The Broken Map

How Everything Became Unhinged AKA The Age of Metastatic Despair and Bad Faith

‘Listen to me, Jennifer. People will accept suffering because they must, but they will do everything they can to avoid ecstasy.’

‘Because it obliterates love?’

‘Because it is real. And because it demonstrates to them that suffering is real and cannot be answered or justified. They will battle that with everything they’ve got. However much we open the road they build new barriers. They cover themselves in mud and wrap themselves in steel to weigh themselves down. But we will not allow them to do that.’

‘Why? Because you love them?’

‘We serve reality.’

-Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire, p.288-89

The Phenomenology of Coco

I keep writing about the Coco not because I enjoy revisiting ad nauseam the ongoing pandemic – I don’t; it fucking sucks, and I hate having to weigh 1000 different factors when I go anywhere to figure out the risk* – but because the response to it, the breakdown of central authority and what that means for rational methods of investigating nature (you know, science) is fascinating. Watching some people make rational decisions that maybe I just don’t agree with and others traipse through a repressed Freudian world of make-believe is a fucking trip.

I mean, it’s a trip in that every day, I’m spiritually traveling to Valkenvania and diving headfirst into Mister Bonestripper.

*If I was more of a psycho, I would get a bunch of epidemiologists together and start a consulting business where – for a modest fee – you can give them all the details of an event you’re going to or an errand you’re running, and they’ll tell you the risk factor. “Running to CVS in central Hollywood at 8pm on a Monday night… you’ve got Enovid, an N95 not fit tested… and you’ll be in there 15 minutes? Yeah, I think you’re okay.” What’s that, even if I was a greed-screeching sociopath, no one would pay for this anyway because they’re pretending the pandemic is over? Right.

By the way, slight non sequitur, but if someone can tell me what changed about the virus/vaccines between the time before and after the National Emergency was ended, I’ll shut the fuck up forever. Because as far as I can see, Biden declaring the pandemic over wasn’t based on some new vaccines that prevented transmission or that stopped Long Covid. It wasn’t based on the virus becoming less dangerous (in fact, the more scientific evidence we gather, the more we should be wary). As far as I can tell, the only thing that changed was that as a society, we just agreed to pretend as if these things had happened. Biden hung a “Mission Accomplished” sign up, and we all fucked off to Fantasyland. It’s truly giving witch trial/tulip mania but on a mass scale.

But despite the despair and rage that is now biologically fused to my DNA, the last three years have really clarified how competing moral and epistemological frameworks function in the breakdown of a paradigm. In other words, how can we all live in the same physical reality, yet many people, regardless of political views – though occurring more often in fascist, conservative and liberal circles more than the fractured Left – are off on their own quixotic trip. And I’m not talking about political polarization, as if the only problem was that the Fox News audience thinks Washington DC is run by Jewish mud monsters, but rather that in this rotting husk of the Enlightenment we’re all living in at the moment, unreality has gotten such a foothold in our symbolic and epistemological understanding of the world, that large swaths of people do not have the intellectual capacity to understand How Things Work anymore. That is to say, it’s not that they’re not intelligent or it’s not that they’re not capable of understanding, but rather that unreality has achieved a critical mass, such that it’s really difficult or it takes too much work for people to escape its gravity. Everyone’s fucking tired, man, and if they have to choose between pretending Coco is over or taking precautions for themselves/sticking to their convictions in an increasingly hostile world/advocating for a safer world, well shit, it’s just fucking easier to pretend like it’s over.

I was talking to a good friend of mine last week about the Coco because, of course, why wouldn’t I? I’m a scintillating conversationalist that can talk about everything from covid denialism to the long-term health effects of even a mild case of covid. Please, invite me to your parties. I mean, real parties. I’m sick of constantly being the guest at Dinner for Schmucks-type soirees.

So my friend* masks pretty regularly but has eaten a few times indoors and has gone to the gym without a mask when there weren’t a lot of people in there. He knows a lot of the same things I know about the long-term effects, and rationally concludes that, to enjoy his life, he takes precautions, but can’t have the same “agoraphobic” mentality I have, where I want to be as asymptotically close to zero risk as possible. We are both rational, have access to the same data and exist within, if not the same explanatory framework, very similar explanatory frameworks, yet we judge the possibility of long coco, stroke, early onset dementia, etc. – in relation to a fruitful life – differently.

