What do you think?
That’s all I really want to know.
But for some reason, that seems like a hard thing to learn.
Which, you know, I totally get. With so many opinions I can adopt, if I like, and most of them more attractive and easier to keep than what I actually think, I totally get the allure of never saying what I think and, instead, telling people what I hear that I should think in order to be “happy,” whatever that means.
You know, like, I can see the attraction of certain health advice. Like how eating chicken wings out of a the back of a truck in the parking lot of a football game will give me a long, healthy, prosperous life.
Or how ostracizing some less attractive person is a one way ticket from melancholia to godhood.
I mean, those are some pretty good tricks, I think. If you ask me the secret of happiness I will probably tell you, in this order, money, power, and starch, and I will probably say that the way to get those things, in that order, is to walk over weaker people in order to achieve those things. And I will tell you that the reason I believe what I’m saying is because they told me it was true. Doesn’t matter who.
It happens, you know? It happens a lot. We live in a world with a lot of compelling guys telling us a lot of attractive things to believe with just enough of the orange-peel tang of legitimacy to make you say, “Well that sounds good enough.”
Because what else am I going to do? The other option is, what? Have my own thoughts and beliefs? What? Do you think I’m some sort of cretin, thinking for myself? Shut up with your thoughts and opinions. I have no time for independent thought here.
Here in my little vanilla ice cream bubble, where everyone agrees, because everybody knows that all knowledge divides into two categories.
On the one side, there’s the fourteen facts of the universe that you can repeat as perfect truth as often as you like, because you know that everyone will agree with you and accept you. Or, at least, everyone who matters will agree with you. Everyone who doesn’t is obviously insane.
I don’t need to tell you what fourteen facts they are because they are so fundamental to reality that we all know what ones I mean. You know that these fourteen facts are True, with a big T, because they’ve been cycling around Facebook for the last two years, which wouldn’t happen if they didn’t represent a perfect reflection of reality.
All the rest of the possible knowledge of the world falls into the other category, which is basically just slander and libel and the lubricant of bigotry. It’s okay to talk about everything in this category, because I know it’s all lies. Things like scientific conclusions that make me uncomfortable. Or analyses of social trends that I cannot personally confirm by talking to my five regular contacts. Or religious dogma of any kind unless it directly supports my lifestyle choices.
Culture, basically. And who needs that?
I can talk about any of this stuff that I like, because talk is cheap. At the end of the day, it’s just fine, because I know that I can dismiss it as the obvious fiction that it is.
So I have no time or energy or interest to examine the information that comes my way. To even suggest it begs the cruelest hectoring. If I am unwilling to accept the reality that has been so graciously designed and given to me by the anonymous system, then how can I call myself a good American? That just sounds ungrateful.
Never mind all that freedom BS. Clearly the dudes who wrote that meant, “free, but just do what we say anyway. We know what we’re talking about. Who are you, anyway? Some kid, is all. This is complex stuff. Just sit quietly. The ice cream van will be around again in a minute. We can handle your freedoms from here.”
Clearly that’s what they had in mind.
I don’t know. I don’t think many of us know. I don’t get straight answers often.
I mean, I do get straight answers, but I also don’t. I often get simple answers, pared down to soundbites, sometimes with pictures attached since I have the retention of a lemming. So I guess I get straight answers sometimes.
I have noticed, though, that I keep getting the same fourteen straight answers, almost like a Surviving the First World Phrase Book got published and I never got my copy.
I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what you think. I don’t know what anybody thinks. I know what I’ve been told to think. Everyone else tells me what they are expected to think. They tell me all the time.
A major theme that keeps coming up is, “think the same as us — you’ll be happy then,” and since they keep telling me so I know that what I really, truly think is the same as everyone else. And if it isn’t, then I am crazy, and dangerous, and I should do the honorable thing and ostracize myself before I hurt everyone around me.
Which is why we have the system, whatever that is. Nothing can go wrong as long as we let the system into our hearts.
Let’s have an adventure.
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