Mess of the Demiurge

 
When it all started in March 2020 I was on board with the NZ Government Covid response. I was part of the Team of 5 Million. I was being kind. There was a global pandemic and the solution was a well-informed leadership and a population working together to stop the spread. The first lockdown will always be remembered as a special time in Wellington. The CBD was completely empty, everything was closed, no one was at work, the weather was extraordinarily beautiful and we all walked the streets, parks and beaches, relaxed and unusually friendly, happily keeping our two metre distance. Apart from police harassing people for sitting on benches on Oriental Parade, not considered essential exercise, it all made sense: we have closed the borders, there is very little covid here and if we don't allow it to spread we can eliminate it before it sets in. And it worked. Covid was completely eliminated from Aotearoa for months and life returned to relative normality. We enjoyed our well-earned complacency as Covid swept through much of the rest of the world. It was understood early that in the event of mass acute Covid hospitalisations, the health system would be overwhelmed and not be able to cope. Despite this, and with all that Covid-free time to work with, no serious attempt was made to increase the capacity or efficiency of the health system.

From the very beginning there were two narratives. There was the clear narrative of the Government, reported every day by our charismatic Prime Minister, Jacinda even gave us updates from her own living room with her child running around in the background. Then there was this strange story that I read about only on Facebook from people who proclaimed that Covid was a hoax or that it was caused by 5G. “Let's be honest,” I posted. “You don't really know if that's true or not.” The other story seemed quite unreasonable and unrealistic and I didn't understand why people were asserting it.

The second nationwide lockdown felt banal and irritating. The CBD was no less busy, everyone was wearing masks, less social distancing, disgust and impatience with anyone coming near. It was an unusually unfriendly time. Auckland was in lockdown for three months. I don't claim to be a health expert, to have access to data or to be able to interpret it better than anyone else, but it is an extreme thing for a government to lockdown an entire population. It is not and will never be casual, something you just try to see if it works. I began to doubt whether it was all worthwhile.

At what point does the Covid response become worse than Covid was ever going to be? This to me is a fundamental question, but tends to receive a reactionary response. It does not suggest an answer, that no Covid response would have been better. It simply suggests the consideration, whether it has already happened or may happen in the future, that the response has done more damage than the virus was ever going to. The reactionary response is a result of the fact that there are only two possible stories: either you swallow whole the narrative of the Government and their Experts or you are a Conspiracy Theorist fueled by Fake News. Almost everyone seems content to place themselves in one of these two camps. I prefer to reserve judgement and remain sceptical. From my perspective, it is highly unlikely that either story is completely true.

Voting

It seems pertinent, in this time of electionary foment here in Aotearoa, to address the current political crisis.

Here in Aotearoa we are currently being bombarded with propaganda and hysteria regarding the impending democratic ritual that justifies the authority of what is known as the New Zealand Government.  This process involves the shameless fixation on characters and either building or demolishing their esteem.  For reasons I do not understand, people respond to this process as if it was in some way meaningful.  They respond to it in exactly the same way they would  a soap-opera or a "reality" TV show in which their favourite characters may get "voted out".  These people fail to in any way to contextualise the phenomenon or to objectively consider the information they are receiving from the media.

There are others who take themselves more seriously and apply more analysis of the various candidates by discussing "issues" or "policies".  They apply a more sophisticated form of character politics by constructing what they perceive to be personal images of all the political parties based on what they promise to do after the election.  The promises, while appearing to be serious issues affecting peoples' lives, society and the environment, are as fictitious as the characters ritually raised and burned periodically because everybody knows that promises are not kept.  The political parties, in listing their post-election policies, are merely drawing an image of themselves to appeal to their particular corner of the so-called "public".  Like those who choose their favourite Idol contestant, the one with whom they can most identify, they choose their favourite political party, to define and elevate themselves, like those who say, "We won," when their favourite sports team wins.

We define ourselves and thus create boundaries.  We are supposed to place ourselves on a spectrum between left and right, to separate ourselves from the idiots or the scum on the other end of the spectrum.  Are these scum the same people we have an enjoyable conversation with until we suddenly find out who they are voting for?  Is this left-right spectrum a meaningful way of separating ourselves from our fellows?  The left-right spectrum is simply a difference in economic policy, whether the mechanisms of politics are set up in a way that channels money to those with or without resources.  It is an admission of the success of capitalism to redistribute the wealth and the moral right associated with it, or an ambivalence or lack of faith in the mechanisms of capitalism.  This in no way defines me as a person and I refuse to place myself on this spectrum.

In fact, I refuse to define myself on any of these party-politic images.  I refuse to distance myself from those around me with arbitrary boundaries imposed from above.  We are told we live in a post-colonial period, that we live in a reasonable social democracy, and that we should be grateful.

Why should I bother to vote?

In Aotearoa, perhaps more than any other English-speaking country, the indigenous people we tried to squash are in the process of reclaiming their mana, though perhaps only in relation to the rest of us, who were colonised thousands of years before the Māori.  We are all colonised and we all continue to be distanced from a direct experience of the world in which we live, instead settling for a mediated, commentated experience.  We denounce military coups and forget how our own government was established.  We imbed ourselves in an abstract and arbitrary universe in which the news media is the oracle, the economy is god and the government is the heavenly hierarchy and then we lament that our false reality is not translating successfully to our actual lives.

