This is ‘NEW BRUTALITY’
Sorry for being trapped in the 20th century dealing with the 21st.
And sorry for being unable to make any sense whatsoever – locked as we are inside the maddening house, where a ‘just do it’ Californian approach to life has left us all burnt out people on a burning planet.
Deep down we all desire nothing more than to ‘escape’ from inside the maddening house – yet we see the state violence inflicted on those beyond its walls.
Words such a ‘digital age’ or ‘social media’ feel vastly insufficient to describe how we have collectively been affected. We have been changed. There is some sense we have been rewired, and do not resemble what we once were.
There has been catastrophic breakdown in the conjunctive purpose of dialogue over the last 15 years. Debating has become everything, yet this inability for new understanding to arise from the dialogue overrides all the facts, all sense of being on the right or wrong side of justice. Indeed, sometimes the only joy to be found is to be so wrong that you can at least revel in nihilistic acts.
People are suffocating, ‘spiritually’, and all too often when they gasp for air we palm their mouths shut because of the problematic utterances they produce.
‘Wokeness’ isn’t a problem because it goes too far, but precisely because it refuses to go far enough. At best it castrates and polices a deep desire to ‘escape’ which lies under every aspect of 21st century life. At worst it becomes an top-down autocratic sensibility of a professional class with an acceptable face, who cannot allow our true desires to be realised because they can’t be honest and admit that they don’t really want anything to change (except the expectation that we will become just another smiling face in the corporate blob).
‘Elon Musk calls ‘woke’ a ‘mind virus’, but what many of the loudest ‘anti-woke’ influencers have shown us is how dangerous it is to be only ‘half-right’. We are all condemned to be half-right in this binarising breakdown of dialogue. But if we, with the arrogance of Musk, assume we are completely right, then we miss the point that we are all half-right but fatally half-wrong. ‘Woke’ doesn’t exist in a vacuum; if there is a ‘mind virus’ that splits the collective psyche, then two sides signals danger.
However, virus’s aren’t always bad in the long run. What we are left with is the task of rejoining and reclaiming the new through their rejoining – to escape the frozen images of affiliations afforded to us by the 20th century. Difficult, even mad to suggest. But what else can you do other than shout mad things when you’re locked inside the maddening house?
John B Ledger 