Our Nations Are Insane
Far Behind the Scenes
As a human being, I belong to history. The future. The living places. Memory. Dreaming.
Love.
And terror.
The terror began when I was a child, watching the Vietnam war on American Television of the 1960’s.
That was when I began to realize that something absolutely fundamental was wrong.
I couldn’t tell who it was wrong inside, but it seemed to have something to do with the bizarre insanity that, apparently, infected… adults.
In fact, the first essay I ever penned, in my early 20’s, an essay called The Guardian Angel, was about this same topic.
War.
And insanity. Not the ‘unclean’ version, not the madness that lands one in a 5150. But let me digress. A 5150 is a statute under which a person may be removed from society because they pose a significant threat to their own well-being, or the well-being of others.
Fascinatingly, a person can be 5150'd on whim. But we do not psychoanalyze nations. Or corporations. In fact, those bizarre, demon-like conglomerates of what is mostly insanity (and various forms of malware) answer to nothing.
Our nations are like a family of lethally insane people, or a collection of such families, arguing (at unimaginable cost), as if they were persons.
They aren’t.
And cannot be.
And there are precisely zero entities that can suspend their insanity. Not merely when it is possible, either.
When it is actual.
When it becomes atrocity.
I’m just going to warn you, briefly, that I shall break all kinds of modern rules as I continue to attempt to clarify my thoughts and feelings here. I am going to speak — not as my ethnicity.
Not as my gender. Not as a citizen.
Not as a member of some age, social, financial or academic category.
I will not be politically correct.
Because the issue is one of being alive at all. What I am speaking of is so fundamental, that plants and animals are aware of it. It is even possible that forests and oceans, mountains and deserts… are aware of it.
And what it is, is this:
Obliterating living beings and places at the drop of some ideological or military hat is insane. There is no obsfucative justification for obliterating each other due to some perceived real, historical or narratological figure.
Our world is a alive, real, and physical — and solitary.
We all feel what happens to others, directly, even if according to some eliminative materialist fantasy of mechanical signalling, we’re not ‘supposed’ to be able to.
And we are not merely human. We are beings. Our universe is alive in and as us. What is done to some, or one, reverberates in the sacred between of us, whether we like to think so or not. And this natural feature of human sensitivity and awareness is captured, counterfeited, and sold back to us by monsters.
We call them nations. Corporations.
Media outlets.
Advertisers.
As a child observing humans blowing themselves (and the world) to smithereens in WWI, II and Vietnam…
I can’t finish this sentence because I am still that child.
Not only was it absolutely incomprehensible and blatantly, fundamentally wrong in a way that nothing else even approaches… later, it would make me ashamed to call myself human.
( And most of me isn’t merely human. I suspect this is something we may have, perhaps somewhat secretly, in common. )
There are primarily a few features of the behavior of my species that I abhor, not ideologically — but viscerally. My body recoils at their appearance.
My soul writhes in its fleshy blankets in an attempt to go somewhere else.
All of them are atrocities.
All of them involve the indiscriminate obliteration of living places and people(s). Or their enslavement.
Torture.
Of all the myriad forms and kinds my species invents.
And implements.
Ever more dramatically as time proceeds.
As you may notice above, the word itself is interesting for its inclusion of the morpheme ‘city’. Unsurprisingly, war and cities are ancient lovers. But this is a special kind of city. A burning city. A cruel vision that burns the eyes.
Of a people on fire.
A living place on fire.
Burning death.
Admittedly, my analysis of the word is not precisely accurate, linguistically.
But these figures grant us insight. Especially in cases where a monumental malevolence infests some people or nation, turning its people into ‘soldiers’. Sometimes aggressively. Sometimes defensively.
Often both, and a third component: a story that demands something terrifying: a malignant story-board representation of justice.
And war, I will argue, is precisely such a case.
