Curiosity
Curiosity is life. It alone can, and regularly does, save us. It can also destroy us, since people in power are afraid of it, but that’s for another day. The human brain craves something to do; luckily, we find ourselves in a vast puzzle, with frontiers of knowledge in every direction, and a universe under every rock—enough to gratify the hungry brain forever.
The opposite of curiosity is certainty, or apathy—both just words for exhaustion. I can understand the longing for certainty—in some things—but only as a foothold for reaching something else. How do people with all the answers not feel the existential terror of living without wonder? The brain’s craving for exercise can be short-circuited by low-grade substitutes: nosiness, gossip, the sugar-rush of social media, reality TV, porn, Rube Goldberg conspiracies, capitalistic religion, fast food. People get rich by keeping you from thinking.
Curiosity implies effort. Certainty and apathy are zero energy.
Curiosity about other human beings, beyond the superficial, is rare in our exhausted society. There are just too many of us. How often do we try to see the human being we meet for the first time before condemning them to a category? And we all know the feeling of dealing with someone who has just met us, sniffed out the box we go in, and handed their brain over to the tribal instinct. All thinking, all listening, all curiosity, have stopped. It doesn’t matter what you say or do from that point. They don’t hear you.
The division in this country is nothing new. We have always lived in tense, divided times. But we are partial to our own tense and divided times, and think they’re the best. Maybe this time they are. I’m not going to stop and look this up, but I have read somewhere the percentage of people in our two main political parties who wish the people in the other party were all dead, and it’s an alarming number. I call these people extremists, the ones full of passionate intensity, and void of humor, the ones who have lost all hope, or desire, for a cooperative society. I see their pictures sometimes—faces contorted with hate, or steeled like crusaders. The absence of humor is a canary in the coal mine if ever there was one. I think, damn, man, times are tough but what are you that angry about?
I can’t help but be curious.
The contentions we face are too much to comprehend, and reach into the bedrock: God. Gender. Truth. The sins of the father. The techno-ethical dilemmas of genetic wizardry, artificial intelligence. Changing demographics. And our complicity in all of them is too bitter a pill to swallow.
When you’re dealing with a problem so complex you have no idea how to even think about solving it (ie, being alive in 2022), if you don’t kill yourself, the most common course of action is to lay the blame on the closest available substitute, sometimes the people you love the most—like a body with an autoimmune disease attacking its own cells.
THEY did it.
Nothing can stop the evolution of life. Change has been the constant engine of life from the moment one cell chanced into a symbiotic relationship with another and started the journey to multicellular life, Steve Bannon and Alec Baldwin. Human culture evolves just as surely. New ideas, new art, new science constantly arise and work their way into our shared social life. The more variety in our culture, the more variety in the ideas. Life experience eventually makes it pretty clear that the process is not about gratifying or preserving individual egos. Still, as we get older, and feel the trends of the world leaving us behind, we can’t help feeling at least a subconscious wish for things to freeze in a state familiar to us, still answerable to whatever we once thought up to make it seem comprehensible. But that’s not going to happen. We live our allotted time, and the fate of all our experience is decay into story. And THEY’RE responsible. It’s easier—in fact, it takes no effort at all—to hate THEM, and imagine a regression into some vague, permanent, familiar world than to accept the inevitable. It’s also easy to absolve ourselves, and escape work, by putting our trust in some imagined savior provided by the propaganda machines that also provide us our simplistic villains. All of those machines—“news” outlets, politicians, “spiritual” leaders, and so forth, have their own agenda and it might be a good idea to look into that before buying their goods.
Hey, are we on the verge of a revolution of the proletariat?
Short answer: No.
The working class (labor) rising up against their masters (capital)? All I see is the working class identifying with their masters, even though their masters have no use for them beyond their keeping them in power. The working class doesn’t want freedom—it wants salary and benefits.
There has never been, and I doubt ever will be, a true revolution of the proletariat. We’ve had peasant revolts, slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the Jacksonian Revolution of 1828, the Bolshevik Revolution, the German Revolution after the First World War, and many others—but all have been unsuccessful or only political revolutions—the exchange of one group of haves and have-nots for another. Is the Russia of today really different from the Russia of the Tzars? And how did Jacksonian Democracy work out for black and red people? A true revolution of the proletariat would be a social revolution, a grass-roots, society-wide transformation of fundamental social structures.
The Marxist/Leninist vision of the revolution of the proletariat—the elimination of wage slavery, of the power of one social class over another, the advent of democracy for the masses—recognized that such a change could not happen without force, which they imagined would be temporary. Ha. They made the mistake shared by all idealistic social philosophies, the assumption that human nature, inspired by an abstraction, could change. Marx envisioned an intelligent, educated, politically competent working class. And Lenin understood that there would have to be a transition period, a dictatorship of the proletariat, keeping the petite bourgeoisie intact, that would last long enough for human nature to change, and for industrialization to modernize Russian society.
The problem is, in America today, the working class doesn’t trust education, and has no taste for the work of democracy. They willingly replace those things with the methadone of propaganda. They want to be told what to think.
We’re still waiting for the revolution.
Can the extremists in America who long for a single party really understand what that means?
One angry class in this country likes to point out that they have the guns, the Dobermans, the dried beans, and can drive the bulldozers, and will “win” the new Civil War they think they want. Another has all the theories and prescriptions for how and what to think without sacrifice or disruption to their complacency. But the real winners of the war will be the same winners as always: the haves. And the losers will be the rest of us, the have-nots. And of course, unable to fight the real source of our misfortunes, our handlers, we will turn to fighting each other. And since government exists to serve the dominant class, forget about that.
The working class doesn’t really want war—it wants what it thinks war will give it: meaningful work and a world like what they vaguely remember, or imagine, once existed. I think that actually describes most of us. But the masters have found cheaper labor, and the past, real or imagined, is not coming back. We would have to kill the curious and creative human spirit to go backwards. We really don’t want to do that.
Tearing down is as joyful as building up. The question is, what does destructive energy have to put in place of what it destroyed?
We’d all love to see the plan.
Certainty—wanting to be right so badly you believe you actually are—is poison. The cliche is true: the strength of America is its variety, the checks and balances of a diverse society. If everybody is the same, there’s nothing to be curious about.
Without curiosity we die.
And the real power in the world will shift, as always, to where it lives.
America is the best thing this world has seen. I hope we don’t piss it away.
January 24, 2022