*By the way, this is a real person, not some dipshit tulpa I conjured to be the strawman in my morality play, like that insane David Brooks column about his obviously-phantom friend who doesn’t understand sandwiches.

To me, most indoor parties, movies and restaurants are just not worth the possibility of any kind of lifelong, chronic illness. The possibility of getting winded from walking up a flight of stairs for the rest of my life is not worth, what? A fucking Hunger Games prequel? Are you kidding me? Coco can fuse your neurons into mush. I go see Wonka and now I draw clocks like Dali for the rest of my life and can no longer remember the word “chair”? Fuck outta here!

But my friend sees it like driving a car. You take all the precautions you possibly can, but you may just get in an accident that kills or paralyzes you. But as a side note, that’s what’s actually so frustrating about The Pandemmy™: it’s epistemologically opaque. I can look up the statistics for car accidents. For every 1000 miles, I have a 1/366 chance of getting in an accident. For most people, that means it’s a statistically rare event. But because barely anyone is keeping statistics on the Coco anymore, because it relies on knowing the complex air ventilation patterns of the place you are going to be in, because it requires knowing how many people have the Coco, how contagious they are, how far away you are from them, etc. Any place you go has to be modeled differently, and that makes it almost impossible to judge how dangerous or not any given scenario is. So, I just have to assume everyone and everything is a threat and act accordingly. Please, though, do invite me to your parties.

And again, my friend and I mostly agree on the explanatory framework for understanding the world. We’re relatively rational and consistent, and rationality and consistency are values that are important to us. What about when the same data is filtered through a completely different explanatory framework though?

The Enlightenment paradigm, for good or ill (and there was a lot of ill), unified humans within a singular explanatory framework, and when that framework lost its authority, when people stopped believing it was the best way to understand the world, the Enlightenment effectively died. This ignites the, as Jack Whelan of the After the Future blog calls it, the ontologically dizzy postmodern era, where we all get to spin off into our own Way of Understanding the World. Furthermore, the totalization of capitalism in the 1970s (meaning this was the point where it truly became the global economic system, meaning it now began to infect every aspect of life) created an economic engine to power a bespoke framework for every person, assuming there was money in it for someone.

While rationality and consistency are important values for me, there are increasing amounts of people that just don’t give a shit about those things, people whose explanatory frameworks for the world – their holistic understanding for why things are the way they are – don’t need evidence, people who are constantly making logical leaps into the stratosphere and floating off into space. Everyone from those who believe in horoscopes to crystal enthusiasts to Coco denialists to QAnon maniacs to Christian fascists – and while some are more benign than others (I would 100% rather hear a friend seriously discuss rose quartz for an hour than how Hollywood is full of adrenochrome-powered clones) – all of them resonate on a similar frequency. These folks all recognize – rightly! –  that the postmodern era lacks spirituality, lacks a connection to something larger than us, but instead of exploring what it might mean to move beyond the current era and discover a new way to transcend, they look back at old, pre-Enlightenment modes of spirituality.* But because those modes mean nothing in the 20^th and 21^st century, they end up just Buffalo Billing it, dressing up in the dead skin of old spiritualities and doing a little dance. It’s how you end up a with a bunch of Christian lunatics who think Jesus is too woke and the pathway to God’s kingdom is paved with ArmaLite and Nissan Armadas.

*I don’t think on purpose. Maybe there are a handful of spiritual or religious folks who truly find meaning, a sense of connection and a possibility of transcendence in The Old Ways, but I think it’s mostly people who look at a decaying, exhausted world and have no idea what to do, so they flail about until they eventually walk into a crystal shop or the wrong Reddit thread or a Megachurch.

The Old Ways and the spirituality they brought us are dead. The Enlightenment and its linear, central narrative are dead. Whatever is going to be the next stage of Geist is emerging now, and while it’s way too early to call the game, it seems to be heading in a rather dystopian direction. Instead of the next stage being a consciousness that combines the best of The Old Ways and The Enlightenment, one that sees the world in all its complexities and finds meaning and connection in them, one that can hold contradictory thoughts in tension and not spin out, well, instead of that, the churn of aufhebung seems to have vomited up the dumbest possible repudiation of the Enlightenment’s singular narrative, creating a real dialectic of dipshits.

