The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
Today it’s time to talk about the monsters.
As I see it, individual humans aren’t inherently good or bad. People are just people, with complex inner lives and motivations and impulses, who do things that can be judged by their effects, either harmful or helpful. A person may do many things with terrible outcomes, but that doesn’t make the person inherently bad: people can always change. We can choose to be better, and do better, to repair and make amends. This is what it is to be a rational agent in society.
Systems, however, are different. Like a person, we judge a system as harmful or helpful based on its observed effects: a government can be just or unjust to its citizens, or an industry harmful or helpful to the environment. But unlike a person, the purpose — and moral valence — of a system is what it does. A system has no inner life; it can’t experience shame or have a change of heart. Unlike a person, a system tends not to change itself. It must be acted upon by pressure from people, from within or without, or risk continuing to perform undeterred. The torment nexus keeps tormenting, and Omelas keeps killing kids.
Many human-created systems that run alongside modern society are complex enough, with enough interdependencies and opposing incentives, that to declare them fundamentally evil — fundamentally anti-human — is an unhelpful simplification.
But we are now in an age when systems have emerged with such monstrous effects on the world, whether intended or deemed “externalities”, that to view them as anything other than inherently against the project of human flourishing is to deprive ourselves of our capacity for rational analysis at a time when we need that clarity more than ever.
What does it mean for a system to be against humanity? It must fundamentally be a project of death-making and immiseration; a thing that devours even itself due to greed, or hate, or fear. It is a cancer on the world, the existence of which is only possible through endless consumption of all in its path: the natural resources of the planet, people it deems lesser or other, even culture itself becomes engulfed within its corpulent mass and fed to its reproductive engine, until ultimately it consumes itself in a paroxysm of violence and self-loathing.
We would do well to call such a thing a monster, and to do everything we can to defeat it before it reaches its ultimate end.
So let us say it: this country, as an actor on the world stage, and as a government for its own people, is a monster. It is a system that has been hijacked by the worst impulses of our world-historical moment; the impulse to regress, retrench, build walls, declare an enemy other, and use lethal force to destroy or subjugate it, no matter the cost.
While I began by saying that people aren’t inherently bad, the monsters of our age do have faces: putrescent excretions from the libidinous mass of the body politic, so warped by the system they champion that they become its avatars. Warmongers; colonizers; oligarchs; profiteers. The pedophilic billionaire owning class, so defined by their own grotesque accumulation that they cohere as one ideological pustulence, reaching out many-fingered hands toward the seat of power, smothering it and uplifting it simultaneously, jagged spikes of gristle and viscera protruding to repel any who would question their material dominion even as life withers in their shadow.
So it is against this obscene, cancerous, many-faced beast that we array ourselves, choosing life over death, curiosity over ignorance, courage over fear, revolutionary optimism over the grim nihilism that insists that nothing we do matters. Instead we insist that everything we do matters: the new world isn’t going to build itself while we stand by. We know that we are all we have: a humanity fighting for its survival against the monstrous, anti-human systems of the age. There is no “them”; there is only us, and no one is coming to save us.
And we are enough.
Featured image from Akira
