Life provides a metaphor in this story about a sign that got vandalized in Las Vegas:
The famed “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada” sign greeting visitors to the vacation destination has red graffiti scrawled across it.
Tourists who discovered the defacing said they were disappointed and planned to digitally remove the graffiti from their souvenir photos.
The problem with individuals (not humans per se) is that they can choose to recede into their own minds, and edit reality there so that it makes them feel better.
Like drug use or drinking, this is backward logic. Instead of changing reality to be better, you change your perceptions of it to be less accurate but also, less threatening to you as an individual.
When one person starts doing this, others emulate if for no other reason to keep up. When it becomes a cornerstone of a society, we talk a good game about freedom, equality, diversity and justice, but really what we all mean is the unfettered ability to keep receding into our own minds. There we are safe from being wrong or dying.
Of course, life is tricky. The really worst stuff that people do takes years, decades or even centuries to manifest itself. If you do something horrible in 1980, expect to see it becoming clear only around 2020. That is, if you’re talking on the level of social change.
This article popped into mind when I read the rather exasperated rant of someone just figuring out how bad the problem is:
Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can’t move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press … all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.
And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was.
We don’t like to think about it, but we endorse this con because we can afford to put up with it, don’t want to get involved where an angry mob might tear us apart, and we want something to keep the other idiots busy while we are busy doing whatever we find important. So we tacitly approved the con and passed the buck on to the next generations.
I don’t think things are falling apart in the way Charlie Brooker wants us to think they are. Remember, the bigger something is, the more slowly change happens. Instead of a big bang, we’re looking at a slow decline.
And why? Because instead of fixing the object in the photo, we’re editing the photo in our heads.
Denial is the most insidious of all false virtues. Perhaps it’s because we care so little to hear about hard-working people being robbed of their respective virtue.
We’re too busy defending the ‘rights’ of the shills ‘doin’ the screwin’, it would seem to notice these things.
Some people think I take pictures of myself or with friends because I’m narcissistic.
I take pictures so I remember who I am, not the ex post facto spin my brain likes to inject. I only let the ‘right’ people in now. The ones that show me what real humanity is without all the faux tea and sympathy. I’m talking about respect, understanding and DIGNITY.
Nothing stays hidden forever. Perhaps if we cared more for “contentment and well-being” their wouldn’t be such a sick climate of super-predatory schadenfreude. Eventually I’m planning to put together some articles.
In the mean-time, I’m thoroughly enjoying yours.
David Mitchell- not just a character from ‘Trainspotting’. All the better. As long as he defends honor to the last splash.
What? I can spot some intelligent-stuffs in what you write, but it’s never on topic, organized, or sensical.
My obese tv watching parents are like this and i fucking hate them.
Whenever I try to explain anything they always have to pin point some stupid detail and make it a sacred ‘truth’ blatently ignoring how I am trying to structure an argument, denying all else and blaming me for ‘not doing enough’ and that people like me who ‘sit on their ass’ and think are the cause of our problems. “Your opinion is unbalanced” they say whilst drinking a huge glass of wine watching some screaming bitch on eastenders.
Meanwhile they fail to realise why their jobs are so pathetic, being carefree and harshly unresonable, making empty opinions with no evidence such as those like “Oh well the environment isn’t a problem because life will adapt” and “nevermind, I will be dead by then” also “Well.. the reality of it is that wealth inequality is not there anymore, everything is getting better” even “No our money is not going to useless 3rd world aid, it is actually going to pay for useless people like you to have those extreme views!”. These are not to be questioned else all hell insues.
This is a typical low intelligence, unbonded family of a thinning middle class soon to be unable to afford the ever increasing mortgage and soon we’ll be forced to live in some craphole with more chimps in some ugly, rented, so called ‘neighbourhood’ full of immigrants and drop outs. But that’s okay because they’ll vote ‘conservative’, “oh not the bnp, they’re extremists”.
This takes the piss, some people have completely lost it. They think they are never wrong and will never allow their sacred 2 second turd thoughts to ever face reality, they won’t dare try their ideas in the real world, they are happy living in a shit hole because they lack the eyes to see it, they are the decay.
And I think this is bad, this is just the dust around the carpet, let alone what’s underneath it.
Rob, I can totaly relate, except my folks weren’t fat fucks but otherwise I had the same arguments, same responses. Get credibility like I did: excercise, cook your own healthy food, study to get a good job as a scholar or scientist, join the BNP & be active. Then you’ll see how much they hate you.