In 1936 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a three-part series in Esquire that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Words and sentiments, that, when I discovered them a decade ago forever altered my perception of the perpetual, unhinged madness of a society that collectively behaves like a petulant toddler in mid-throes of a tantrum.
The kicks, the wails, the clenched fists and gum drop-sized tears will ensue until he gets what he wants. The toddler is not concerned with his mother’s humiliation, or the punishment to be dolled out in the parking lot, or the secondary effects and disdain to come from his older siblings, or, for that matter, whether the transitory end to be achieved is even worth such a definitive course of action.
There is no rationalization or systematic balancing of costs versus rewards, the toddler is just reacting to the fear of not getting his way, of having to accept no as his new reality.
Which is precisely how modern society behaves—fearful, neurotic, and emotional—all the while preferring the lies and delusion of the dream world to the sobering truth of the reality.
What was once a republic of free men has morphed into a soulless institution, a conglomerate of corporate, profit-minded interests that sees us as the binary inputs to the source code of a real life Matrix.
Like any well written matrix, it tells us how to behave, what is good or bad, and, what is expected of us so as to avoid deletion. To survive we must push through our emotional insecurities to the pursuit of education, stable employment, a family unit, all so that we can raise children and teach them to accept and conform to the same code.
And for those of us who think independently or otherwise question the integrity of the protocol, the Matrix flags us as mathematical remainders to be compensated for and balanced out, or unnecessary code to be marked for deletion.
If the system seems cold, harsh, or incompatible to humanity that’s because it has long ceased to be a system of humanity for humanity. What we are experiencing is mankind’s blind servitude to an economic model of growth into extinction, an agenda that no longer has humanity’s interests in mind.
Human ideas like the pursuit of happiness, once a qualitative supposition pursued through the vissitudes of trial and error, where notions like beauty, discipline, love, and moral perfection could be pursued for their own sake and purpose has been superceded by the quantitative exigencies of productivity and profit.
A source code and world where gains and losses are tabulated not felt, and where the unnecessary and superfluous code to be deleted is really the people who inhabit this planet.
The ways and methods of the Matrix are varied when it comes to convincing us to accept the source code updates leading to a particular course of action that is expected of us. Its favored tool for exchanging our interests for its interests is sensationalized misinformation, which leads us to the doorway of fear and irrational decisions.
Take, for instance, our idea of justice and how it has been twisted, mangled and otherwise so perverted that it no longer resembles whatever it was or might have been. Justice at its most fundamental level is a concept of fairness and equity.
In Old Testament times that was an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, a principle that was easy enough to comprehend and apply, because it was both simplistic and even-handed, while today’s version update of justice is arbitrary, relative, and chimeric.
If a poor man steals from you or defrauds you, Justice may send him to prison for a decade or two to be terrorized and monsterfied, so as to one day be released into society as a well-programed tool for keeping the fear factor of humanity dialed up to the proper setting for panic-stricken, irrational decisions.
If it’s a rich man who steals from you or defrauds you, he will either hire lawyers to probe the relativity of justice, an eventuality that will leave you holding the bag of your own losses, or he will simply pay a pittance of a fine in comparison to your losses and continue on with his life—no harm, no foul.
And this type of relative and circumstantial justice creates a universal unwillingness and reluctance to adhere to laws.
How many times have we heard the saying it’s only illegal if you get caught? The underlying message being, whatever you can get away with is fair game. But, what about codes of honor and character?
I wonder.
If someone damages your property it is just that you should be properly compensated to balance the loss. Your losses will be calculated and liabilities assigned so long as you have competent legal representation.
But, if you suffer a violent loss, whether of the sexual, physical or mortal nature this is where the already slippery slope of injustice becomes all the more snow-blinded and treacherous.
Because for someone who is the victim of rape, assault, murder, or kidnapping being compensated or made whole for said loss is complicated, if not, impossible. In a literal system of justice a rapist would be raped, a violent assailant would be assailed (assaulted), and a murderer would either be executed or have someone of equal relation to said murderer, murdered.
In some cultures these types of atrocities or errant behaviors are resolved by making the perpetrator pay a fine, forfeit property, or submit to a term of slavery or service to the injured party. Again, simplistic and even-handed.
Today, however, if you suffer a violent loss the laws are such that you are the aggrieved, yes, but the injured party is actually the State. And because this fictitious person has now assumed your victimhood it’s the State who gets to exact its injustice while you, along with every other tax paying citizen is who gets to pay for it.