Whatever the virtue we point towards with the term Justice may be, it cannot ever be the cartoons paraded about in the propaganda of nations, corporations, and media conglomerates.
In fact, it’s not a destination, at all.
It’s a way of traveling together.
And everything alive knows this.
Except my species.
I sense all things related to war with terrible interior urgency. With human helplessness, horror, naivete, and sometimes, despair. I lived in abject panic for years due to the ramifications of the development of nuclear weapons. I witnessed missile launches. And by the time I was entering my 20’s, the full weight of the transformation of the scope and forms of war was inscribed in my bones.
I am not alone in this. Each of us has a secret place inside us where this smoulders.
And I honor that, deeply.
The movements of my fingers in this moment are my expression of that reverence.
Our world is alive. All of the beings here are my ancestors, my family. From space, this tiny droplet of water is a precious oasis in a vast seeming desert of Eternity. This is the world where I live. And the one I adore.
Life is not precious because we declare it so. It is not sacred because of writings in books, or even the commandments of God.
It is sacred because our every breath and heartbeat are its own.
It is inviolate not because of ideas or language, statutes or declarations.
Inside us, we’re one people. One being. One family.
Always.
And forever.
No matter the politics and commerce that conspire to somehow convince us …
that something else, some story or fiction…
is more true.
I am not well-educated about the conflict presently raging in the Middle East. And though I’ve not had my DNA analyzed; I cannot say that I am Jewish or Palestinian.
Yet, for reasons as natural to me as tasting food, I think of distant others as my own family. Before I think of anything else.
I claim no right to speak on behalf of anyone other than myself, but if you find my words compelling, let us leave our categorical associations at the door.
We are all human. We are all living beings. This is our world, and all the living places that dwell here are our home. The home of our children. Our ancestors.
The history and future of Life on Earth.
When monsters arise that threaten to render that into the desolations of war, my voice will not long stand silent.
I have read some of the news, and listened to a variety of discussions around this atrocity. I have been subjected to propaganda of various forms and severities. I have some basic understanding of the shape of the events that took place, and are proceeding. I make no claim to expertise, only to concern. A deep and abiding concern, for all the people of the world. For their lives, families, histories and futures. And, similarly, for the living ecologies of my world, because without them, we will disappear.
I live in America. This could be construed to be a sort of declaration: I am an American. But long before I am American, I am human. An animal. An organism. A being. Perhaps, a soul. Or a web of them…
I am not merely an American.
Someone could decide, based upon some insane courtroom-narrative, that because I am an American, I am the same thing as America.
Having, at the gate, made such a catastrophic category error, the insanity might naturally proceed to holding me accountable for the actions of my nation, present and historic.
This is where the malignant counterfeit of Justice arises.
Because human beings are all human. They are not their nations. I am not Reebok, McDonalds, Fox News, Tik Tok, Vietnam or Hiroshima. Those are diseases that infect the context into which I was born.
Again, I speak for myself here. Not for others. But it occurs to me that, in the same way I am not America, Jews are not Israel. Palestinians are not Palestine.
The peoples of these places may, in fact, feel that these places are synonymous with their human body and life. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, either. I also identify with place.
But I am not merely that synonymy. And when that becomes the only thing that matters about human beings, then… the tangled mess of justice misconstrued… becomes war.
People are not Nations. And Nations cannot be understood as people, either.
We are human beings. All of us.
First.
Those other things?
Those are fictions.
There’s a variety of complicated historical, religious, commercial and military narratives woven into this disaster. I recognize that, formally.
However, this is precisely the recipe of insanity and atrocity that we must find a way beyond.
If any ‘separate’ human being even recommended what factions within Hamas or Hezbollah actually do, most of us would recognize them as violently insane. Nor can I condone Israel’s responses, however seemingly ‘justifiable’ they may appear from some perspectives.
From outside, it looks like two insane monsters have squared off and are eating everyone they can get their claws on, with ever-increasing fury and momentum. In a conflict that can easily ignite a broad-scale reign of active human atrocity.