Sad, tired men and their sad, tired ideas; reboots, revivals and distaff reimaginings; strip mining the past until the mountain collapses. Bad thinking, bad logic and bad faith. What’s truly needed is a complex, non-linear consciousness, but what we’re getting is desiccated spirit, a suspicious heart, and a brain that can barely do basic math. I hope this is just Global Consciousness stopping at 7-11 to grab a Hibiscus Lemonade Slurpee before getting back to business, but I fear we ain’t leaving the store before we nuke Geist or heat it (and ourselves) out of existence.*

*Okay, I know this is dense, but there’s a reason for the jargon. “Geist” is a concept from Hegel; it’s his way of conceptualizing history. I have terrible metaphors for how to visualize Geist, and one of those, one of the ways I visualize it – the totality of human history, that is – is like a big ol’ witch’s cauldron full of stew. The current stage of Geist is the surface of the stew and, you know, the further down you go in the cauldron, the closer you get to the beginning of human history. You can visualize that, right?

So, “aufhebung” (I know, I know, it’s kinda pretentious to use the original German, but the English translation “sublation” sucks ass. If it’s going to be difficult-to-understand jargon anyway, might as well use the original word.). Aufhebung is the process by which history changes. Think about it like this. When you first start making the stew, you throw in some potatoes and carrots and, uh, what else is in stew? I don’t know if I’ve ever really had stew in my life. I guess, like, beef or something? Peas? Whatever, you get the idea. There’s a bunch of ingredients and some kind of soup stock. As you stir the stew some ingredients rise to the surface, some sink below.

Think of the same process with history and culture. As history wears on, some parts of culture endure, some parts disappear, but because history is, uh, this giant stew, “disappear” doesn’t mean “gone for good”, it’s just there, below the surface, waiting to come back in a new transformed way. “Transformed” here just means that the context and the relationships are different because there are new things in culture mixing with the old. The carrot that spent the last few, er, decades, at the bottom now rises to the top with some bits of potato that weren’t there the last time.

Let me try and make it a little more concrete. Let’s take the rise of for-real, this-is-undeniably fascism in 2023 as an example. Between the concerted crushing of dissent around the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, the Democratic establishment in Atlanta using any means possible to eradicate the opposition to Cop City, the CDC essentially redefining the definition of an infectious disease and violently juking the stats in order to hide the damage Covid has done and continues to do, the election of undeniably fascist leaders in The Netherlands, Argentina, Italy, etc., we seem to have gone through a paradigm shift of sorts this last year. We might not have Stasi in America just yet, but if we continue down this path, they’re undeniably waiting there in the future to dump our bodies into an unmarked grave.

But this didn’t just emerge out of nothing. At the end of WWII, the world kind of pushed fascism below the surface by defeating Germany and Italy, but what did the allies do precisely? We say we “defeated the Nazis” and “defeated the fascists”, but what does that mean? We changed the rules that Nazis lived by publicly, but – with the exception of a handful of high-ranking Nazis who were executed or the ones who fucked off this mortal coil by their own hand – most of the Nazis went back to their pre-war lives. The OSS (pre-CIA) helped a bunch get to South America or even America, if they could help in the battle against the Commies; the USSR vacuumed some up, I’m sure, as did other Western countries.

And most of our homegrown Nazis got off scot free as well. Torkild Rieber, the chairman of Texaco, was a fascist, Nazi and traitor, who not only illegally supplied oil to the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, but also, starting in 1939, gave Hitler the locations of US cargo ships heading to the UK, which the Germans then sunk. The only repercussion was that he was forced to resign when this all became public. That’s it! After getting hundreds of US citizens, minimum, killed by feeding info to the Nazis, he became the president of another oil company, and died decades later having lived a long life. All he did was Homer-into-the-bushes back into society.

And Rieber is not atypical! Post-WWII, Nazi beliefs and fascism just sunk below the surface of the stew, like some bones and gristle, waiting for the right historical conditions to re-emerge. Which, lucky us, is now.

Etsy Explanations

A while ago, rightwing fuckwit Laura Loomer tweeted about food not tasting as good as it once did since Covid started. She was searching for an explanation for why that might be. Now, it can’t be that she herself has changed. That option doesn’t even crawl through a single crevasse of her tiny, half-wit mind because her explanatory framework automatically precludes the possibility that the Coco has long-term effects. So, the only explanation left is that the entire world has changed – food processing, restaurants, the ingredients themselves – they’ve all been impacted since, er, about March 13^th of 2020. Her entire Twitter account is her basically describing the symptoms of Long Covid, but because she can’t intellectually understand that as a possibility, she looks to other explanations for why things are different.