"The desire to live, to continue, becomes more and more indecisive, more and more phantom-like."
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)

I vote because there is only one thing worse than thinking voting will change anything; thinking that not voting will change anything.  I sympathise with my friends in Australia and USA who don't bother to vote and I do vote for the very same reason.  Here in Aotearoa in 2014 we actually have someone to vote for.  I am not suggesting we will make huge political progress as a result, I am not saying that I believe in or am even aware of their stance on blah-blah 1 or blah-blah 2, but I witness, in my peripheral observation of the political process and its noisy media emanation, a modicum of integrity, a delicate and almost miraculous quality to maintain in the political arena.  While we drive full-speed towards the political failures of Australia and USA we have the opportunity to redirect the train.  We have an intelligent engagement with a political process that can still be influenced.  I would never put myself in that situation, so I can respect reasonable individuals who place themselves in the political world and, however naively or cynically, try to influence it.

My faith lies in the hope that it will collapse, and in the meantime we can only minimise damage.  It is clear that nothing of value can be achieved on a political level, and so I vote for those in whom I can see integrity, because I trust the strength of the human soul, not ground down with political dogma and heirarchy, to stand up against stupidity and violence.  Meanwhile, real change is manifested with real responsibility, in our lives, in our society, in our environment.

from Anarchy – a novel I can't be bothered finishing

The stage was set for another democracy performance.  This elaborate and expensive play had been performed once every three years in New Zealand for many years.  It was nothing new.  And yet each and every time there was the promise of something new, something special.  The possibility that the act of democracy would elect an individual who would create profound change in our world, in our country.  An individual who would go that extra mile, who would take it further than anyone had taken it before.  Who would align with the values and the needs of the Mainstream Kiwi and our government would explode in bursts of colour and light, symbolic balloons and streamers would erupt from the beehive like a swarm of love and leadership.  But every year the country ended up with a spineless slug, of sufficient matter to fit into any square hole or ergonomic office chair that happened to already be lying around in parliament.  They were the anti-revolutionists.  Heading, with every passing year, as New Zealanders values become broader and more open-minded due to inevitable creep of globalisation and secularism, towards centrism; the entire political spectrum shrinking into a dash and readily becoming a full stop.  A This-Is-What-You-Get end to the wonderful ancient invention known as democracy.  Is the inevitable end to democracy a slow but certain self-consumption?  A swallowing of one's self?

The billboards stood tall and strong like meercats staked to the ground.  At every corner they proudly display the smiling faces of their digestible candidates

I walked down the street and I saw one of those fucking political signs and I said, “Goddamn politicians, make me pay for their propaganda.”  It looked like that thin plasticky shit so I thought I could just yank it off the wood, but it cut my fuckin' hands up and I ended up leaving the stupid thing, completely attached.  And some stupid old lady was staring at me like I was defiling a religious image of Her Majesty Mary of Nazareth or something and I just glared at her like, “what?” and she just kept walking, like pretending she hadn't been giving me the evils and I stared up at that big billboard with that smiling rich prick in the suit and I said, “I'm gonna fuckin' destroy you and your shit-eating grin.”

            When I got home I told my flatmate Albert about it and he said, “So?” and I said, “Doesn't it piss you off?” and he said, “No.  Why should it?”  And I walked away in a huff.  I live with such morons that I just can't stand it.  If they could at least figure out how to do the dishes properly I wouldn't mind, but even that's a big challenge.  Sometimes I have visions of blowing the back of their heads off with a handgun and then I wonder whether I could get away with it, but I never come up with a good enough plan and I always get bored pretty quickly cause I guess if I was going to shoot someone it would be fucking Winston Peters or John Key.  Don Brash saved his own skin getting out of politics fast enough.  But if I saw him on the street he'd get the hiding of his life.

            I called my mum 'cause I wanted to have a proper conversation with someone and she just told me that we have left-wing and we have right-wing and you may agree with one or the other, but we're lucky that they both balance each other out and what we are left with represents all New Zealanders.  I told her what if you think they're all bloodsucking leeches with as much moral power as a store-brand battery and how can you vote for little electronic bunnies that have no personality and no commitment and have to be wound up by months of public funding and she said, “What?”  I decided to get literal and get eloquent and try to speak in my mother's language and so I asked her what she thought of the concept of anarchy.  “It's an absurd idea,” she told me.  “For starters, how does a country run without any organisation or laws?  For second starters, how can anarchy be a concept and how can it be a political system because as soon as it becomes organised it ceases to be anarchy and without any sort of organisation how is it going to overcome the firmly established institution of democracy?”

            “I'm not about to form an anarchist group, Mum.  I'm just exploring possibilities that offer us a little more than democracy has.”

            “It's futile.”

            “It's futile.  You just have no imagination.  The times they are a-changin', Mum.  Democracy has left us with nothing but debt and depression.”

