Sun, 9 Feb 2025
Our body politic is sick; we are collectively demented. This dementia of our social consciousness now threatens the integrity of our social conscience—limited as it may have been to begin with. The very existence of our centuries old American experiment is in greater jeopardy than it has been since the Civil War. Indeed, we may well be past the tipping point and whatever of our republic survives from here will be fundamentally altered in ways we cannot now begin to fully grasp. The nature of that change, though, as of yet remains fluid in terms of what values systems will win out.
We've never been prodigious at probing those aspects of our past that paint our forebears (or ourselves) in an unflattering light. We’ve typically ignored or underemphasized inconvenient histories, and now we’re witnessing the complete revision or wholesale omission of those histories as a matter of public policy.
The past can be forgotten, but its consequences cannot be averted. We are all the products of where we came from, the sum totals of our cumulative experiences, both the individual and the collective. Whether we accurately recall that history is of little relevance as to whether it happened. And what happened in the past will continue to impact the present, influence the future.
Those impacts can be productive if we learn the lessons we’ve been avoiding. On our present course, we are denying our history as it happened, often to shield our feelings from the discomfort of grappling with the misdeeds of our antecedents, and often because we seek simple solutions to complex issues.
As we lose our view of the past—whether internally or externally prevented from accessing the past as such—we also lose our ability to understand who we were, where we came from, how we got here, why it matters. By extension, if we have no context for who we were or where we’ve been, we lose all hope of understanding who we are. We surrender all capacity to chart a future course for who we wish to be. A world with no past can have no future that diverges from any present realities we now experience.
If we desire influence over the future, we must understand the past. In order to understand the past, we must embrace discomfort and forgo the sound bite. History is a tome, not a factoid.
---
Reclaim your attention. In lieu of financial or political power, the single most valuable social resource we as individuals possess is our attention. Why else would there be such a war for how we spend our time, where we focus our eyes, whom we listen to, and for how long? Why spend billions and billions of dollars to purchase our attention if it is so cheap a commodity as to be surrendered for free?
Don't want to spend your hard earned money to use our product? That's fine! No worries! You can watch this ad instead. We gladly accept tender or time. Your attention is as good as currency here.
It's a modern truism that if the product is free, you’re the product not the customer. I'm more inclined toward Shoshana Zuboff's assertion in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that we are less the product and more the resource being extracted. Our attention, like any other precious resource, is mined for its value, and sold for its utility in driving profits, garnering unfathomable power for those who possess it. The plural of attention is data. To surrender our attention is to surrender our privacy, to degrade our agency.
As the public square yields to monetized digital spaces, and as the social conversation devolves into a series of monologues and sound bites competing for ever-larger shares or our ever-dwindling attention spans, what if we were more selective, more discerning in where we placed our focus? The 24-hour news cycle perpetuates an information ecosystem that lends itself directly to the rightwing strategy of voluminous chaos. In fact, it only exists at all because we offer up our constant attention. What if we eschewed the hot take that most closely aligns with our confirmation bias and, instead, sought to understand what is real irrespective of where reality leads us?
A literate population is a prerequisite for a people to be secure in their freedom. A well-read population thus becomes a bulwark against oligarchy, against autocracy, against totalitarianism.
We need not read dozens of books a year, but we do need to read books. We need not avoid all social media at all times, but we do need to engage with social media consciously and strategically. We need not numb ourselves and close our ears to every fresh horror that hits the airwaves, but we do need to pace our consumption of information so that our news diet is commensurate with our ability to digest it, to know what it means for us, and to translate that into what we can do.
We must also recognize that no one of us can do everything. No matter how just or worthy of our action the innumerable moral causes we’re presented with may be, we cannot individually address all of them (even if we must collectively do so). We must ground ourselves in our unique individual histories. We must let our background experiences guide us to where best we can impact our collective history as we shape the amorphous future—a future that evolves from the concrete past, a future that passes through the calcifying present.
The human experience is vast. The only actions any of us should take are those for which our unique individual histories prime us to be most individually effective. And that may be different today than it was yesterday, than it will be tomorrow. The arrow of time is nothing if not fluid.
