“If laughter dies, we die” Jon Rappoport
One of the good, if not great things about Twitter, perhaps the best thing about it, is that it’s funny. It’s actually full of really funny people. Almost none of these intentionally funny people are libs* (obviously libs are unintentionally funny all the time!), because people who are capable of the level of earnestness required to find literally anything racist/sexist/homophobic… are just not capable of telling good jokes. To be funny you have to be able to connect with the absurd and as soon as any lib does that they realise how ridiculous they are and stop being a lib. Maybe we should just send them all to stand-up school and then the world would be fixed!
Not a single person who has been peddling the Covid mania over the last two years has a sense of humour (not even the actual comedians). Macron? There is no way Macron has ever made anybody really laugh, real laughter, the laughter of the absurd, not some kind of snarky, sarcastic, snort (I bet he’s great at those!), but proper belly-laughter. It just can’t be imagined because there’s no way he ever has. He has never laughed at himself in his life.
Trudeau? Nope. The video of his joke about admiring China was just weird. He rammed it home by making some comment about how much his environment minister would like to be operating in a China-style dictatorship. I’m labouring the joke but I’m hardly making it any less funny. All the people in the room chuckled because he was powerful and he made a joke, and he has nice hair. It was not real laughter, it was the correct social response. Jacinda Ardern snickered (whinnied?) when she told a journalist that “yep” she was planning on making life extremely miserable for the un-jabbed so that they’d be forced to get ‘vaccinated’. These dictators find the weirdest things funny.
Then there are the public scientists. Fauci appears to make jokes. He says things and then smile-laughs a bit but usually what he said isn’t funny and sometimes it’s downright sinister. There’s nothing funny about Chris Whitty, Rochelle Walensky, Jenny Harries, either, except the sheer absurdity of some of the stuff they say. Memorably at the beginning of the madness Jenny Harries suggested children could ride their bicycles parallel to each other a metre or so apart and have a fun time at the park as long as they never got any closer, or (gasp) came into contact with each other.
Again, an ounce of self-awareness would have these goons rolling on the floor at their own idiocy. If they had any sense of the absurd they would take off their little plastic badges, or lanyards, whatever, place them on the lecterns and just leave. Because it has all, from chalk circles on the ground, to filthy cloth masks, from useless PCR tests, to ‘white-supremacist’ freedom protesters, been the theatre of the absurd. We laugh but unfortunately not enough of us, not quite yet, anyway.
Covid-mania has been a kind of manifestation of the deep-seated neuroticism of our culture. It is the expression of a mental illness of society. Nothing can be clearer when you see perfectly healthy teenagers talking about how they must go and get themselves tested, not out of any requirement, but because they are going to a party. What is even more absurd, although, of course they do not see it, is that they are talking to each other in a group, travelling down the escalator in a crowded department store explaining how they must get tested before they meet up again tomorrow night, at the party. Where would you begin to explain the ridiculousness of what they are doing? I mean if they can’t see it then as they talk to each other, when will they ever see it?
What is going on? Is this the mass formation psychosis? These people have become psychologically entrapped in a mass-hallucination. We are talking about alienation, a concept familiar to me from my academic days, and of which I am wary, as it is so intrinsic to Marxism. I’m not thinking here particularly of the kind of alienation that makes people feel antagonistic towards, for example, their government. The kids on the escalator are only too in accord with their government, its demands and its values. What instead they seem to be alienated from is themselves, their own humanity.
They chatter to each other, offering stories of the last time they were tested. One describes in detail the location of the test centre he is going to use. They talk over each other excitedly, but as I watch them I wonder what would happen if each were to suddenly find themselves alone at a cafe table, with nothing to do but think about that visit to the test centre. With nobody to talk to to reinforce the normalcy, almost the fun of this activity, would a blink of self-awareness cross their mind - ‘what am I doing?’. Maybe - if they didn’t have a phone to pick up immediately they were alone!