Whenever anyone under 60 has a stroke or heart attack, some dimwit quote-tweets the new article with one word: “Vaccinated?”* Because there are a number (millions?) of anti-vaxxers who think all the ills that come from Covid are *actually* due to the vaccine. Forget the fact that peer-reviewed science shows that the long term effects of Coco hold to unvaccinated and vaccinated alike and that vaccinated people fare better, their explanatory framework precludes the possibility of the disease itself having any long-term effects.

*Now, when I see that same thing, like Jamie Foxx having a stroke or Madonna being hospitalized with a weird bacterial infection or Bronny James having a cardiac episode, I do think, “Uh-oh, I wonder how many times they had the Coco?”, but I know better than to say that shit publicly based on ZERO evidence. I mean, technically, I’m saying it here in public, but only to use as an example of how much of a better person I am.

There’s a number of reasons for this, but I think the prime cause is that in the background sits the moldering corpse of the Enlightenment. Free of a central narrative, people are allowed to spin off into whatever niche epistemology feels good to them. Maybe “feels good” isn’t exactly correct because it seems like a lot of these folks are absolutely miserable. Perhaps “satisfies them” or “placates them” works better. “Feels familiar” is probably best.

And just so we’re clear, I’m not saying The Enlightenment, and the central narrative built and socially reproduced by wealthy white men and their coteries, was good; I’m just saying that that central narrative kept all the Epistemological Energy in, and once the Enlightenment died, it was like Walter Peck shutting off the Containment Unit in Ghostbusters. Woosh, the ways we know the world shoot up through the roof and disburse into the dusk.

This is all highly metaphorical. Even if it is poetic. I mean, nothing screams erudite like a Ghostbusters reference. What I am trying to describe though is what happens when a central, centuries-spanning authority loses all credibility, and people start searching for a way to understand the world that makes sense. And the larger problem we all face is that once that central, philosophical narrative – that way of understanding the world that The Enlightenment represented – lost its authority, so did all the institutions that embodied that authority.* Slowly, over decades, but that’s where we find ourselves today, and the Coco might have been the final event that tipped the system over.

*However, one of the reasons these institutions endure is that many of the people that make them up depend on the institutions for paychecks, bonuses, power, self-worth, summer homes, accolades, long-term career prospects, something to do, something to profit from, prestige, a way to pay the mortgage, a non-app dating pool, etc. Most of these people will not voluntarily give these things up, which is why many of the people in charge were the first to fuck off to Narnia as things on the ground got gritty. They must, either genuinely or at the very least publicly, pledge fealty to the status quo because so so much of their lives are built on it. Would you give up access to free office supplies just because the institution you were part of had lost all intellectual and moral authority???

Life, Uh, Finds a Way

I keep mentioning non-linear dynamics in these essays, glossing over what that means, and saying I’ll explain it later. I’ve been hoping to kick the can down the road because there’s some technical stuff to explain when it comes to non-linear dynamics, and I just didn’t want to do it. Look, this is the stuff Ian Malcolm, you know, Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, studied. And while I’d love to put a drop of water on all your hands and say, “See, get it?”, there’s a little more work that’s gotta be done. But I think it’ll do a better job at explaining why everything’s so fucking bananas.

If we think about ways we know the world, ideologies, explanatory frameworks, etc. as a kind of topography, or a map – in my mind, I visualize these things like Tron, kind of like a greenish glowing grid – this is called phase space. And in phase space, I visualize all the different ways we can know the world, politically, scientifically, etc. as creating different areas. If I’m going to keep the pop culture metaphor going, it’s the map at the beginning of Game of Thrones. And within each area – politics, science – there are different regions, and each of those regions is ruled by an attractor. Each attractor is an ideology or understanding of the world. And it’s called an attractor because the closer you are to it – in this case philosophically or ideologically – the more you’re pulled into it.