Wait, what? Why would I pay for a supposed justice that I am not receiving?
That is a very good question. But I’m afraid that the truthful response to this question is likewise not going to be to your liking. The short answer is because you are being held at gunpoint by agents of this fictitious persona, the State.
The more convoluted and analyzed answer is because for almost the entirety of your life the State has been outwardly manipulating your perceptions so as to extricate particularized responses to the perceived reality of crime.
We have all heard the term fear-mongering. A process of manipulating a person’s fears so as to push the person toward a desired decision that you want them to make. It’s a lot like pointing a gun at someone’s head.
The unspoken but obvious threat being that if said person doesn’t do, say, think, or act, accordingly, then the trigger will be pulled. When that happens brain matter will follow a very unique trajectory divided between the force of the bullet and the force of gravity.
So, the extracted moral concession or decision is rational only to the point that it is meant to protect you, him, or me from immediate harm. And whatever eventual harm comes from the decision that has been forced upon us at gun point is seen as irrelevant.
Fear-mongering leads to irrational decisions with voting, the purchases we make, not to mention the governmental policies or laws that we support. And yet, everything in this country seems to be happening at gun point.
Do this, or else!
At a biological level it’s important for us to understand what is taking place when the State essentially holds a gun to our heads to extract the very particularized responses that it demands. The fear response begins in the amygdala, an almond shaped organ at the base of the brain.
When a fear response is activated, two simultaneous responses begin. The first, is hormones like adrenaline begin to flood the system. We feel an increase in breathing and heart rate. Second, blood flow is diverted from the cerebral cortex, a part of the brain that is critical to reasoning, judgement and other advanced cognitive functions.
In other words, fear makes it harder to think our way to a good or rational decision. Instead of a process of nuanced thinking we’re forced into making survival choices that are quick, intuitive and emotional in nature. And the consequences are as immediate as they are obvious.
To make matters worse, decisions made while in the grip of a fear response leave an imprint on the brain, creating a neural shortcut that makes it more likely for us to repeat our irrational decisions when confronted with similar stimuli.
The process is called neuristics, and the more that fear is used to produce a survival response the more engrained the decision becomes. And one of the State’s methods for dealing with the aforementioned outliers who don’t conform is to designate said subset of the population for deletion from its Matrix.
It invents laws that said subset does not have a voice in determining, knowing perfectly well that those laws will be violated, and when they are, the outliers will be labelled as criminals and separated from the herd.
And once they have been labelled as criminals it becomes systematically easier to further delete opportunities, rights, and eventually all freedoms and life itself. All in the name of Justice, with you and I as the aggrieved and the State as both the victim and benefactor.
The original federal criminal code only punished about thirty crimes. Again, simplistic and even-handed. By the 1980s, the same code punished more than three-thousands crimes.
And today, it’s not even known how many crimes are on the books, but it’s over five thousand and there are over three-hundred-thousand regulations that carry federal criminal penalties.
The individual states with their ever-growing criminal codes are no better. We have been programmed to think that the solution to all societal ills is to criminalize more behaviors, ever expanding the very criminal codes that less and less of us even understand, or for that matter, even contributed to.
By the time someone is eighteen, and legally able to vote, they have already violated dozens if not hundreds of laws without even knowing it.
In 2019, Congress introduced 154 bills that would have added new criminal penalties to the federal code. But, how many of us were even aware of these new crimes to be created?
It stands to reason that a system of law that few understand represents a systematic threat to the legitimacy of our government and justice system. Because the less legitimacy that people perceive, the less likely they are to adhere. Until we arrive at a point where the criminalization of the people becomes the end in itself.
Obviously, the reason that the laws are not adhered to is because we don’t remember ever having created them. We were in fear mode at the time, staring down the barrel of a gun, and whatever we agreed to then, we don’t remember or agree to now.
What was once a representative government has now morphed into an oppressive apparatus of control,i.e., a Matrix of supposed efficiency at the expense of the many for the expansion and enrichment of the few. Obviously, we are not a unified population.
