certain of themselves, and they're so wrong, it becomes difficult to take them seriously. But a genuine commitment to rationality, and an ability to follow through, to be consistently logical, open-minded, reasonable, concerned only to know truth even at the expense of "fitting in"--this quality is rare and precious.
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