sunday night ponderings

i’m sitting here, and my bum is a bit numb. i’m thinking about getting up and doing some tidying around the house, but will probably end up sprawled on the couch watching kung fu movies.

i’ve been nosing around this past few days looking at philosophies. i’m a big fan of belief. i love what people believe. that scientologists believe little aliens live in volcanoes and send out bad vibes which kill us all is just great to me. i love that kind of thing. it shows that people, all over the world, are so desperate to believe in something that they’ll pretty much grab hold of anything which appeals to some latent gear in their head. that gear kind of clicks for them and BAM! they’re believing dogs are the messengers of god and ants are to be obeyed. show me a crazy belief, and i’ll show you people who are amazing.

michael moore has a new movie out. it’s about capitalism. i love isms. there’s so many isms in the world. i was reading about objectivism, today. you want to know the best thing about objectivism? the thing i love so much about it? i love that, when ayn rand was thinking up this zappy new philosophy, that she needed to give it a punchy title. you know – all philosophies need a punchy title. and she wanted something really cool, but existentialism was already taken, so she picked objectivism. imagine that – you’re building your own little philosophy of belief and you want to call it one thing, but then you find someone else has already thought it up.

it’s like how you start a cool country band and you say, “hey – let’s call ourselves the sex pistols!” and, you know, it’s not your fault you never listened to punk. then you have to go back to the drawing board and end up with something like the love guns. second fiddle to a better title, i think. i love that. i feel sorry for objectivists. they’ll never be taken seriously at parties, because existentialists will be standing nearby grinning at them quite smugly indeed and what’s more annoying is they’ve got all the groupies and all the beer.

capitalism, though (to return to the movie), is a funny little animal. it’s one of the few isms which is desperate not to be an ism. it’s like that girl in the middle of the room who is trying so hard to be cool and says she’s not only bi-sexual, she’s try-sexual. she’ll try anything. anything at all. so, step up. anyone? hello? please be friends with me.

and the only thing which keeps her at these parties is the fact that yes, everyone gets with her in the end. they just can’t help themselves when it comes to self-satisfaction. even the mormons can’t help themselves. and the catholics – although they always think about apologising later.

belief – it just defies all logic. well, it’s hard to say that, because logic can be a belief, too. just look at spock. spock embodies everything science wants to see in our lives. cold, hard data. everything to a scientist is numbers. this must make looking at the stars a very dull occupation indeed. that logic, too, is an occupation shows capitalism’s still getting her end away here, too. but who can blame the geeks for trying to cop a feel?

i saw one website which called michael moore a “social-democrat”. intriguingly, there are also democratic-socialists, and they are in no way the same. one side calls the other a capitalist. i find that highly amusing. to me, it’s like putting two d&d gamers in a room and watching them fight, because one plays tabletop (and is currently dressed in a homemade wizard outfit made from bathsheets and a foam wizard hat) and the other plays the mmo. one speaks in “d6″ and “d24″ while the other keeps going, “w8, d00d – i gots phat l00t!” neither of them can understand each other’s lingo, and both are adamant they’re from completely different worlds and the other couldn’t kill a goblin if it were tied down to a table and already had the dagger half-inserted into its chest.

the wide spectrum of belief in this world can stagger your mind if you start looking them up. people actually believe these things so rabidly, that they’ll attack each other and kill each other over the most amazingly strange ideas. and let’s not even think about what they’d do to kool aid when they believe in judgement days or the arrival of ufos. what simply astounds me more than anything are the number of core beliefs which are similar to each other. nearly every major religious order announces it has a steadfast belief that killing other people is wrong, and that anyone who does so is going to spend an eternity in a very bad place of moo cow death. or hell. or something. yet, every single one of these religions will gladly start dishing out death to anyone who gets in their way – pointing out that killing people who are not THEIR people is actually quite okay, after all. their beliefs are temporarily suspended so they can cope.

this temporary suspension of belief isn’t limited to religion. this movie of michael’s which condemns capitalism in its current form (yes, there are MANY versions of capitalism, too! it’s like christianity in a way. it has many names and many tshirts and even more ways to be good and bad than even santa could think up in an average year), wouldn’t have been made some five years ago. it wouldn’t have been thought of. everyone was happy with it then. it was working. rich guys were rich and poor guys were poor – nothing new there. but now, all of a sudden, the rockbed of greed has crumbled in places. some poor guys couldn’t quite hold onto the greasy pole and fell off, so naturally those guys at the top must have been responsible.

