Internalized Fascism

Internalized Fascism

Seriously.

If you want to know the shape of the fascist cage that media has constructed inside our minds, our parents' minds, and our grandparents' minds over the years?

Read that awful "Screenwriter's Guide for Americans" slop that Ayn Rand wrote.

And then, if you're a creator?

Go forth, and do your damnedest to make works that depict and stand for the OPPOSITE.

It's really wild to me that, when I point to our economic system and hierarchies and condemn the damage that they've done to me and to my life, there are people who would scoff and say, "Yeah well, it COULD have been so much worse though! You got off easy, considering!"

Is that…supposed to make it better? Should I really be grateful for that?

DOESN'T THAT MAKE IT WORSE??

Look, if I'm on a train, and there's a horrific crash, and I stumble out of the train car bloodied and "only" missing an arm and one foot…should I go up to the conductor and shake his hand and thank him for a job well done?

Am I not IGNORING the literal bloodbath -- the piles of human bodies and lives still unmoving on the train cars that I left behind?

The mangled pieces of my friends and family, their cries and frustrations and struggles -- hell, the bodies of STRANGERS, who are human beings just like me -- suffering and crying in needless pain…

And I'm supposed to smile about that, because my pain was and is lesser than theirs??

I don't understand the kind of ghoul you want me to be.

No, it is NOT a good system, just because others got hurt worse than me.

The fact that others get hurt worse than me, and are struggling more than me, is an INDICTMENT of immense proportions. Not a redemption of the systems causing it.

I actually wound up liking "The Woman King" as a movie way, WAY better than 300.

It is beautiful cinematically, it touches on some things and addresses some things that are good…

But please don't get it twisted, because that was NOT a historical movie. ^^;;; We know that.

The sunrises were beautiful, but I do not perceive it as a society that I wish to return to.

Because it does envision a world in which most of the hierarchies that plague us now, are still in place.

If you pay attention to the beginning, they're pretty adamant about showing this.

A lot of what is depicted seems like an attempt to say, "Look! This society in Africa was just as good as white people's, because, see: we had money, and patriarchy, and rich people, and kings, and war, too! That's what makes a civilization!"

For me, that whole attempt misses the plot on what it means to be a human.

There's a fundamental thing that I think that we miss when folks say, "Well, but look: white people are right, because they have all the money and all the power. They're "winning"!"

…Sure, that's winning….

If you enjoy being hated by your kids and having to down twelve Zoloft and two bottles of wine and step on the necks of fifty different people before breakfast, just to be able to stand being yourself for five fucking minutes… :/

Let's not pretend that these "winning" rich people and monarchs and oligarchs have healthy relationships with themselves, much less their families, much less anyone else.

The image of happiness that they project is often just that: a very carefully (and desperately) maintained IMAGE.

Even more basic than that: It's winning if you're a virus.

If you are an unselfaware gorilla, who lives in a troupe rather than a society, and your only idea of a "good" life is about domination and control. About who can you manipulate, who can you threaten, who can you hit over the head with a stick and gain power, for the sole purpose of just having power.

That is an ape troupe's idea of winning.

The kind of "winning" where scientists start to study you to try and figure out what's wrong with you.

We are apes, and descended from apes -- but we're not in an ape troupe...or really, we're not supposed to be.

We are HUMANS.

Humans are a KIND of ape, but we became different for a reason.

The fossil record shows a point, hundreds of thousands of years back in history, where the strongest apes -- the ones who were using violence and strength and threats to control and lord it over the other members of their community -- started dropping like flies.

Because one of the weaker apes had invented the blow gun.

And one of the other weaker apes knew how to make poison.

And all the other weaker apes agreed, "yeah, you know what, this guy is a fucking asshole, he needs to go!"

This happened multiple times across the populations of our ape ancestors, at roughly the same time frame in human evolution.

…And afterwards?

After our ancestors ended these strongest apes?

That's when our ape ancestors began to evolve at an EXPONENTIAL rate.

That's when we started to live by collaboration, consent, community, and trying to continually make conditions better for each other; instead of constantly trying to hoard and compete and get over on one another…that's when we started to have each other's backs on the regular.

After our ape ancestors sent their tyrants into the dirt; THAT'S when you start to see extremely complex language and tool-making and art and architecture EXPLODE across human culture: opening up all kinds of different options for life and for living.

All the things that make us FULLY human -- not just apes -- all these things resulted from us looking at nature's 'Might Makes Right', 'Red in Tooth and Claw', types of "winning", and saying to each other, "I'M SO SICK OF THIS SHIT!"

Nature is beautiful, yes. It birthed us. We need to cohabit with it sustainably and respectfully in order to live.

Yet, becoming human was an ancestral act of REVOLUTION.

It is relatively only very, very recently in the span of human existence when folk whose only loyalty is to capitalism and the made-up concept of whiteness, have swept across the world and RE-reframed the concept of "winning" according to fucking ape-brained bullshit that humanity had gotten rid of LONG ago.

They're doing it in ways that hurt not just everyone else, but themselves, too.

They are literally murdering the global ecosystem to do it.

And it disturbs me how many people have accepted that return to an absolute trash concept of "winning", instead of seeing it for what it is: NOT "the way humans just are"; but a regression, back into semi-conscious and ultimately suicidal ape-troupe mentality.

🤷🏾‍♀️ Sometimes I can't decide whether a motherfucker's problem is their projecting their vile, inhumane attitudes on everyone else, or, their having a distressingly low level of reading comprehension -- or both...

But then I remember that that's not what I'm here to bother about, and just block, and move on 😂

People who champion the nuclear family and insist that it is the only way to have a healthy family, are ridiculously misinformed.

The nuclear family as has been enforced by monarchial, state, and corporate powers is an exceedingly recent invention.

Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

We evolved to be cooperative breeders, with communities that heavily engaged in alloparenting.

A parents' ability to "stay together to raise a child" would have had zero bearing, evolutionarily or otherwise, on the child's safety and development.

That's because most humans used to live in real societies: in which the priority of humanity was to look after and take care of one another in community; rather than recklessly competing to atomize and exploit communities for the sake of profit.

As such, children would have developed a wide array of complex, mutually-consensual relationships with pretty much anyone in their community that they vibed with -- not just with parents and other blood relatives.

"It takes a village to raise a child" isn't just a cute, feel-good saying.

It's ancient wisdom.

The owning class ultimately want there to be not ONE inch of earth that is not monetized, paved over, or existing in their personal gardens.

Meanwhile, people have to shift around like a card game, chasing employment and affordable housing: never getting to know and to work with and to be nurtured by the lands in which they live.

We are Earth's children.

The theft of humanity's connection to her is just one more insult that comes part and parcel with the deep injuries of capitalism.