Meanwhile, over here, ‘commentators’ are hungrily earning attention-dollars — largely by catering to the opnionati.
I cannot tease apart these histories. Or the issues of Identity that reside therein.
Perhaps, as much as I can do… is imagine something that resembles coherent, compassionate attention.
But I can easily imagine almost any move other than war.
There are structures in our societies that recognize and respond to insanity, especially violent insanity, in a way reminiscent of how our immune systems respond to infection. Except these functions are incredibly primitive, where they are not similarly insane.
But at the level of nations… monsters can rise, dominate the field, and determine the meaning of the past and the future for the people they obliterate, torture, enslave and destroy. And there’s nothing in place to interrupt them except… stronger insanity. The more well-armed the monster, the more effectively it obliterates everything alive wherever it goes.
And ‘corporations’, those little cancerous representations of nations, actively vampirize our minds, cultures, ecologies and futures… stacking up dollars and moments of human attention in ‘banks’.
We call this whatever we call it.
Commerce. Capitalism. Business as Usual.
A seething morass of absolutely lethal lies.
Lies that set fire to the silent truths that dwell forever inside us all.
Our unity. Our humanity. Our world.
And they bring Hell to Earth.
In real time.
The irony here is thick enough to puncture steel.
Because the monsters seem to think (nations do not have brains, though): they’re pursuing Justice.
We have certain ‘rules’ of war, written and unwritten. They’re pretty bizarre, actually. But there are standards for how one goes about ‘negotiating’ conflict with integrity.
Generally, speaking, you ‘try not to directly attack civilians’. Of course, if some monster is invading your nation, that goes out the window because the civilians will generally collaborate with their own military.
Don’t wantonly rape, pillage, attack hospitals. Kill children.
These are some of the guidelines.
But when the monsters begin consuming our people, their minds, our civilization, let’s be clear: there are no ‘rules’ that will protect anyone at all.
The entire history, future and hope of life on Earth, in 2023, might end up in the following category: ‘collateral damage’.
Incurred by what?
It’s almost as if our species, at the group level, has been captured by some terrifying demon that inclines us to go actively, aggressively insane, under certain circumstances, once we’ve been ‘enchanted’ by some narrative of religious, political, or cultural (or just mix them together) mythos.
But there’s an even weirder problem skulking in the shadows of human history and war.
As if the groups of humans think that, if they just behave destructively enough…
… the Gods will come back to Earth.
That whole eschatology nightmare.
Worse still:
It’s probably true.
There are, unfortunately, a broad array of human factions that want one of two things: absolute military supremacy (this is about the most ironic desire it is possible to have, since it actively foments apocalypse, every time), or The End of the World.
Some of those factions are formally religious. Which, again, absolutely reeks of ironic insanity.
The problem is that it’s not the 1930’s any more. This is 2023. ‘We’, the insane human collectives that are filled with our bodies and lives, as if they swallowed us, Jonah-like, have developed the ability to obliterate most (if not all) of the human beings, and possibly the capacity for our world to support life at all, in an extremely short period of time.
We’re facing 50 broad-scale threats (nearly all of which arise from our behaviors at the group level), any 1 or 2 of which could end us.
Ex-President (and often insane-person) Ronald Reagan once quipped that if we had an enemy from outer space, perhaps it would serve to unite us for our common well-being. I’ve paraphrased his statement here.
But what if war itself is precisely that enemy?
It might as well be, today.
Because something is using us as if we were computers.
And the Operating System is comprised of nearly pure malware.
We execute the functions. Which turn upon the active, exploitative execution of the history and future of life on Earth, and the principles… the virtues… fundamental to our humanity.
To our souls.
If we are to survive, we must invent the opposite of war together.
What is the opposite of a bomb that just keeps going off all over the planet throughout every modern human lifetime?
This we must discover.
And become, together.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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