the prophet
Mental illness is what we call it when sensitivity lies supine, exposed to the horrors of civilization. It requires enormous insensitivity, feigned or not, to live in our moment. Without a doubt, you’ve avoided a tent on the sidewalk, some stretched out and used up person slumped next to it in an alcove, their eyes hollow. You’ve put the starvation of continents from your mind. I do it too.
And it feels cyclical, doesn’t it? Like we’re on some kind of wheel of endless suffering, where you run and run and run and run until you get tired and need to lay down, maybe drink a few cups of water and have a snack. Then it's back to the running. To make it worse, there’s a whiff of adolescent self-indulgence when you draw attention to it.
For most people, it takes drugs to get past this shit. Drugs or the hardening of the heart: maturity.
The drugs are many and varied. If you can win the wealth lottery, you can insulate yourself in a home, protect yourself with material things that give pleasure and distract from pain. You can become Krapp, listening to your tapes, forgetting that you were ever anywhere else. There are all sorts of chemical remedies—in fact, they get pushed on you.
See, the drugs, they aren’t really for you. They are for civilization. They protect systems of oppression and violence from you.
Mood disorders are rampant. I bet if you asked a shrink, I’d have one—chronic depression. Very rarely in my life have I not felt an enormous weight pushing down on me, an overwhelming sadness, a feeling of waste. Mood disorders run throughout my family—and I’m betting a lot of people’s families. Why? Bad luck?
I don’t think so. It seems to me that encountering the world and the systems we all have wrought together damages people, creates scars, wounds, and outrage. Civilization, at least one as inhumane and brutal as ours, creates mad prophets that scream at us, and to survive, we have to ignore them, we have to tell ourselves that we are sane. Until we break and become the prophets, heralding an end that nobody wishes to look in the eye.
A trend I have noticed among my peers is that many of them only look fondly at culture of the past. Occasionally, some work of art breaks through the noise and speaks to someone, but most of the time, it's a faint signal amongst so much noise. Thousands and thousands of pieces of television, movies, books, games, entertainments of all kinds—and yet, none of them seem capable of satisfying us. Once upon a time we had a culture of redemption, where our artwork might seem to represent our true selves, who we are, where we might go. That was, of course, a fantasy, which we look back on with nostalgia.
Now, our culture is bespoke, atomized, independent, disconnected. It looks inward, rather than outward. Even among the communities where we find common ground and connection, there are seemingly unbridgeable gulfs.
But I will take a moment today, to howl like a madman—this is not how things should be, it is not even one of many hundreds of possibilities for how things could or might be. It is within our power to end great swathes of suffering, to make meaningful sacrifices that dramatically change outcomes. Of course, death is always at the end of the road, but dying with dignity doesn’t just need to be reserved for the tiniest percentage of our society. Wouldn't it be nice to live for something? Wouldn't it be nice?
There is a reason that moonshot revolutions historically have to involve someone who has “lost” their mind.
Ask yourself why that is.