various rants and musings

I hardly ever post anywhere (here or my ultra-secret other blog) anymore... I don't usually have the time.

My sister broke up with her boyfriend of 5 years on New Year's Eve. Apparently, while Ashley and I were at the New Year's parties, my mom had been trying to talk to him (the boyfriend) about... well.. actually being a decent boyfriend. He was cheap, controlling, childish, and petty, for starters. There's a whole bunch of things I could say about him, but in the interest of time, I won't.

To make a long story short, The Boyfriend got incredibly pissed off at my mom and said a bunch of nasty things (in front of Ashley, no less). Cait (my sister) immediately came back with her own insults, and I yelled "fuck you" to him while he was going down the stairs. He didn't challenge me. I wish he had.

I hate this kid. I shouldn't say "kid" because he's about a month older than me, but whatever.

I don't just hate him because of how he treated my sister, or my family for that matter. I also hate him because he's disillusioned me in a number of ways.

This kid was very punk. He lived that whole lifestyle, and embodied the whole "you can't tell me what to do" ethic. But he was a complete asshole, and, in so doing, he made a mockery of the entire punk movement.

The punk ethos, to me, is about equality, tolerance of differences, libertarianism, and self-reliance. It's funny; a lot of hardcore punk kids hate hippies... but in all honesty, they (we? I used to be a hardcore kid myself) were actually far more idealistic than many of the hippies they despised. But so many people pervert these ideals... Equality and tolerance become warped into simply another form of class-ism, while libertarianism and self-reliance become a childish refusal to cooperate with anything.

It's disillusioning because no matter how much you believe in the positive ideals, people will automatically associate you with people like Alby if you believe in these ideals.

I've always believed very strongly in the whole movement, but my beliefs are kind of crumbling now, and the sad/scary part is, I don't know where to go from here.

It all comes back to one thing- competition. I absolutely fucking hate competition. I think it's a retarded holdover from our animal pasts. And yes, we are indeed descended from the animal kingdom in an evolutionary sense. But for god's sake, do we need to GLORIFY this the way we do?

In all honesty, too, it isn't even so much the various cruelties and unhappinesses I associate with competition that bothers me.. it's more complicated than that.

It's sixth and seventh grade all over again.

REDNECK KID (so hormonally imbalanced that he's physically an adult at age twelve): Hey faggot! (pushes me into a locker)
(At the limits of my patience, thanks to this happening an uncountable number of times, I kick REDNECK KID in the solar plexus as hard as I can. He slumps to the ground, groaning)
REDNECK KID'S REDNECK FRIEND: What the fuck'd you do that for?
REDNECK KID (weeping indignant tears): I's just playin' wit' ya.

No, you weren't "playin' wit'" me. You were challenging me. I responded in kind. You wound up on the ground crying, so I guess that means I "won". But I didn't win; I never did... because I was supposed to win according to the rules of Redneck Kid's asinine gorilla dominance ritual. I had learned through painful experience that little asthmatic prepubescent me was not going to win a "fair" fight against the towering behemoths that went to my school.

In other words, I was supposed to play a game I never wanted to play in the first place, and have my behavior during said game restricted by rules that were meant to benefit the opposing side.

And the most incomprehensible part is that I'm supposed to enjoy such things. It's supposed to be fun. In fact, for most people, the "thrill" of playing a game that's not only idiotic but stacked against them from the beginning is practically their entire reason for being.

(head explodes) I don't get it.

If we're going to embrace Social Darwinism and glorify our animal heritage through competition, then let's get rid of the fucking value judgments and rules. Let's get rid of traffic lights, smoking bans, and laws forbidding child abuse, murder, rape, and the various other inhumanities we inflict upon each other. Survival of the fittest, right? The strong would survive, the weak would not. I'm not advocating this in any way; I'm merely presenting this as an intellectual exercise.

"But that's anarchy!" you exclaim. You're right, it is. The animal kingdom has no government; you don't see a United States of Lionland anywhere, do you? If we're to idolize our animal heritage, we should keep that in mind. But anarchy doesn't work for humans. You'd have absolute chaos for a while, with the sociopaths of the world killing, looting, and pillaging everything they could while those of us with more conscience or restraint would probably have a fairly good time of things, living our lives however we saw fit.

But then we'd eventually polarize into two or three groups per locality. If the sociopath types worked together to any capacity, the non-sociopaths would have to do the same in order to protect themselves. And we're forgetting a crucial factor- humanity is not split between sociopaths and non-sociopaths. It took me a long time to learn this.

It's more as if the sociopaths could almost be lumped in with the sort of people with which I tend to try and surround myself, even though the two "type" are practically polar opposites. Sociopaths need to be dominant; they believe they are the only people on the planet who are real. The people I like best are so against control and dominance that the outside world tends to see them as "aimless" or unproductive. But they struggle and work and sacrifice for their freedom just as much as the "normals" struggle for their little niche in the rat race. Since they fall outside conventional social mores, they could, in theory, be classified in with the sociopaths of the world. Neither group wants to be ruled; it's the ways in which they achieve this that are wildly different.

But the real division within humanity has nothing to do with sociopathy. The real division is between who wants to be ruled, and who doesn't. The former group is much, much larger than the latter.

Thus, any anarchic situation would eventually (d)evolve into a few control-and-power-loving sociopaths here and there leading a whole bunch of little sheep around. You might occasionally see an anti-control person or people in charge of a group devoted to opposing the sociopath groups, but these would be rare, and numbers count for a lot in warfare.

So it would basically be the same old story over and over again. The people who love power and control would take over with the help of the thundering masses that love being controlled, while a few shining lights in the darkness would continually try to fight the oppression. It'll repeat over and over again, throughout the remainder of human history, a constant cycle of structure leading to oppression followed by revolution followed by the beginnings of potentially oppressive structure all over again. It'll never change. 's why I don't usually "do" politics.

Where am I in all this? I used to think I was staunchly a part of the non-sociopathic anti-control group. I am, at heart, and always will be.. it's the expression of this that needs to change.

After a lot of soul-searching, I've realized I'll definitely have to rejoin the corporate machine once again. I've spent the past few months desperately trying to find ways out of this, but it's inevitable. They have The Power and I will have to grit my teeth and do what they say in order to take some of it for myself... because it's not just for myself, it's for anyone who wants to benefit from it.

I just hope I can stay the course. It's hard to walk a path when you can't see more than a few feet in front of your face.

And it's even harder knowing that even if you walk the right path, if you walk in an incorrect way you stand to alienate yourself from everyone you love.