For example, in the US, heck in most of the world, vegetarianism or veganism as a moral outlook on life doesn’t have a lot of juice, doesn’t have the horses as Tom Wilkinson says in Michael Clayton. If I say to you, “The right thing to do, for yourself, for the animals, for the Earth, is to not eat meat,” what makes you believe me or not? It’s a moral position that I think is right, but I don’t have the horses to make you see it. If I tell you, “You shouldn’t kill another human being” though, well, now that’s a moral imperative with juice! That baby’s been percolating for thousands of years going back to the Torah. “Do not,” it says. That has some moral heft to it. You feel it in your body. That’s a massive moral attractor. “Do not kill non-human animals,” not so much. “Don’t kill pets”, a somewhat intermediary position, holds a decent amount of weight too, but if you look inside yourself as you think about these different dictums you know viscerally which ones feel the most dense.

Because moral imperatives – or any other attractor (political beliefs, common sense beliefs, pop culture beliefs, etc.) – are governed by critical mass. The more people that believe them, the more force, the more heft or juice or horses they have. When I imagine the Tron topography, I imagine the attractors of a region of phase space like holes or wells or chasms in this landscape. The more force the belief or understanding of the world has, the bigger the well is.

I know this is complicated, but let’s just work through this Tron metaphor.  In your mind’s eye, imagine a 3-D ‘80s graphics grid just like in Tron. Cool? Got that picture in your head? A grid rendered in shitty Reagen-era computer graphics? Awesome. Now each region is a different part of culture, and the one we’re focusing on here is “MORALITY”, and that region is itself broken up into a bunch of different areas, “SEXUALITY”, “MURDER”, “PROPERTY RIGHTS”, etc.

Now every moral belief creates a well in this landscape, and the bigger, the more widespread, the more viscerally dense a moral belief is, the bigger the well is. And the bigger a well is, the easier it is to just fall into it. Or the more the beliefs you grow up with align with the most widespread, the most weighty, moral beliefs, the easier it is to fall in. Maybe you’re born in the well, or maybe you grow up just on the edge, so it’s easy for you to fall in, like some kind of philosophical Baby Jessica. Maybe you live farther away, but the belief becomes so pervasive that the ground beneath you swallows you up. Regardless, once you fall into the well, you add your own mass to it, deepening it, expanding it, making it easier for someone just slightly farther than you were on the phase space to now be closer to the edge, closer to falling in. A person’s understanding of the world, both morally and factually, is a function of where they are on the phase space, how close they are to an attractor and how dense that attractor is.

Here’s how I became a vegetarian.

Mad Cow Disease was a big headline in the 1990s, which turned me off to beef. And I’ll be honest, I grew up middle class. We never got the best cuts of meat, so I never really liked the taste anyway. It was easy to give up. Then came pork. I didn’t like the taste of pork chops, and bacon was fatty so it was a rare treat in my household. Easy to eventually give up. Then I accidentally gave myself a case of food poisoning that left me Exorcist-ing from every orifice for an entire day thanks a single piece of undercooked chicken I must have missed in a stir-fry I was making. All of this left me open to Peter Singer’s arguments a few years later when I read Animal Liberation in grad school. You can see how, over a decade, each movement pushed me closer and closer to the “vegetarianism is moral” attractor and away from the “animals don’t count when it comes to murder” attractor, even though the latter is much, much bigger.

For any explanatory framework to have power, it must have a critical mass of people, it must have a large enough attractor, enough horses, that it changes the topography. Otherwise, it takes a lot of cajoling over a long amount of time for someone to fall into it. Without thinking about it, most of us will just agree that “Human murder is wrong”. Maybe people say it hypocritically, but on some level, they believe it enough because the moral attractor for that has a lot of power. It’s deep enough that most of us fall into it. Maybe you’re cynical or a psychopath so you’re closer to the edge, but on some level you know.

For truth – whether that’s truth about physical reality (science) or moral truth (ethics) – to be true, it needs a critical mass of people to believe it. That’s really easy for physical reality. It’s the stuff in front of us, and the repercussions for ignoring it are pretty immediate. If I’m swinging a hammer around willy-nilly, and you think, “I don’t believe that’s a real hammer,”* well, when you walk into it, physical reality will teach you a fairly painful lesson fairly fast. Most people, even without walking face-first into a Estwing E3-16C (of course I looked that up – what about me screams, “This man knows a specific hammer model off the top of his head”?), would agree that walking into the path of a swinging hammer would be painful and ill-advised. Critical mass for claims about simple reality is easy-ish to achieve.

*And look, I have no idea why you believe that. Maybe you were the target of a series of Truman Show-level pranks where your tools were replaced with exact foam replicas. And every time you bought a new hammer, a new screwdriver, a new drill, it was replaced with a foam one. I dunno. People believe all kinds of weird shit. 