Tyrants and oligarchs require from us a monolithic experience. There can be no permissible diversity of thought under the politics of control. Unsanctioned perspectives under such a hegemonic political structure pose an existential threat to its continued hegemony. Those who think differently change the world, which is a horrifying prospect if the world is working for you just fine the way it is.
---
Distrust anyone who purports knowledge of a path to utopia, particularly if that path is hostile to all other paths, and especially if that utopia is supported by a necessarily dystopic foundation. Indeed, suspicion should be our only response to anyone who makes a claim that any ideal end state is even possible. The very notion of an “end state” at all, even in concept, is anathema to the nature of physical reality. There is no end state beyond that of the ultimate stasis: death. (And even then, that is only the end of consciousness.) Evolution has no linear goals in mind, and any appearance thereof is a post hoc rationalization.
This is one reason I find appeals to an idyllic past unfounded and appeals to populist revolution dubious (even when I happen to align with the past values espoused or the cause for which the revolution is to be waged). Omit the “r” from “revolution” and I’m less resistant; evolution is compelling. There are no leaders or despots in evolution. There is simply change over time. Given enough time, all things become possible.
The past is more a teacher than a role model; it must be learned from, not repeated. Returning to former states only furthers a karmic cycle of nostalgic disappointment through which we must reach into ever-deeper pasts in search of that mythical Eden from which we have ostensibly fallen.
Violence begets violence, and so revolutions seem to me doomed to perpetuate a state of recursive struggle where the victims become the victors become the victimizers, thus creating an entirely different karmic loop. In such a spiral, the end of oppression is a constantly shifting goalpost within a game forever tied at zero.
This is not to say that upending an unjust system is not a worthwhile endeavor. On the contrary, it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. If a revolution is to be had, its primary objective should be to generate a new set of initial conditions from which a more humane path can emerge. We should avoid hubristic thinking, discarding any ideas that we might be capable of anticipating and creating a fully articulated worthwhile future state. Rather than aims to cement outcomes, we should set our sights on preserving the future’s persistent malleability, and not overemphasizing endgames.
The American empire is collapsing under the weight of prolonged civic neglect as the cancer of dysregulated capitalism metastasizes and creates both the sociological and ecological conditions for global cataclysm. This is the result of a complex history that cannot be neatly categorized into moralistic tales of heroes and villains, nor even of right and wrong.
Our Founders were unprecedented in their success in establishing a resilient post-revolutionary government due in no small part to their foresight in understanding that the future will know more than they knew. Several of the load-bearing pillars of our Founders’ government were downright repugnant in their moral depravity (the so-called peculiar institution, for example), but by providing a mechanism for real time course correction, they anticipated the inevitability of their young republic evolving as it aged.
They did not assume their efforts were an end to history (and, in fact, the constitutional republic we have known up to now was their second try). Instead, they set up an ongoing experiment, one that must be maintained and improved upon if it is to survive at all.
History is the cumulative result of multitudinous individual lives, just as society is the cumulative manifestation of the myriad actions and shared beliefs of its constituent members.
---
We are at once descendants and ancestors. We are the consequence of that which preceded us. We did not consent to our origins, but here we are. We are not merely the results of past actions, but members of the only temporal home anyone will ever know: the present. And we who exist in the present are the agents of possible futures. Our actions today lead us into those tomorrows we will soon inhabit, as will whatever progeny we leave behind.
Every day, we set new initial conditions. Those initial conditions are unfathomably various and complex in their consequences. Some of those consequences will be as predictable as arithmetical progression, but the vast majority of them won't be. Every effect becomes a cause, and every cause has an effect. This will be true until either cause or effect exists independent one from another.
Because of this, we must not forget where we came from, even if it is painful, even if we wish we'd never been there at all. The better our understanding of our past, the greater the likelihood we will not be doomed to repeat it, that perhaps the future may be kinder than the past, than our present.
Our collective dementia is not individually solvable, but if we as individuals take ownership of our own histories, perhaps we can regenerate the cellular makeup of our collective consciousness from the bottom up. If we can reclaim our individual capacity for holding the complexity of the past, if we can revitalize our relationship with our attention—both its duration and its focal points—perhaps we can create a worthwhile future from which posterity can create additional worthwhile futures.
These futures will not be utopias, but perhaps they can be free.