We are minority pitted against minority, outlier pitted against outlier, not always on the basis of race or ethnicity. Take, for example, how the drug epidemic—a reality that effects all social classes and races of society—has been systematically used to criminalize, marginalize and otherwise delete Black and
Latino communities more than any other. Instead of laws that are representative of the belief structures of the populaces that they are enforced on, laws are now a tool or weapon of control, enslaving one or more minorities or group of outliers to the beliefs and whims of another.
The choice before many of us is to either adhere to someone else’s will for our lives, or become a criminal so as to exercise our freedoms. It’s absurd!
My great-grandfather, Selso Gómez was a legitimate Mexican businessman prior to the passing of the Prohibition laws in the United States. But, thanks to a minority subset of religious fervor and twisted logic, laws were invented to criminalize the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
Laws that did nothing to curtail demand, or the criminalization and eventual incarceration of my great-grandfather. In Mexico, Selso was a business owner, husband, father, and supporter of democratic institutions. He had lost siblings to Mexico’s struggle and fight for liberation and democracy.
But in the eyes of the U.S., he was a criminal to be illegally hunted down on Mexican soil, kidnapped, and brought across an international border just so he could be incarcerated.
Eventually, common sense prevailed and the hysteria around alcoholic beverages was stamped out legislatively, but not before my great-grandfather contracted tuberculosis in a U.S. prison and died shortly after his release, leaving my great-grandmother to raise four children on her own. The effects of which are still being felt to this day.
The fear-mongering in our society has convinced us that the only solution to curtailing certain human tendencies and otherwise freedoms is to criminalize said behaviors, then, proceed to systematically delete them from society, by clicking and dragging them from society’s desktop into the trash bin—confirm deletion, confirm, click, i.e., mass=incarceration.
Unwanted or rogue-code is thereby relegated into prisons, concentration camps, C.I.A. blacksites, Gitmo, etc. Essentially, pick your poison or time period in history and see that the same deletion process has always existed.
Mass-incarceration is today’s version of deleting unwanted code. And, similar to deleting files on your computer, clicking and dragging them into oblivion, in the carceral state version of obliterating lives there exists the appeal process, essentially a confirm delete protocol.
It’s the rogue-code’s plea to the Matrix itself to not be permanently deleted, despite the obvious inevitability of that outcome. A sort of last attempt for the rogue-code to prove its utility and willingness to conform to the source code’s demands: educate, work, procreate, then train offspring to likewise conform.
When the Spaniards arrived on the shores of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519, they discovered an entrenched population of rogue-code. The indigenous population was problematic in that it resisted the enslavement protocols of that time’s version of the Matrix.
In journals and letters Europeans expressed that the natives were “restless, lazy, and unwilling to except the yoke of servitude.” Many of the natives preferred death to servitude, no so unlike the Japanese in WWII who chose suicide to the dishonor of capture or defeat.
Two cultures, that when threatened with having their source-code overwritten, chose deletion rather than accepting a foreign code of servitude.
In the early 2000s, I was invited to visit the Tarahumara indigenous tribe of northern Mexico. I was an unoffcial translator of sorts to a group of graduate students studying the ability of certain tribes to maintain their autonomy despite the ever-increasing demands of the individualistic, market economy all around them.
Upon arrival we were granted a casual audience with the tribal leader, a weathered man in his seventies with agile movements and sharp eyes. One of the many questions that the group asked me to translate was regarding criminality in the Tarahumara society.
There was no obvious presence of law enforcement or jails, and the group wondered how it was possible for a population of nearly ten thousand to peacefully co-exist without some sort of law an order. It was a question that made the chief laugh.
He was amused. And with careful pronunciation he asked when we had last been to the capital (Mexico City), and when I explained that we had just come from there, his laughter ensued.
He confessed that he had not been there since 1977, but asked if there were still police on every major intersection in the city. I said that there probably was, not that I had noticed, but since the capital was known to have more police per capita than any other city in the country, it was probably so. Then he asked, whether the armed police made us feel safe.
It was my turn to laugh. Mexico’s capital, at the time, was known for its rampant crime, violence, robberies and theft too numerous to tabulate. Kidnappings were reported as one every three minutes.
The chief’s comment and laughter made us question the absurdity of our assumptions that law and order somehow prevented crime.
What we assumed as logical, when scrutinized, suddenly seemed about as counter-intuitive as eating more to lose weight or driving slower to get somewhere sooner. But, at some point between a adolescence and adulthood that was the software update that we had assimilated.
