Waking Up From a Dream and Finding Yourself in a Nightmare
Achieving a greater understanding of our communities and our places in the world fortifies the house of cards that make up each of our lives.
The following story is published for Rust Belt Revolution. Please join the ground zero struggle for human survival and stop the fascist slide into ecocide.
In today’s world, no matter where you look, there is an unmistakable feeling of dread and confusion. In the news, in communities; the fear is everywhere and there is very little one can do to escape the sensation. The traditional escapes we’ve long counted on are no longer available to us. Sports have been shut down, most other entertainment has too, and these venues have lost efficacy. Our friends may have not gone anywhere, but we all feel farther apart. These are normal occurrences in troubled times, but they can be quite frightening.
If you find yourself in fear more often than usual, and feel more fear than you’re comfortable with, there is only one cure: understanding. However, much like a vaccine requires a preservative to remain effective over long periods of time, so too does understanding. The greatest preservative to understanding is the certainty that there can never be any. True understanding is omniscience, something no human or creation alike can attain. No matter your education or experience, or how powerful you’ve become in a capitalist system, you can’t know everything ever. No one can know everything about even one single thing. The unknown cannot be measured, but it can always be expected.
Humanity has built itself the most marvelous house of cards imaginable, in that nothing is permanent. We rejoice at its wonders, relax in euphoria at the opiate of modernity, but like the addict who thinks of his next high before the current passes, we too know our current situation to be temporary. For us to know how to place our cards at the correct positions relative to each other, we either guess and hope for the most favorable outcome, or use a machine that will place them for us with scientifically precise measurements. But neither method will ever achieve a perfect house. Our most precise measurements are never truly precise. A distance that was unimaginably small a century ago is now just another value in our everyday equations. In another century, the same could happen, but more likely it won’t.
As the perception of our understanding has grown, our imagination has shrunk. We’ve become comfortable believing in other people’s certainties. All that has delivered upon us are boxes full of certain lies. We no longer treat truth as a serious matter, but as something to be deliberated into universal submission. Our concept of it has been fashioned into buzzwords, like names of colors. We see red as red because people with power over what we see decided it into being. When we imagine red, what we see is a decided result from a decision that was never ours to make. This makes it difficult to imagine anything at all, and it only furthers our false certainties.
Like a virus hijacking a cell, forcing it to reproduce itself without the cell ever knowing, the same is true of certainty. All that is safe to be certain of is that we exist. There is no real truth; there is only you, and what you make the truth. In our society, the powerful hold all the cards, and because we are the cards, they hold our bodies and souls. And inside us there’s another house of cards. There’s a card for everything that makes us who we are, and a house for all the things that make them what they are. If we’re to fortify the house of cards into a structure worthy of collective life, we must improve as individuals. To do that we must raise our consciousness of the world around each of us and come together in that mutual understanding.
Understanding is merely shared ideas put into motion as a way of life. When the house of cards is not fortified, it comes down and can destroy our individual psyches. If we rebuild too hastily and without the collective understanding to fortify our communities, we risk harming those around us. After all, weak houses in our minds lead to a weakened, desperate society. That’s when the powerful smell blood and swoop in as demons dressed as saviors. Promises to to ensure the house does not fall comes with it the splintering of the community. With the powerful holding us up, we may still stand, but on shifting sands and only for so long. Over time, the way of life that defines our understanding crashes down.
Fear is unavoidable. The cards all around cannot stand forever without maintenance. If you see they’re on the verge of falling, begin with moving them with your mind to grow your understanding. Start with the small ones, the smallest you can think of, and soon you’ll find there are none too big.
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