But We Won't, Will We?

On "The Wisdom Of Uncertainty."

There was a time when events in the world made me rush to the page. An event would unfold and I would write or I would catalogue my experience of it with a feverish necessity. But that was also a time when ‘events’ appeared in intervals, and long intervals at that. There was an assimilation period after a world-wide event like an earthquake, an assassination, a riot, a rare birth, a scientific triumph or anything that had enough of an echo in its wake that you heard about it even living under a rock. Things aren’t like that anymore. It’s as if there are no more rocks with deep enough hovels to hide under. Things happen every day, multiple times a day, and the effect on me isn’t to rush to the pen or the page as often, if at all. A kind of event fatigue has taken hold, it would seem. That isn’t to say that I don’t care, far from it, my heart swells or aches in the same way it would when we didn’t have the perpetual, rectangular news cycle looping in our pockets. I suppose what I am attempting to digest is more that of the phenomenon of what it means to be in a constant state of alarm. From one world changing event to the next with the same consistency and velocity of changing the channels on a remote control. Am I better for it?

So instead of rushing to the page or to pick up my guitar to make sense of the way it all seems to be unfolding, I am experiencing a pausing of sorts. As if I am more alarmed by the new normal of things and the way we are collectively accepting this continual state of emergency. Are we better for it? I would argue that we are not, and far from it.

What a challenging idea to elucidate though. It might appear to the casual observer that I have gone into a state of numbness or cultural nihilism but nothing could be further from the truth. I am haunted by the imagery and the information that I am privy to each day. Aren’t you? But some, not insignificant part of me started to wonder during the last few years if there was any clandestine subtext to be unearthed, and if so, where? I’ve never been conspiratorially minded, per se, but I’d be lying if I said I DIDN’T see the potential for this ‘perpetual state of emergency’ epoch that we live in to be exploited by groups and/or individuals with just the right amount of intellect intersecting with a lack of a viable ethical structure. I’m not saying that ‘bad things don’t happen this often’ and that these events we’re continuously hearing about and in some cases experiencing firsthand aren’t real. I think part of the ‘pulling away of the veil’ is that we’re collectively discovering how edgy life really can be and that we’re learning how much we were sheltered from before the advent of the internet, smart phones, social justice warriors and the 24 hour news cycle.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that there seems to be some perverse incentive lurking in the corners of this mass origami we’re collectively and continually unfolding. And wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to be unknowingly participating in such a strange experiment? To discover that we are the proverbial ‘useful idiot’? No one should be profiting or profiteering on or from this state of emergency. (That’s about as close to a certainty as I can get.) The incentive would then be to bolster conflict and tragedy and ratchet up tensions as opposed to purposefully turning down the volume, negotiating peace or building better bridges.

‘Labyrinth Walker’ by Jeremy Shafer

But how do you govern such a space when the web that’s been and is being drawn is exponential and the tools at the weaver’s behest are cast in the language of secrecy, exotic psychologies and gaslighting at a scale that is hard to imagine? I suppose this is where I’ve been as of late, in a long moment of pause. Not numbness or cultural nihilism (once again) but a liminal space, for want of a better phrase. How do we make sense of this strange moment in history? When information is weaponized like an intentional breaking of a dam and we the thirsty and well behaved townsfolk have our homes directly in it’s shadow and this avalanche is our only source of water.

It makes me want to turn it all off. It makes me want to give back the superpower of my wifi connection. I am sure it has that effect on us all at one point or another. But that most certainly isn’t the answer. I would argue that if there are some bad actors pulling strings like some worse version of Oz than even the 2013 Hollywood reenvisioning could muster, that that is the intended and desired reaction. Turn away. Avert your eyes. But we won’t, will we? So this is what my pause has been about, I suppose. Maybe I’m giving my mind and my soul the space it needs to discern.

Space! Imagine that.

We live in such a gilded moment in our history when (through technology) we’ve made enough space for ourselves that we allow it to be filled up with decadent and cancerous foods, vaudevillian distractions and malignant “information”. All to the point of hastening a kind of ‘crisis of meaning’ to borrow an oft used turn of phrase, but a crisis, nonetheless, that we did and most certainly should have seen coming.

I guess one could argue that a collective ‘powering down’ of the attention economy in the form of a mass walk out could be a viable short term fix. It’s only a game when we all agree on the rules of play, right? But as enjoyable as a phone free existence sounds right now, in my heart I know that this isn’t the right idea. I think perhaps we need to better understand the art of war and one of its classic tenants first successfully applied over twenty two centuries ago: divide and conquer. Once we can see that a tactic of war is being applied socially through these technologies we’ve all enthusiastically onboarded, we’ll be able to better understand that it didn’t happen by chance. Someone is benefiting from these divisions. Someone is profiting mightily from this perpetual state of emergency and they are doing it at great cost to the rest of us.

I hope you are well wherever you are in the world today, and I hope this has given you some things to chew on as we, mere frogs, float ever-forward into the slowly boiling jacuzzi of tomorrow. Ha!

With Love,

-Brandon Boyd (November 6th, 2023)

“The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety