Dear Internet,

I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t make sense what I know, and I know very little. No one can know enough to truly know what’s happening. And if you don’t know, you cannot make choices which depend upon you knowing. In which case, you are forced to fall back on one or both of two strategies: a) principles, or b) greed. Greed may be a principle, if you skew it right. Instead of “principles”, we could say “rules” or “logic”. Doesn’t matter which rules, necessarily, just pick some. Instead of “greed” would could say “instinct” or “intuition”. Most of us follow a combination, heavily biased towards some kind of gut feeling or other, made up of habits, feelings, wishes, and knee-jerk reactions. We’re not machines, after all.

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The United States has a new president, and lots of people are excited about it. I’m glad to see the end of the second Bush era in the U.S. I’m dreading the spectre raised by Bush Sr. of another Bush White House—this time with Jed. I am diametrically opposed to everything that has been spawned by that monster, George H. W. Bush. He may be the epitome of everything I despise in the world.

Obama is probably going to be a somewhat rerun of the Clinton years, hopped up on the Internet. I can foresee a lot energy and activity going into running websites and issuing updates and general communications frenzies, but I’m skeptical that all that information flying around between citizens and their government will have a significant impact on how the U.S. government actually operates.

The predicament in which the United States finds itself has a lot more to do with the attitudes of its people than with the actions of its government. Obama won by 4% of the popular vote. This is not “overwhelming”, except in the most cynical interpretation. I fully expect that in the mid-terms in two years, the American people will flip the balance back towards the Republicans, ensuring once again a paralysis in government and a stagnancy in political ideas.

What the United States needs is another revolution. I’d prefer a bloodless one, but even a civil war might be better for them, and the rest of the world, in the long run. But they certainly need less television, less fast food, less plastic, and fewer cars. They need an economy that runs on something other than conspicuous consumption (as does Canada and the rest of the world). Sadly, consumerism, capitalism and democracy are a kind of locked-in trinity of short-term thinking driven mostly by fear, uncertainty and doubt. It panders always and inevitably to one human quality: insecurity.

Change may come to the Insecure States of America, but I suspect it will be shallow, superficial, and cosmetic. Because that’s all the American consumer will tolerate. Don’t think that lipstick-smeared pigs are gone for anything but a short recess.

I wish I had the time to write an article which lived up to the promise of that title. But all I have is a moment and a few ideas.

If there is one thing you can say about normal people—perhaps because it’s the one thing that most defines normality—it’s that they seem to intuitively understand the value of civil interaction. Normal people are polite. Normal people refrain from offending others unnecessarily. Normal people speak in moderate tones using ordinary language. Normal people try to be friendly. Normal people are a dying breed.

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One. Down here on planet Earth, we are running out. Space. Energy. Food. Materials. Money. Patience. Purpose. Creativity. Challenges. You name it, the supply is dwindling.

One planet is too little room.

I hate listening to people who think space exploration is a waste of time and money. The people who think that investing in space vehicles, exploration and colonization is a waste are smoking crack. It’s all there is! It’s not the wrong choice–it’s the only choice. If I could fool myself, like these activist idiots, that human nature could ever be satisfied with what it had, I’d be happy to put all my energy into seeing to the needs of of people here and now, into creative solutions, into doing more with less. You name it. Because, ironically, I can be satisfied. I’m a socialist and a minimalist anti-materialist. Things–objects, possessions–annoy me. I like ideas. Knowledge. But only good ideas. Only true knowledge. No fairy tale delusions posing as good ideas. No wishes posing as truth.

Societies, like all things organic, do either of two things: grow or die. There is nowhere else to grow down here. Earth is full. Past full. Overloaded. If we keep on this course–wasting what little is left on toys and lawn furniture, watching TV, trusting the market to solve our problems–we are screwed five ways from Sunday.

I don’t think it’s going to come to that. We will figure it out. By which I mean, someone in charge will figure it out and make it happen. The question is only how long we sit around with our thumbs up our collective asses worrying about interest rates and unemployment statistics, research polls and retirement plans.

There is no future here. Not worth having. We have no frontiers. We have no challenges. Social justice is not on the agenda. People are greedy and selfish. The only way to get them to stop stealing from each other is to point out to them a bigger, shinier thing that they can covet.

If we don’t get in gear, pretty soon people will have to resort to eating each other. Figuratively, of course.

Two. What else is there?

Exactly what do you have to hope for in your life? And who are you? Maybe you’re satisfied with a few short steps up the ladder. Or maybe you like it just where you are. There are six and a half billion people on this planet. Do you think that they’re satisfied with where they are? I mean, people have needs, and much more than just material. More than social, too. They need to feel purpose, and for some, that means more than just making a living. They might not know it. Although, from what I hear, they do know it. People are listless. Depressed. Detached. And these are people in the “developed” world. The “rich” countries.

Some people will tell you that these people need God. Lies. They need God like they need mercury poisoning. Like they need a dose of methadone. Like they need a pat on the back and a hole in the head.

People need a challenge! They need a purpose. A direction. A reason. A goal. If they can’t find a challenge in their environment, they will, mostly, look for it in competing with other people. They’ll gamble. In casinos or on the stock market. Or they’ll find pointless games to play and meaningless risks to take. They will, in short, waste their lives for lack of a sense of where their horizons are. Because, since the Earth is a sphere, and has few secrets left, every horizon leads right back to where you started.

The only other direction to go now is…

UP.

Why can’t you idiots admit it? By which I mean, you smart people.

This is the responsibility of the smart. Smart people have given the rest of humanity fire, the wheel, moveable type, air conditioning, electric toothbrushes and the Internet. Probably a tenth of one percent of human beings are responsible for the ideas, the science and the technology that drives the world forward. The rest just get their paycheque, spend it on stuff, and eat it up. I’m just talking in terms of the economics, here. Their appetite just keeps growing. Every day they want more, but every day, we get closer to running out.

And when it finally dawns of Joe Average, when he gets laid off from his job bolting tires on Priuses or digging turnips out of some exhausted field, he’s going to look at all the stupid crap we wasted our time on, and he’s going to blame the smart idiots who invented all of it and ignored everything important. What does Joe Average know? He knows what’s in front of him. He’s got his everyday wisdom. It’s not his place to figure it all out. It’s the smart people who are letting us down. Who only know just enough to make their Googles and their Enrons and their Mortgage Trusts.

Well, you smug bastards, eventually you’re going to wake up and realize what a bunch of idiots you’ve been, when you have to face all of time you’ve been wasting, and it will be too late… for you, and Joe, and everyone else who’s going to get screwed.

Time is running out. And knowing we got the kerning just right on the signs that point to Hell is not going to make it OK when we get there.

The problem with the act of writing, these days, for me, is of listening to my thoughts and determining which, if any, is clearly more emphatic and distinct than the rest. And isn’t about what I’m doing at work, since I can’t talk about that. (Unlike some Cocoa software developers, but like many other software developers, we keep our cards close to our chest. We emulate Apple in that regard.)

Outside of programming, the pre-eminent question in my mind is rather vague and abstract. How do we organize people to get them to do what’s best for everyone in the long run, instead of everyone doing what they think is best for them in the short term? How do we convince people that what they think is in their best interests probably isn’t? And who are “we”?

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Perhaps like many, I live my life, in part, through art. Perhaps not “live”, but “interpret”, as part of understanding. Perhaps not art, but story, whether in books, movies, or songs. I need those comparisons to make, or at least have the illusion of making, sense of my experiences.

I just watched a movie which has a certain resonance. It was popular with a certain class or group of people, a kind of self-loathing snobs. High Fidelity. And while the book was better, for many reasons, it was also harder to identify with the protagonist, as it was British, and the movie is American, and while, as a Canadian, I wish I could be more like the British, I’m not. American culture, and especially popular culture, is, by and large, what I’ve been surrounded by.

The movie is about a guy who loves music and goes through a break up and has to consider his life. A common story about the listless urban wandering soul. I’m not so much a music lover, but I have my moments. In truth, art, high or low, popular or obscure, is for me mostly a jumping off point for my own fantasies. My own dreams of how life could be, should be, would be, if only…

Rob Gordon, the hero, through the pain of (almost) losing his best, truest hope for love (there’s that word again), realizes that he’s been sacrificing the joys of real life for the fantasies of his own invention, and that he will stop it, since he’s been given a second chance.

A long, long time ago, I had fantasies about love, but they were without words and without pictures. They were only feelings, and thus can never be shared, but only guessed at. It’s an unknown how much I sacrificed for them. Love was, however, probably a minority theme in my dreams, most of which were driven by anger and a fascination with knowledge, technology and power. I sublimate. Or used to do so. Now, I just channel it into work and study. Or sleep.

Art doesn’t work so well for me any more. The truth is that, usually, I find myself bored and irritable part way through most books and movies, and I tire of albums within weeks that started out fantastic. Because …. I don’t know why. I’m reading the wrong kind of books and watching the wrong kind of movies and listening to the wrong kind of music. (Although Metric’s Live it Out is maybe an exception.) Because, by and large, the books and movies and music are selling a picture of the world, of life, which I cannot stomach, because I know that it is not real. And, for all John Cusack’s cute monologues and Jack Black’s clever wit and the sprinkling of self-satisfied I’m-so-hip profanity, the movie is ultimately bullshit about swallowing the American Dream whole and not choking even for a second. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to puke and rub peoples’ faces in it.

Life is not about getting what you want by admitting you really want what you’re supposed to want, what you’re expected to want. It’s about not getting what you shouldn’t want because if you got it, you’d be a monster. Life is about denying yourself to get along in society and not end up in prison for not having the self control you need. Human beings are animals. But we are also gifted with foresight and the ability to predict what happens when we give in to our natural urges. Humans are influenced more by fear and hatred than any other emotions. Love is just a side effect. Love is how we feel about people and things that help us escape that which we fear and destroy that which we hate. And, being human, and prone to abstract thinking, many of the things which we fear and hate are symbolic, and thus our loves are also, by and large, symbolic. That’s what the mind is: a collection of symbols. Our feelings respond to them, often more strongly than to real physical stimuli.

