Question Not
Question not the pleasures of the rainbow haired overlords. Not their penchant for posing with weaponry impotently threatening violence. Not their commodity fetishism for identities not their own. Not their vampiric consumption of words, draining them of meaning, leaving them lying flaccid like a clock in a Dali picture draped over a tree. Question not the prisoners of unreason who cast confusion on the young. Not their love of childish cartoons and codes of speech. Question not why so many are lost in computer games or comics or TV shows about dragons and robots. Question not their dark perversions made bright, like illustrations in books for children. Question not because we live in an age of adults speaking like children who force children to speak like adults.
Question not their singular dedication to pleasure, their need for instant customer satisfaction. Their bourgeoise lust for new and exotic simulacra of a real-life struggle. Their pretended “exclusions”, “fights” and “disadvantages” thrown about them like stage costumes. Their phoney wordplay and untruthful statistics like makeup. Their sophistry and false equivalence like jewellery. Their beguiling bogus science like heady, pungent perfume. Beware their flagrant mistruths, these are not careless deceits, they mean to stress test market rationality and see how much weight of absurdity it can really bare before it snaps.
To be human is to experience alienation of one kind or another, from the people around you, from the society you live in, from yourself and your feelings. Where philosophers of old contrived to resolve this feeling intuitive to all of us, this modern creed instead determines to amplify it. Humans are objects to the new overlords, infinitely customisable imperfect projections of their true soul, only by the public performance of change or radical external change can they be perfected. Alienation is not an evil in this creed, it is a product to be consumed. A market to be exploited. A retelling of original sin but this time round God is to blame. An individual’s responsibility is to their own pleasure and self-realisation; community, empathy, internal change are the enemies in this geography of despair where every man is an island.
Mass-markets require reductive messaging if a brand is to succeed. Humans have short attention spans and nuance has no place in a slogan. Therefore, to be a man is now to swagger, to be aggressive, to have facial hair, to go to the gym. Women must be conventionally beautiful, dangerously thin and obviously sexually available. These are not new market currents, this message is merely an early 21st century iteration of the body-conscious consumerist understanding of biological sex that went before it. This is not a revolution, it’s the opening of a new market. Men and women with the intellectual belligerence or human dignity to reject the option of being Barbie or Action Man are made refugees from their previously fortress-like categories. The overlords would see them scattered across a hundred made up genders, like seeds on infertile land.
The intellectual feudalism of grievance has raised up these man-children, these nobles of wonderland who speak in riddles, whose rule is not progress, it is a stupefacient intended to arrest and disorient dissent. These plutocrats with their corporate sponsorship, their crowd funders, their branded baseball bats. This madness of words with no meaning, of supressed debate. This grotesque reimagining of children determined to make children a battleground. These are lunatics, and the lunatic fringes of capitalism are now in charge of the asylum.