The chief proceeded to explain to us that the reason they didn’t have jails or police was because they didn’t have crime. A statement, that to us visitors, all of whom were city dwellers, seemed far-fetched.
How could they not have crime? Hadn’t anyone ever gotten drunk, assaulted someone, or destroyed property? Was there no rape, child abuse, fraud, or murder? The chief was patient as our apparent incredulity pulsed with disbelief, but his expression and smile never waivered in its sincerity. He then explained that, yes, horrible things did sometimes happen.
But they were infrequent and, he could see no benefit from placing someone in a cage. Which, according to him, would have been an unforgivable offense that would only serve to break a man’s spirit.
He then concluded the meeting, encouraging us to speak with whomever, and promised to speak with us again the following day. Altogether, we spent five enlightening days with the Tarahumara.
What we learned was that our concepts on crime or errant behavior were not universal, nor were they shared by the Tarahumara. The members of their community had property and things, yes, but nobody was concerned with locking them up in safe places.
If someone “borrowed” something, the original owner just assumed that it would inevitably be returned at some later time. Another concept not readily perceived in their society was unemployment, since everybody seemed busy at all times, though, work to them was not a central part of their lives, it was assumed that everyone would do their part.
And as for violence, in all its varied manifestations, there were fights and disagreements but they weren’t considered crimes. They were just life, the natural occurrences of personalities that sometimes clash for any number of reasons.
When and, if, certain reoccurring behaviors turned into problems that affected the whole community, the elders would convene and take action. But not action in the sense of punishment, isolation, or torture like in our societies.
Action for them was to dig down into the underlying causes of the problematic behavior, address said underlying issues, and then give the particular individual more of their attention as a community until the behavior and situation corrected itself.
In almost every circumstances of what we would call a crime, were things that they addressed with active involvement in the person’s life. To them, punishment for punishment’s sake was not justice, it was a crime and counter-intuitive.
The members of my group saw this as impunity or a lack of justice, even more so when they learned that the tribe lived under a concept even more difficult than all the rest to understand.
Basically, if you do something that the community brings to your attention as unacceptable, the choice before you is accept their help in addressing whatever the underlying causes may be, address the issue on your own, or leave the community.
Which, can seem harsh, but, compared to the draconian methods of America’s carceral state, maybe not. And in regard to their concept of “no memory,” after behaviors are adjusted to the demands of community expectations, there is no need to throw in their faces that they had once done something that was considered unacceptable.
Not like in modern society where you are forever labelled a convict and criminal with the zealot fervor of a society hellbent on forever seeing you as an outcast.
It is time for us to rethink our concepts on justice. Without blame or further criminalization, we need to see ourselves for who we are based on what we do to others and ourselves, not just blindly follow a chimerical concept of justice that no longer is what it claims or does what it says.
Just like in programming, some code can be edited, while other code must be clicked-dragged and forever dropped into the oblivion of permanent deletion. A government that subdues us by dividing us with sensationalized misinformation, rather than leading us with the truth, is not a representative-based republic centered on human dignity, rights and freedom.
And the lies about needing to protect ourselves with hyper-surveillance, infringed upon rights, a militarized police force, an ever-growing criminalization of behaviors, where mass-incarceration is the proffered solution to addressing the complexities of our humanity is not the best of what we are or what we can do. We are more than cogs in a machine, and our humanity is far from binary.
We are not automatons, we are people—complex, beautiful, emotional, perfectly imperfect people. And whether we realize it or not we are all Neo, and the choice before us is just as Morpheus presented it, the red pill or the blue pill, the truth or the lie. Which will we choose?
Because the choice is also the opportunity to live up to our fullest and brightest potential. And the solution is not in the code to be written, it’s in us, it always has been.
When we choose to favor fact over fear, we rescue ourselves. When we demand that public information campaigns be clear and direct presentations of truth, we rescue each other.
And when we pay closer attention to what is being said, and who is saying it, and remind ourselves that news outlets do not sell truth, they sell advertising, then we not only rescue ourselves and each other, we actually start to rewrite our own code, from radical and rogue to righteous.
Our society is at a critical juncture point in the evolution of how we perceive social justice, and the choices before us must be based on the facts. Because our situation is not hopeless, nor shall it ever be. So let us swallow the red pill, interrupt the interface, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Thank you for reading today’s publication and supporting MYLIFEplus25. Look out for next week’s post: The Pipedream of Immigration Reform
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