Have we been witnessing a death-drive? Not just of the ruling class but of society itself. Did enough of society want to crash a bus through the working day, the school routine, small businesses, the economy? Covid-mania has been profoundly self-destructive, to individuals, and to western societies as a whole. Were we bored? Were enough of us so tired of having enough food and comfortable homes, and unchallenging jobs, that we unconsciously decided to just blow it all up? Can society have a psyche as well as individuals? Perhaps the elite were like a kid with a magnifying glass, wanting to see what would happen if he set the ants on fire. The rest of us are more like the bored teenager who turns up at the high school in the middle of the night with a can of petrol and wants to burn it all down.
Not me. I liked things the way they were. My life was ordinary, uneventful and I liked it that way. I got frustrated with some of the stuff that was going on, cancel culture, and so-on but I figured it would probably work itself out, there was no need to raze the whole thing to the ground and start again. Perhaps this was an unusual view. When the world changed radically in March 2020 I didn’t get excited about it, like some people seemed to. I didn’t like it. At all.
I think lots of people didn’t like it, but there were many who had a note of excitement in their voices when you talked to them. Even a neighbour who worked at the hospital and had been sleeping in a separate bedroom from her ‘vulnerable’ husband for several weeks sounded excited (perhaps because she wasn’t sleeping with her husband!). A music teacher friend whose livelihood was threatened, and who had several concerts cancelled, sounded excited.
Over the first summer, when restrictions were partially lifted but everyone who could was working from home, and the unnervingly clear blue skies held for what seemed like weeks without a break, I would take my daughter to meet her friends in the park and then maybe have a walk. It was like being on the set of a Star Trek movie. I was in the utopian green space of some major Federation city. All around were pastel-lounge-wear-clad workers taking work calls on their ear-pieces, as they walked circuits of the park, soaking up the sunshine. They were like pigs in paradise. It was utterly weird. Sometimes I think if it had rained all that summer, as sometimes happens in the UK, lockdowns and Covid-mania might have ended then and there. Who wants to work from the spare bedroom while the kids get fractious and rowdy as the rain pours down? No indoor play centres to go to, no trips to the cinema, no office to escape to. It’s just an idle thought.
The endless articles, still popping up regularly, on how this was going to show us how to organise work better, how to organise life better, how to Build Back Better. When all we had done was break it. That seems like part of the death drive too, the idea that society, work, everything had to be destroyed before we could make it better.
That in itself profoundly gestures towards alienation. Who but people alienated from themselves and their society could think that the way to solve problems is to destroy everything first?
And then from the rubble of the destruction crawled the cruelty. First under the guise of doing good. Locking elderly people in their care homes, keeping away family and friends, to keep them ‘safe’. Utter, appalling cruelty that we know, although it has been brushed away, caused people to die of hunger and thirst - an incredibly painful, frightening way to die. Shutting schools, and playgrounds, then making kids test repeatedly, wear masks, feel afraid they would kill ‘granny’. Again total cruelty under the guise of compassion. Causing people’s businesses to fail. Making the anxious, the depressed, the autistic, the deaf, wear masks, negotiate interacting with an entire society wearing masks. The threat that access to work will be denied to the unvaccinated, access to society, access to health care. The evil that has been done in the name of compassion is indescribable.
Now we have to live in this world where we have seen those who have power over us, if we let them, have no care or compassion for us at all. Where we see so many sitting back and watching it happen, or cheering it on, because they like nothing better than drinking their beer by the light of the flames of a burning world.
There is comfort. Alienation is profoundly destructive, and there is power to destruction, but creation will always be greater. Re-birth is always stronger than death. They are burning it down but we, the ones who for whatever reason never wanted to see it burn in the first place, are the ones who will bring it back. Because they only know how to destroy. They will burn it and then they will scatter the ashes to the wind and then they won’t know what to do next. Like Stalin destroying his enemies and then turning on his allies.
The solutions to the ills of society offered by the ruling class are of the exact wrong type. The Metaverse, UBI, digital ID linked to vaccine status, are all innovations that will make us more alienated, not that they care, of course. The regime seems to be focussed on turning us into mindless, soporific aphids to be milked by the busy, purposeful, little ants, when they’re not flying on their private jets.
The alienation that made this destruction of society possible, with the help of the nihilistic portion of the population, was born of not having meaningful work, of being indoctrinated not educated, and unable to find a purpose in life, being poisoned by sugary junk food, environmental contaminants, pharmaceuticals, and finally being mentally destroyed by the dark side of the internet and social media. Nothing that the regime is offering us as the future will alleviate any of these problems.