            “Oh, what've you been reading, Henry.”

            “Nothing, you know I don't read.  We've just been having classes at uni.  Everyone's anti-democracy at the moment.  You can get 500 bucks if you set up a club and this guy Jonas wants to set up an anarchy club and he said he's aware of the irony, he wants the money and he wants to stir some shit.”

            “Language.”

            “I'm just saying what he said.”

Jonas got his $500 and the Anarchists Anti-Club was formed.  Surprisingly for Jonas, people actually turned up to the first meeting.  Many were long-haired, scruffy and unshaven.  Wore dark clothes, slumped shoulders.  Others were well-dressed and confident, with a conspiratorial gleam in their eyes.  The first meeting was not very anarchic, which went along with Jonas's sense of irony, as it was largely taken up by the detailed rantings of an old man who claimed to be part of a failed communist party take-over of parliament.  He then moved to a commune on Waiheke Island and was disappointed to find it as pointless and irritating as flatting with way too many people who wouldn't do the dishes or replace the toilet paper.  He was, at 65, ready for some anarchy.  He was studying again because his wife left him.  These three interweaving stories were the feature attraction of Anarchists Anti-Clubs first successful gathering.  On the way out a giggling and apparently stoned individual kicked over some chairs and drew an anarchists “A” on one of the tables with a vivid.  If the details of this event were at all interesting, I would go into them.  Henry attended, curious.  “Organisation is so boring,” he commented to his girlfriend Michelle on the way out.  “I knooow,” she conceded.

I don't see anything to believe in

Help me to understand what I am doing in this world.  Every day I find good people to meet and good things to do and I wonder, does it add up to anything?

There is always the possibility that I could begin to believe in something, though this seems to be a far-fetched prospect.  I don't know how this believing in things business is done; no one can give me a straight answer, as if they don't know or aren't willing to face the truth.  Perhaps the truth is that they practice what George Orwell called double-think and they actually don't believe what they believe at all, but they do believe in it simultaneously.  This idea makes more sense than the one that suggests the world is full of stupid believers rather than beautiful lovers.  My experience of the people in this world, once the veil of abnormality is removed, is that they really are beautiful lovers rather than stupid believers.  Try it for yourself, it's real, it's scientific, it's repeatable, meet another person face-to-face with openness and honesty and acceptance and love and you will discover that essentially they do not believe in anything, they are beautiful and they are present; they are your lover and you could even say they are you, though we don't want to be metaphorical because that is only one step away from metaphysical which is too many steps away from science, which is the truth.

No, I'm being ironic now, I don't believe in science any more than I don't believe in original sin.  They're both human concepts that neither exist nor don't exist.  Of course one concept is considerably more useful than the other, but who am I to judge really, I am merely a thinker and a poet.  I have no legitimate or official authority handed down to me via a higher authority.  All I have is the integrity of being a living being, given life by God herself, birthed from the Gaian womb for 99 years of life on this planet before I too will rot back into the earth like everything else.  My authority is neither perpetual or omnipotent.

Some people claim some sort of official omnipotence.  They know they are as powerless as their children though they would never admit it to themselves, let alone someone they trust or the world they fear.  These people believe in their omnipotence because they think that the dominant ideology that legitimises national givernments and their gun-wielding agents is a universal ideology and that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong or at least insane or at least criminal or at least unpopular.  Their omnipotence is reinforced with law, with involuntary taxes, with professional gangs trained in systematic violence and intimidation and with a globe divided via national borders.  Yes, the planet, the largest physical object we can be certain we control, is defined and divided by which national government owns what, and every piece of land is owned by some government.  Even Antarctica is claimed as national territory by a number of governments, though it is uninhabitable.  I can only assume these omnipotence-delusional control-freaks are simultaneously aware of their powerlessness; surely, because they understand the convoluted mechanisms of politics.

Perhaps the beautiful loved-filled human being who is reading this thinks they believe in something.  Maybe they casually believe in something useful or maybe they definitely believe in some religion they must guiltily defend.  Maybe the more aware they are of the mental mechanism of double-think the more forcefully they must make a display of the absolute nature of the linguistic construct they use to define them as a person.

What if they could be honest?  (What if you could be honest?)  What if they could acknowledge that their religion, whether it be Islam, Mormonism or Consumer Democracy, is not true or untrue, that it is a beautiful useful myth for them, that it is so powerful already that it doesn't need to be defended, that its integrity is such that it is actually strengthened by the proximity of alternative myths, that although this myth preceded and will survive humanity our understanding of it can be enriched and complexified by open-minded discourse and diversity and therefore the truth is not under threat.

Just quietly, who but a person practicing double-think would feel the need to defend their ideology?  It is the same as a person or society full of fear feeling the need to defend their territory, rather than someone supported by confidence and strength.

I don't know what I am trying to say.  I don't believe in anything, yet I feel the need to write every day.  If you have discovered something worthy of my belief, please let me know immediately.  Look at the corner we've painted ourselves into, I don't see anything to believe in.  I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them.