But so little art, so few people, admit to this essential truth of human experience. We live lives not in touch with reality and real things, but in a murky fog of dream which surrounds and penetrates the banal truths of our lives, and it is the symbolic nature of our dreams, the subtle deformation, the transparent distortion of the mind’s warped lens, which enthralls us. We are tricked, fooled, and bamboozled constantly, by our own minds, and through the encouragement and prodding of others, fraught with their own delusions, and longing for confirmation that they are in fact not deluded at all. Everyone wants someone, or many, who can help to solidify their certainty in their own world view.

Thus, movies like High Fidelity are born and can so readily captivate the minds of even the most hardened cynic.

I am not a cynic. Cynicism is just another kind of bullshit; a pose, usually adopted by ignorant children attempting to appear sophisticated. An attitude of the same ilk as the casually provocative, those types who like to show off their comfort with sex or violence or other socially awkward subjects in an attempt to prove their worldliness and cool.

I am a bullshit detector. And while I was amused by High Fidelity (on the second viewing), it is still a bullshit movie.

What makes me miserable like nothing else in life is the sheer endless mountains of bullshit that fill the landscape and blot out the sky, crowding in on me and cutting me off from the broad vistas of reality which I might otherwise have to enjoy. Bullshit like newspapers are full of, bullshit like advertising is full of, bullshit like culture is full of, bullshit like so many people I used to know are full of, and know it, but won’t admit it. Because they wouldn’t know how to live without it, or wouldn’t want to, because then they’d have to find something else to justify their sad, pointless existence.

All I want is to be rid of it. But the truly sad thing is that I don’t know how to live without it, either. Although, unlike most people, I used to keep it very separate. That’s the way with nerds: bicameral thinking. Real life is stark and cold; the life of the mind is fantastical and completely absurd. But we know the difference. We nurse our admittedly hopeless dreams, secretly or otherwise, ashamedly or proudly, because there has to be someplace to escape the obvious emptiness of the “real” world and the smoke screens blown up by other people.

For myself, though, I’ve outgrown all my old imaginary toy worlds. Their faults and seams are too obvious. The scaffolding reveals itself. The marionettes strings’ reflect too much in the harsh light of experience. I need new fantasies. Only I’m not sure I’m ready for what that means. There is darkness there. I’m talking about deathly darkness. Despairing darkness. Vile darkness. Blind darkness. Bloody darkness.

And there is light in that dark, too, but it is harsh light, burning light, brutal and unkind. It is the light that the universe throws on the pretensions of men and women and burns them and reduces them to ash. It is a power, and it is friendless, heartless, and pitiless. And it whispers. And it promises.

Not magic. But immunity to magic: to tricks and illusions plied by charlatans and actors. It offers a weapon with which to annihilate fools and their foolishness, and bring an end to the disappointment of discovering that all the promises they made were just a dollop of Vaseline on a photographer’s lens.

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A city full of cowards is this
We’d give ‘em just enough rope to commit
But there’s been too much wine under the bridge
And my eyes have become immune
To everything I take from you

You wander around on a crutch
Why don’t you just lay it down and shut up
With thoughts as pure as the driven slush
And a cool insanity
From everything you take from me

How do you know if you really care about someone, as opposed to just needing them to be around? How do you know if people care about you, instead of just needing you to be around? When someone says, “I love you” do they really mean “I like that you love/like me?” Is there any difference? When people tell you, “You’re a good person,” do they really mean, “You’re good to me and so I like you”? Do people only evaluate one another on their immediate pragmatic value? Can you care for someone that you don’t respect? Would you want someone to care for you if they didn’t respect you? Is it wrong to tell someone that you don’t respect them? Or is it right? If you care about them? If you love them? If you like them? If you respect them in some ways, but not in others? Are people dishonest with those they care about for selfish or selfless reasons? Both? Neither? Is everyone just using everyone else? Is that wrong, or right, or neither? Does goodness always feel good? Is love good? Does love always feel good? Does goodness exist? Does love exist?

Today is my birthday, and I’m going to see the sun rise. Not by choice; just because I feel asleep at nine thirty and woke up at two thirty, and spent two hours researching Cocoa exception handling issues, and now I have to re-write some code even though I don’t want to.

I am thirty-seven years old. Have I wasted my life? Have I accomplished anything? Have I lived well? Have I done good things? Awful things? Have I contributed more than I’ve taken, or less? Is it measurable? Is it a nonsensical question?

Why don’t people value improvement of themselves and their world? Why are people complacent, cowardly and dishonest? Why am I unhappy with the state of the world and with people? What can I change? What should I change? Why don’t people take responsibility for themselves and the consequences of their actions? Why are people so stupid and pathetic? Why do people treat falsehoods as true? Why do people want to be deceived and deluded? Why can’t people face the fact that life is uncertain and that death is inevitable? Why do adults behave like children crying for their parents to make it better?

How should you respond when someone important to you lies to you, makes you false and insincere promises, and then betrays you because you question their deceit? With humility, or vengeance?

I didn’t get to see the sun rise, because it is cloudy on the Eastern horizon. But I don’t believe in omens. I don’t believe in anything. Belief is not required. Life goes on.