Somehow (and I’m not offering some kind of hippie commune solution to this because that hasn’t worked before either, and it’s not the kind of life that suits everyone) we have to find a way of living that doesn’t make most of us want to tear stuff down or blow stuff up. What is that way?
Many, taking a lead from structural Marxism and its off-spring, gender studies and critical race theory, might consider that destroying the capitalist structures of oppression will create a better future. That is a huge subject, but it seems to me that these theories themselves, Marxism, gender theory, and critical race theory, have contributed significantly to the alienation people suffer from. Where we might, as individuals, view the slights and obstacles we encounter in our lives as discrete difficulties to be overcome, Marxism and its theories teach us to see each problem as part of a huge web of oppression directed at us because of some unalterable aspect of our ‘identity’, our femaleness, our colour, our sexuality. It makes us feel hopeless, victimised, and that the entirety of society is against us. This creates the very alienation that is the problem. Furthermore it does nothing but identify (create?) problems, it offers no solutions (except burning everything down).
Better to take an approach that I would compare with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in psychology. Rather than globalising the problem in the way, for example Freudian analysis does , and locking people into an endless cycle of rumination that may go on for years, or a life-time, without solving the patient’s problems, CBT takes a very practical approach. It asks the patient to identify their troubling thoughts (thoughts, not the world, not even the deep structures of the unconscious and all its neuroses) usually in some detail, and then to identify how anxious each thought makes them, what they could do to deal with the thought/problem that frightens them, and then to rate how anxious they feel after coming up with that solution. It also involves lots of practical advice on how to stop spiralling into negative thoughts and so on. In other words CBT focusses on something identifiable, quite small, and fixable. CBT doesn’t say ‘the world is going to be destroyed by the ‘climate emergency’ what are you going to do about it?’ because that is just too big and catastrophic. It doesn’t say ‘you are being made miserable by the oppressive structures of society, what are you going to do about it?’. No, because those sorts of vast problems are the kind that lead to hopelessness, nihilism, and the death drive. Before you know it you’re burning down the world again. CBT says, ‘You seem a bit directionless? What is making you feel that way?’ to which you might answer ‘My job is boring and seems pointless’ to which CBT replies ‘How would you feel about looking for another job?’ and now we’re solving a manageable problem and not burning down the world.
So we need to change the discourse that is in the society around us all the time. That discourse is that there are these huge structural problems that make many of us victims, that are insurmountable unless we destroy the structures ie society.
As an adjunct to this I think it is instructive to consider the technology, which is becoming prevalent in our lives and is being rapidly pushed on us by the ruling class, the digital ID, chip technology that can be implanted in brains or hands, driverless cars, AI, surgical robots, mRNA vaccines, etc, as being fetishised, by the ruling class and by some greater or lesser portion of the population. This technology, creations of our own brains, has become an externalised, worshipped object. Some people want to become melded to their technology. They want to enhance their intellect with a brain chip, their bodies with implants, use bio-tech to increase their longevity, and live their lives as an avatar in a virtual reality world created by their own computers. Ironically, as so many of those who embrace such ideas might consider themselves adherents to structural Marxism, this is something Marx warned of, that fetishising our own creations would ultimately lead to our enslavement by them.
So we are living through a disturbingly neurotic period of society. Those aspects of it that seem most threatening are the most pathological and the most destructive. There is every reason to believe they are ultimately as destructive to the ruling class, and those who welcome them, as to those of us who are afraid of them. If we can avoid our own nihilism and see that the huge destruction that has been wrought on our society is fixable we have a chance of making it through. It is of course impossible to find anything funny in the huge cruelty and destruction that has been unleashed on the world by the ruling class and their pet technocrats. Still while the theatre of the absurd is bleak, it is also ludicrous.
We can laugh at the hysteria of the ruling class’ indoctrinated minions as they rend their clothes at Elon Musk buying Twitter, or swear they will leave Florida if Disney doesn’t get its tax breaks (let me help you pack!). We have to laugh at them calling advocates of free speech ‘far-right extremists’. We have to because it is one of the sources of our power. We must laugh, and (re-)build things.
(* libs - used here to mean extreme, leftwing progressives!)