now, i’m not rich. i wish i was, but then don’t we all? i don’t understand wealth, though. i don’t understand mega-millionaires. people who make it big and earn lots of money confuse me. people who earn so much money, like bill gates. or oprah winfrey, or any number of bush’s cronies. all of these guys – i don’t understand them. they make so much money they can buy islands. buy islands! why? what for? sure, i guess it’s a nice thing to give your significant other, but you can’t very well carry it around with you, can you? what’s wrong with the old dream of house, car, wife, kids and football? why does it have to be houses, cars, wives, girlfriends, offspring, gold-plated mp3 players, much phat loot? what do you do with it all? by no means do i think rich people are sad, miserable scrooges, but really – sometimes it’s just a little pervy what they buy. how many houses can you live in? how many cars can you drive at once? so, i don’t understand their belief. if i made a few million, i’d be “right – time to retire and sit on my ass and watch the world go by – yippee!”

but these guys consume! is it greed, as is currently the flavour of the month to condemn?

i don’t think so.

i think it’s belief. it’s that single belief that there’s always another rung above you, and if you fail, you may go down a rung, and once you’ve gone up – who wants to go down?

it’s fear.

fear is at the centre of every belief. the fear of the unknown. the fear of tomorrow. the fear of yesterday, and the fear of now. the fear of weird people, and people from the next village. the fear of women and the fear of men. the fear of race, and inadequacy. the fear of losing it. the fear of getting it. the fear of life, and the fear of death. especially death.

the fear of fear.

every belief, when you look at them is simply a way of dealing with fear. it is a way of finding some kind of structure to hang our fear on so we can look at it and say, “ha! i’m not scared of you no more!”

capitalism. communism. socialism. racism. sexism. democratic-socialism. catholicism. mormonism. islamism. they’re all the same.

but not so hard to figure out when you notice they all have an ism on the end.

it’s a strange world we live in. we seem all so desperate to kick each other away, and to draw great dividing lines across our globe. we try to defend our “ideals” from “outsiders” who would “attack our way of life.” yet, no matter where you go, the essential core values of all humans is still very human, and as such similar if not the same. it’s still what identifies us as a species, no matter which race of this frightened little species we are. we still dream of peace, though we’re built for war. we still dream of life, though we’re built for death.

i ramble, now. but i do that on a sunday night. i’m not looking to solve anything, or preach anything. i have no firm belief to preach. plus, i’m a hack and not a real writer, so couldn’t begin to use the words properly to make a formal philosophical argument for anything. i personally don’t care too much if america wants the oil, and i don’t care if they want to burn the world with them just so they can profit out of the mess. i don’t care. i don’t care if the chinese rise out of the ashes and create a new empire. i don’t care if jesus jumps out of his grave and begins smacking naughty bottoms. i don’t care if australia doesn’t win the cricket.

i think something we should all remember, though, is this: all we have to fear is fear itself. that pretty much says it all, i think.

i love all your beliefs, humanity. you’re sometimes profound, and sometimes weird. you’re always funny, though. it’s a shame more of you don’t share my amusement when it comes to belief, and just let everyone believe as they will. that guy on the corner who says the end is nigh? let him be right. leave him alone. give him a dollar, even. what the hell. you were only going to spend it on junkfood anyway. and those islamic terrorists? try talking to them. it’s harder than shooting them, i’m sure, but i’m sure they just want what every ism ever wants – to have their beliefs respected and to be left alone. can’t live with that? here’s a fantastic english word i just discovered: compromise.

a wonderful word, really. compromise. what i find a little disturbing is there’s no such thing as compomisism. go on. google it. there’s nothing there. there should be, though. trotsky aside (i don’t think he meant it as i do, so this is my objectivism moment). i might give it a bit of a head start. how’s this: you can believe in angels and guys rising from the dead. you can believe in demons sucking your toes at night. you can believe in ufos abducting you when you were a kid. you can believe when you die you will be a god of your own planet and women will worship you. you can believe you are really are right about everything. and i’ll sit here, my best smile on my silly face, and i’ll say, “riiiight. good on ya, mate.”

and me? what belief do i have right now? what’s motivating me right this second?

well.

i do believe i will get up out of this chair and have me some of this chocolate icecream i’ve got in the freezer…

Tags: compromism, isms, ranting