“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
I have no fear of becoming a monster because I do not fight monsters. I type. But I do gaze long into the abyss. And it does gaze back. Into me. The act of looking into the abyss and having it look back … has changed me. And the ‘changed’ me gazes once more into the abyss and again the abyss gazes back. And I am ‘changed’ once more. What Nietzsche left unsaid was the abyss changes too with each viewing. It has become more … visible. More known.
I used to think that Nietzsche’s use of the word abyss was interchangeable with the word void. And I thought Nietzsche’s words were a warning. The risk of staring into nothingness was to invite that nothingness inside you. But Nietzsche did not say void … he said abyss. An important distinction. There is literally nothing in a void … but there is something in the abyss. I still think Nietzsche’s words are a warning. But now I think he was warning us against something else.
Vampiric lore states that a vampire cannot enter a home unless it is given permission. It must be invited. And we all have, to some degree, invited what exists at the center of the abyss into our lives. And it has changed us. We have all become more like the thing in the abyss than before we first looked.
Who has gazed into the abyss? Almost everyone. Who has been changed? Again … almost everyone. And what from the abyss has changed and become more visible, more known … more accepted? In a word:
Evil.
But not in any religious sense. There is no god. There is no devil. There are only people. And some of those people are psychopaths. Unfortunately for us … psychopaths rule our world.
The war in Afghanistan cost America over 2 trillion dollars or about $300 Million per day for 20 years. The US may have “lost” the war but the Military Industrial Complex won the money. War is not a business. As General Smedley Butler said, “War is a racket.” War is a rigged game where the rubes always lose and their tax dollars are swiftly transferred to the bank accounts of the psychopaths who run the Military Industrial Complex. The television shows us the anguish and the horror and the deaths but they never show us the bank accounts of the top 5 defense contractors.
Ayatollah Khomeini first used the phrase Great Satan in a speech given in November 1979 to describe the United States which he accused of imperialism and sponsoring corruption throughout the world. Any American who took offense at Khomeini’s speech never understood one word of US history.
Psychopaths obviously run America’s health care system. This “health care” system is designed to amass billions of dollars in profit every year by denying health care to people or by charging exorbitant prices that primarily serve to bankrupt the people who need healthcare the most. If that isn’t psychopathy … I don’t know what is.
Wherever I look, the Energy Industrial Complex, the Food Industrial Complex, the Educational Industrial Complex, The Health Care Industrial Complex, and the Entertainment Industrial Complex, I see psychopaths in charge. Their overall goal appears to be to systematically lower the quality of life for 99% of the people who live on this planet while enriching themselves. The psychopaths don’t care if their actions result in poisoning us with toxic food or water on one end of the continuum or murdering us if we stand in their way on the other.
It’s the psychopaths’ world … we just live in it.
The 4 years of Fucko the Clown has ended. We now have Joe Biden as president. The Democrats have a slight majority in the House of Representatives and narrow control of the Senate. Joe Biden, with the stroke of a pen, could eliminate crushing student debt, expand Medicare to all, free migrant children from concentration camps, and so much more. But he says he cannot do these things.
Why?
Is there a massive pen shortage in Washington DC?
He will not do these things because at this very second They Are Making Money and that’s all anyone needs to know.
Insanity reigns in the United States. A more virulent form of Covid 19 is raging through the country. The current 7-day average of new Covid 19 cases is 140,893. If everyone was vaccinated and wore masks the virus could be contained. But insanity is ascendant. Millions of Americans have broken from reality. They do not believe vaccines and masks can save them and their children from the virus.
They Are Insane.
But the psychopaths wouldn’t gain any ground unless they had their minions. So they seduced tens of millions to the psychopathic side by driving people insane. They inculcated lunacy into the body politic by encouraging blatant racism and misogyny, applauding virulent anti-intellectualism, and rewarding insurrection and murder. Through it all the psychopaths instilled in everyone the insidious lunacy of hyper-consumerism.
From Mark Crispin Miller’s introduction to Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, “… a nation built for shopping cannot possibly endure as a democracy—or, for that matter, last at all …“
I first learned about slavery in the US when I was a kid in 3rd and 4th grade history classes. The concept of things being made by slave labor or child labor was shocking to me even though it was painted with the broad strokes of elementary school history. The idea of owning a human being was offensive and owning a thing made by a slave was despicable.
Today, you, me, and everybody else own things made by slave labor, child labor, or both. We use them every single day. If a sweat shop in Los Angeles, or any city in the US, were exposed and shown to be cranking out smart phones or big screen TVs with slave labor we would demand the sweat shop be closed down and the owners prosecuted.
Wouldn’t we?
But collectively we don’t give a shit … if the sweat shop is in another country. Ask yourself … Why should it matter where the slaves live?
Well … it doesn’t.
If there was any decency in any country that has an Amazon warehouse within it, the warehouse doors would be chained and padlocked until that obscenely rich motherfucker Jeff Bezos paid his fucking taxes, paid his workers a decent wage, and then redesigned the warehouses to be humane work spaces. But “Same Day Delivery” has derailed higher thought processes.
We have been changed.
The Evil in the abyss changes all those who gaze upon it. Because Evil gazes back. After a while you may choose to look away … but that doesn’t mean the thing in the abyss looks away from you. As it has become more known … you have become more known to it. It knows your name. It knows where you live. It knows what you want.
PS
So ends the Tenth Canadian Anniversary “moment”. We moved up here on August 22nd 2011, became Permanent Residents on July 26th 2016, and became Canadian citizens on September 5th, 2019.
Over the last decade we’ve been able to clearly see the differences between life in the US and Canada. There is no comparison. When I read or watch the news from the US it isn’t like gazing into an abyss … it is gazing into the abyss.
But we have Stupid here, too. In British Columbia the protocols that were put in place to protect us against the original Covid-19 virus were relaxed just when the more dangerous Delta variant started spreading like crazy. The Delta variant is up to three times more transmissible, up to three times more dangerous, but is being treated like it’s a lesser threat than the original Covid strain that brought about all the restrictions in the first place. If that ain’t a WTF moment I don’t know what is.
For The Insane living in America … I have no words. For the Sane People of America you have my sincere short-lived condolences.
Short-lived?
For 5 days in late June – early July this year, British Columbia suffered through its first “Heat Dome” event that killed 815 people and roughly 1 billion marine animals. More will follow.
So I say short-lived condolences because the temperatures … and the oceans … rise for us all.
August 20, 2021
