saw someone posting a thread of impassioned tweets about how absurd it is that conservative assholes don't think it's their duty as humans to be basically kind and supportive to others, because "we live in a society" - this is a thing i've posted myself but i realized something
(i didn't RT or quote it because i'm not trying to dunk on their good thread)
their thesis is "we formed this society for a reason, what could that be if it isn't to support each other" and my immediate, reflexive thought was "who's we?"
i've lamented, in moments of my deepest miseries living under capitalism, that I never consented to be born. nobody gave me a choice; "do you want to be born to a pair of lower middle class medium-privileged parents on the Throat-Ripping Money Planet?"
i did not get to make the choice to live under capitalism. before i undertook the burden of having to provide for peers, i did not get to review the situation and go "hm, yeah, this looks like a reasonable thing to do with my time and energy."
however, i *did* decide to sign that social contract. i did, at one point, consciously realize that it existed, and i did have to consciously accept that I wanted to be a part of it.
school did not tell me about this. it had me swear fealty to the American flag instead.
school did not tell me about this. it had me swear fealty to the American flag instead.
why? why wasn't there a point in my childhood where I was told what i am doing here and what my function is in a society, meanwhile i was forced to pray in language i didn't fucking understand (not a word of it - syllables with no meaning) to a piece of cloth like a soldier?
why did nobody ever say to me "this is what's expected of you in american society. sign on this piece of paper, a symbol of your oath to participate"? i mean the answers are obvious. this is not what I came here to talk about.
i don't mean a literal binding contract i'm just saying nobody ever made me realize that I'm not an individual in a society, that I do not have the right to act as one. And that needed to happen.
George Conservative Fuck Face was also never put to the test. was never told outright "you must understand that there are things expected of you in a society." he was expected to infer that, and it DIDN'T FUCKING WORK
so 3-4 years ago was probably the first time he was ever confronted with the notion that "we all agreed to this" and the critical problem here is, HE NEVER DID. he did not consent to be born, not in this country. just like you and I.
you aren't going to get anywhere with the argument "we all agreed to this" because he has no memory of that. my memory of that was in like 2011, maybe? like during occupy? when my peers convinced me that it was necessary to agree to the contract or I would not have a happy life.
our society is really fucking broken. we leave enormous swaths of shit - like sex, or the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF SOCIETY - to absolute chance, hoping people will by happenstance have experiences that impress in them the importance of caring about others
or thinking about the consequences of your actions or knowing how the fundamental elements of being alive work
elementary school spent time on algebra my brain was not equipped to understand when it should have been teaching me to think about epistemology, to ask "what makes me trust or distrust someone?"
you are surrounded by people who may never once in their life have thought of society as something other than a resource. fundamentally antisocial because they never actually agreed to live in society. this is catastrophic, and may kill us all.
and who's surprised by that? how could it be surprising? we didn't teach something, and so tons of people don't know it. that's not remarkable.
nobody has been reading the EULA for being born. shouldn't that be what school does? shouldn't it be orientation? "hey welcome to the world, a lot of us got here already and we figured a few things out, lemme bring you up to speed"
we let religion handle all of that for millenia. so we didn't put it in schools. and now religion has been revealed as a corrupt farce, so kids (correctly) ignore everything it teaches. so nothing is being taught.
anyone could have predicted this. i'm sure plenty did. but this is the natural outcome of letting hundreds of millions of people grow up without ever telling them "did you know those other people expect things of you, and you should expect things of them?"
by the way i don't want to hear anything about all of this was planned. it's not. evil is banal. this happened through incompetence, not malice. but we have to fucking do better when we rebuild after the war.