For moral truths though or for scientific truths, which are not just simple claims about physical reality, but testable, experimental claims about how it all fits together and works theoretically, critical mass isn’t so easy to build. Moral truths have religion and philosophy to build critical mass. A critical mass that was achieved over thousands of years through millions of people believing the same thing. Vegetarianism, at least how it’s practiced today, doesn’t have that history. And one of the reasons it takes so long for us to abandon outmoded truths about the world is because we’re weighed down by the dead, their bony arms pulling and grasping and holding us down. Scientific truths are the most difficult of all because even after you have a critical mass of scientists to stamp the word TRUTH on a fact and put it back on the conveyer belt, you now have to get a critical mass of non-scientists to understand it. And because science is about constantly testing reality and changing one’s understanding of the world based on new information, one has to constantly be creating a critical mass of scientists and then a critical mass of non-scientists.

This isn’t perfect. Scientists are wrong all the time. They can let their prejudices and ideologies and petty feelings get in the way. Some are cowards and bend the science to meet the needs of powerful people with fat sacks of cash and awards and other things that tiny-minded milksops covet. Some are lazy or racist, or dumb as shit, but great at networking or writing grants. Even with all these assorted dipshits mucking about in the practice, the methodology of scientifically testing the world and retesting the world and drawing conclusions from those tests is remarkably reliable. In a healthy society, there would be a pipeline disseminating scientific consensus to the masses to build critical mass, but in our society, where central authority has broken down over the last century, scientific consensus just becomes one of many explanations, each of which have their own mass. Whether that’s a QAnon crank explaining the world through cryptic messages or a corporate Dem desperate to keep the status quo status quo-ing, each of those attractors is as equally powerful – or in many cases more powerful – than the scientific consensus because they (QAnon, the sweaty status quo) have a large number of people who believe these things, and not only believe these things, but socially reproduce these truths by behaving as if they are true. And beyond that, wealthy elite folks will put their outsized muscle behind the beliefs that suit their needs (for example, the oil industry knew climate change was connected to burning fossil fuels as early as 1959, and then created a massive, decades-long PR campaign to cover this up), which deforms and distorts the phase space even further. Trying to navigate this space successfully is like trying to win that wooden marble labyrinth game. Does anyone remember those? Am I from 1856?

What I’m trying to get away from is that human behavior, like how we actually behave, is some easy thing we can reduce to a system or to psychology or whatever. It’s people – temporally, symbolically and rationally – trying to navigate a changing space that over time has different yawning chasms whose shape grows or shrinks based on how everybody else is navigating the space. Sometimes the ground just changes underneath you, the attractor opens up like the pit of fire, and you fall in. Maybe you’re like me and you’re clinging to the side screaming into the void, “A full third of Oklahoma has Long Covid! This isn’t sustainable!”, constantly questioning your own sanity because everyone else is just trying to enjoy the fall.

A Final Map Metaphor

So great, we’re back to Covid. Thank god. Every sentence that didn’t mention it left me craving that lil’ microscopic freak. But what the fuck does it have to do with why everything is so unhinged and will continue to become more and more psychotic, assuming we don’t change course?

Explanatory frameworks are like maps of the world. The more accurate the map is, the easier it is to navigate. But a map that’s kinda accurate? You can still get by, it just causes confusion. Sometimes you fall face first into a gorge, but most of the time, you mostly get around. The explanatory framework for the world generated by scientific consensus is the most accurate. It’s not 100%, but it works well most of the time. The farther you get away from that attractor, the more difficult it is to navigate though. You start using the map generated by the “I just desperately want to keep the status quo because it’s good for Business and it’ll be a lot of work to change things and I don’t want to do the work and Business is taking care of me and my loved ones” AKA the centrist Democrat attractor, and well, things kind of work. And sure, you’re getting sick a lot more these days and the health system is worse and there’s more and more environmental disasters and the airlines are always canceling flights or doors are falling off mid-air and what’s this “summer flu” thing everyone I know keeps getting? So, yeah, you’re kind of navigating the world, but it doesn’t make much sense and that’s kind of frustrating or depressing or surreal. And god help you if you’re following the map generated by the fascist right. Now nothing makes sense, and you’re a mewling baby stultified by a world of swirling sounds and colors. Yikes! If only there was a Playmobil set to keep the burgeoning Brown Shirts occupied.

