On apathy, impotence, and the realization that there is no one to fucking blame
Who is responsible for the current state of affairs? For the world as it is? — A capitalist dystopia offering nothing.
No perspective, no hope of freedom, a life spent in the hamster wheel of daily grind. Enriching others — those who adapted early enough — while struggling to survive. A life estranged from each other, with no sense of community, no sense of purpose, because there is none, constantly being fed lies and an unstoppable stream of propaganda. THIS is how you must live to be happy, THIS is what you must buy, consume — work and consume forever.
We’re way behind, we’re living on the edge of time
We must get rich, becoming poor became a crime
Many promises were made but, in the end,
The first to die has always been the working manThey tell our kids in school it’s like that, don’t ask why
We gotta work until we’re old enough to die
The more we learn, the more we still don’t understand
The first to die has always been the working man— First to Die, Haymaker
The Global South being held in poverty, hunger, and despair while we still claim to help. A whole industry built on the lie of aid. Masking the crimes of the past while committing new ones even more atrocious. All the while smiling and shaking hands. The cognitive dissonance and apathy slowly destroying our humanity. The Global South — billions of people, fates, families.
Whole generations in the West spending their lives in disillusionment and the always present, nagging, never-disappearing, painful, soul-crushing feeling of a kind of emptiness they — we — cannot explain. There is something missing and we do not, cannot even know what because we have never known it. The world today feels so very wrong because it fucking is.
All the while we’re looking for someone to blame, someone to hold responsible. Governments, multinational corporations, banks, institutions, billionaires, anyone. The horrible realization: It isn’t anybody’s fault. Everything is a symptom. Rage against the machine and the machine will welcome it.
This is capitalist realism.
Governments acting according to the unwritten rules of eternal economic growth and the cancerous ever-increasing exploitation of environments and peoples. These rules not in any way diminished because of not being written down, but even more potent because of it.
They are not mere rules, but ways of thinking, living, acting, and treating each other and the world around us. Capitalist realism permeating everything and constructing an illusionary and yet all-encompassing social reality too strong to fail. Seemingly eternal. Forever.
We blame governments because it’s convenient. They are victims and perpetrators at the same time.
Recently, while discussing the now ever-present issues of inflation and economic decline, the question of what the government should do about it came up. A friend of mine remarked something along these lines: “Well, what can our government really do about it? They can do nothing. Inflation is a global, multi-national problem. There is nothing our little country can do on its own.”
He is right of course.
How can one fight a system?
How can a well-oiled cog in the wheel fight the whole machine?
How can one oppose a hypercomplex, incomprehensible web of causalities and relationships?
We are, in the end, all just casualties.
I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great War, no Great Depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
— Fight Club
Corporations: just another symptom. How are they to blame? They do exactly what they are supposed to do. The only thing we have ever programmed them to do. What will it help to burn Amazon down? To destroy Nestlé? The momentary relief of having destroyed these machineries of exploitation and destruction will soon be supplanted by the knowledge that others will take their place.
Burning down banks will be great; it will feel great. Other banks will take their place. In a kind of sense, there are more banks than people.
Same for billionaires. Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, and all the others. Only doing what we are permitting them to do.
Everybody is an anti-capitalist in thought.
Everybody acts like a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
They have not only created this world of despair and replaced true happiness with the kind of happiness you can buy and sell. The kind of happiness you can project on graphs. No, they have also taken something very essential from us. They have taken from us the ability to do something — anything — about it.
Capitalism is eternal.
It has always been there; it will be there when we are long dead.
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
— George Orwell, 1984
They took from us the ability to resist and gave us useless proxies.
They left us with impotence and apathy.
How can one fight an illusion? How can one fight dogma? How can one destroy a self-perpetuating set of abstract beliefs? Adapting and dissolving everything into its internally inconsistent machinery to the point where anti-capitalism becomes capitalism and activism turns into conservatism.
The only thing left to us is the prospect of witnessing the inevitable collapse of the giant house of cards — and be buried under it.
or…
…collapse it all ourselves. Like they almost did in 1968. And then they sold themselves and the world:
To end this on a slightly positive note: There are meaningful things one can do. But they are not going to come from the apathetic liberal centre and its performative activism of peaceful protests, entirely useless boycotts, and so on.
Help, build, agitate. More on that in later essays.
I’m author, writer, and activist Antonio Melonio, the creator of Beneath the Pavement. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. It’s the best way to support Beneath the Pavement and help me put out more and higher-quality content.
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Thank you. Will write more later but right now just need to say thank you.