The world changed in 2020. Perhaps irrevocably, but certainly for a while. We struggled with the change as a society, but in 2023, the most powerful forces decided to pretend the world hadn’t changed and they used their considerable power to convince the confused and traumatized population that their fiction was true, that the map generated out of the ravenous need of the Capitalist class to keep going no matter what was the map we should all navigate our lives by.

In February of 2022, Impact Research, Biden’s polling firm, released a memo suggesting a number of “strategic thoughts” about how the Biden and the Dems should reframe the pandemic so that the Dems could “take the win”. The memo doesn’t suggest following scientific data or retrofitting indoor spaces to have better airflow or masking or using HEPA filters. Instead, it says that they should declare the pandemic is over, that thanks to vaccines* we can all return to normal and that the Dems should move the goal posts on what an acceptable outcome is, along the way seeding in misapprehensions about the virus – things scientists knew were false back in 2022 – as if they were indeed established facts. I have no idea if the authors –  Molly Murphy, the president of Impact, and Brian Stryker, a managing partner –  knew these were lies, though the way they talk about Covid in the memo seems to imply they know. As well, I have no idea how influential this specific memo was in determining the White House’s strategy, except to say that this is exactly what they did, so if they didn’t use this as a blueprint, they on their own, or through some other consultant, came to the same conclusions.

*Which are good, don’t get me wrong, but must be seen as part of a layered defense and not like you’re throwing The One Ring into Mt. Doom.

On Twitter, Laura Miers compiled a long thread of the ways in which elite interests, including the White House, have actively worked to suppress information about the dangers of Covid in order to keep the status quo humming along. The White House actively pressured Facebook to tow the party line and remove posts that pushed vaccine-hesitancy, which maybe would be good if we lived in a society that actively promoted peer-reviewed scientific findings and worked hard to discredit pseudoscience and misinformation. However, this pressuring extended to “often-true” information and didn’t serve to promote accurate scientific findings but instead advance the narrative that was most beneficial to what the Biden Administration wanted, which was to fucking forget about Covid already.

Just to be clear, I’m not pushing a conspiracy that this was a project undertaken by some shadowy cabal to weaken the working class or to see if the virus would mutate and give us gills or claws or organic BBLs; it probably emerged out of a mix of many motivations: laziness, apathy, cynicism, denial, greed, ignorance, you know, the whole panoply of deadly sins and such. A lot of people, no matter the repercussions, don’t want to do more than they absolutely have to to not get fired, and rocking the boat in the name of scientific truth will most certainly get your ass fired in this pretty little dystopia we’ve built for ourselves.

The overall point is, that for purely political reasons that had nothing to do with public health or scientific data, the most powerful political office in the world declared an end to the pandemic. Again, if you can tell me one physical or scientific thing about Coco that changed between the day before the National Emergency ended and the day after – like, the vaccine became so effective that it stopped transmission and breakthrough infections became rare or the virus became less transmissible or Long Covid became less of a problem, etc., anything – I’ll shut my fucking trap forever and go back to writing sketches about, I dunno, a family that makes all their clothing out of horse penises. “Mom, everyone at school made fun of my dress today. I’m starting to think that horse penis clothing isn’t fashionable.”

But if nothing changed, yet people are acting as if it changed, can we at least agree that that’s a big fucking problem?

And look, I get it! Everyone was fucking exhausted and everyone wanted it to be true, and everyone is full of desperate desires to return to pre-2020, full of childlike “if you want it enough you can manifest it” naïveté, and there was so much propaganda minimizing the effects of the Coco, as well as a concerted effort to simply not publicize the new awful shit scientists are discovering about the disease, and powerful politicians are declaring it’s over and the CDC just reduced the isolation time to while you’re taking a piss at work and celebrities are behaving in public as if it’s over and all your friends on Instagram are inside unmasked. The gritted teeth “Everything is normal!” scream is a ubiquitous everything everywhere all at once making it really, really difficult to think rationally.

The temporal dimension of human existence certainly didn’t help either. For thousands of years, physical reality taught us that the air was relatively safe to breathe. And the scientific consensus backed us up for the most part. Much like “Do not kill,” this belief had so much critical mass that no one really questioned it. And then in 2020, the air inside was no longer safe to breathe. It’s going to take a long time, perhaps a generation or more, to chip away at that belief’s critical mass.

Both of these dimensions have created a yawning chasm, a giant attractor labeled IRRATIONALITY, smack dab in the middle of the ways we use to explain the world, and with all of this fucking up the phase space, it’s turned us into a civilization of Laura Loomers.* We’re getting sicker and sicker and having strokes and heart attacks and getting dementia in our 20s, 30s and 40s; the life expectancy in the US dropped for the third year in a row; Tuberculosis is back; Long Covid is an inevitability for anyone that gets infected too many times; but barely anyone publicly wants to admit that this is all because we’re letting Covid run roughshod over our entire civilization, so everyone is left confused as to what the fuck is going on.

*Just to underline this, I saw this item in a recent e-mail newsletter from The Ankler, one of the newer Hollywood trades:

“Just to share some positive job related news for once, and to demonstrate how there can be unexpected benefits to societal shifts like increased WFH work — while making up 12% of the U.S. adult population, disabled folks made up almost a third of the new labor growth in the U.S. since the pandemic according to JP MORGAN Chief U.S. Economist Michael Feroli. Labor participation rates for disabled men and women also both hit records last year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).”

Is it that the economy is suddenly becoming more accommodating to the disabled? Maybe, although as the commercial real estate market teeters, there is a marketed push to end WFH and get everyone back in offices. Or is it that disabled folks made up almost a third of the new labor growth because Long Covid is so pervasive that the economy has to either include the disabled or collapse? If you ignore the fact that the Coco has been affectionately referred to as a ”mass-disabling event”, then this fact looks good – look how inclusive our society is becoming! – but if your explanatory framework isn’t based in Narnia, then this is actually a troubling statistic and not a triumph of diversity initiatives.

The Irrationality has been growing for a century. It started off as playful postmodernism, whimsically messing with the forms mainstream culture uses to reproduce itself – fake ads, fake news articles, fake parades for example. By the 1970s, The Irrationality grew larger. The economy was exhausted – god forbid we change the way we do anything – so the ruling elite just started papering over our commodified lives with credit cards and debt and stock buybacks and manipulating LIBOR and no longer engaging in a productive economy and just doing whatever is possible to juice the stock price, and sure, if that means building buildings no one lives in and deleting completed movies before anyone can see them, well, okay, I guess that’s just what we’ll have to do. Strip the copper wires out of existence, and let the rest rot. The Irrationality grew with every politician and person in power who looked at this mess and thought that it would be too much work to untangle it and too difficult and too costly to oppose the psychotic forces that only wanted to accumulate greenbacks at the cost of everything else, and one by one, the good folks with vision were filtered out by a system that isn’t interested in vision. Even though it’s not rational for a society to not think about anything but short-term gain, all the smaller, perhaps-rational choices of a cadre of greedy psychopaths with even scintilla of power created a larger-scale, civilizational Irrationality. And it grew and it grew, until finally Covid created the final bit of heft to create the critical mass needed to tip the entire system over into The Irrationality.

The map no longer works because it’s no longer a map of reality, but everyone is still trying to navigate the world with it. It’s like the bible for the Evangelical set. It might have made sense to a desert people a handful of millennia ago, but in the modern world, it’s just confusing and doesn’t really apply, like, I can’t wear clothes made of two or more materials? So if you use it, like Evangelicals do – at least the honest ones – maybe some of the larger-scale moral questions are answered, but everything else is just bewildering and not a way anyone can live their lives.

The broken map – the broken explanatory framework – people are too used to it, too attached to it, it’s too familiar and homey, and it feels good to use it, even if the gorges aren’t marked and the roads no longer go where it says they’re supposed to and none of the landmarks make sense anymore. So, it feels familiar and there might still be fun to be had with it, but it’s also confusing and frustrating and depressing to be lost all the time. They’re trying to order Shamrock Shakes off the menu but it’s July. When the cashier tries to explain, they point to their calendar and screech, “It says March, asshole!”

It's March. It’s Narnia. It’s the Bible. The solution is to just take a time out and draw a new map, but until everything collapses or elite interests have wrung all the profit possible out of the old map or a mass movement (haha) takes control, all we can do is try to peel people away from the critical mass of The Irrationality one by one until a new map can be drawn.

Now, having written yet another essay trying to get a grasp on our contemporary madness, I’m just going to sit back and wait for the party invitations to roll in!