Ridiculous Creatures

A rant about hierarchy in our Age of Stupidity and a recipe to save us all

Credit: Jonathan Foster

Last week poetry, this week an essay! Is there no end to the wonder’s of Jonathan Foster’s The Crow? Make yourself a nice drink, sit back and enjoy this week’s slightly curious journey through the human condition. I hope you enjoy.

1.

Nobody ever really knows what’s going on behind closed doors where the sharp and subtle emotional knives of our families and relationships hack and sculpt all of our hearts. Nobody really knows what goes on in the private realms where people play both actor and audience in their own theatre of repression and pretence and cruelty.

We know that emotional turmoil occurs behind every facade because we all grew up behind a facade of our own. We all recognise that the cruelty and stupidity and the infinite forms of destructive behaviours we ourselves have endured also exists in the lives of others because we all carry the scars of savagery and barbarism in our hearts. And, even though we feel the agony of those scars we still inflict that agony upon others. We can’t seem to help ourselves.

We are such paradoxical creatures. We create carnage yet also harmony. We’re strong yet fragile, complex yet simple, powerful yet helpless. We run from the pain that carves our deepest wounds yet we so often seek the familiarity of precisely that pain from which we run. We act with conscious resolution and we act with casual negligence. We are fountains of unconditional love and benevolence and compassion and forgiveness, and we are fountains of unmitigated hate and harshness and cruelty and mercilessness. We are the source of the very light that casts the darkest shadow.

And, perhaps most strangely, we experience life from within our isolated lonely consciousnesses as segregated individuals locked into our own skins. Whilst at exactly the same time we experience life as beings in a shared and mutually dependent social realm where we perpetually flow through one another like a kaleidoscope of butterflies, alighting within each other, forever affecting and altering those we pass through, forever being altered by those who pass through us.

We are creatures that are forced to go through life as both the subject and the object of our own experience.

We are ridiculous creatures for sure. Which is risky for such subtle creatures as we humans because we shape the outer world according to the emotional condition of our inner world. So when the outer world is in conflict and emotionally barren and spiritually broken we know our inner worlds are in a dangerous condition.

2.

Of course none of this is news to anyone. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Writers, poets and priests make their meagre living, whilst con-men, charlatans and politicians live lavishly from delving into that utterly incomprehensible yet altogether ordinary experience we all suffer, the human condition.

Half of Substack leans into writing about feelings and love and the internal emotional landscapes we all inhabit. This platform is fuelled by the agony we inflict upon one another. I write about it myself in my fiction. My characters are often in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, feeling the wrong way, battling to escape or right something that has wronged them. I’m a voyeur of the human condition, equally awed as I am baffled, as grateful as I am angry.

On some days we humans seem like narrative-driven apes trying to make sense of the world by tying threads between the events in our lives. We create islands of symbolism and metaphor in a sea of confusion. The more symbolism and metaphor we use the more truth they seem to hold. But we’re not actually divining reality and discovering truth through these threads and stories, we’re mostly creating islands onto which we clamber to feel safe like harbours in a storm.

So, all things considered, I suppose being the narrative driven, emotionally scarred and conflicted creatures we are, it’s not a surprise we find so many of our behaviours queuing up to be in contention for the Most Ridiculous Stupidity Ever Award.

And how ridiculous can we get?

Well, try this for size: Imagine we very, very, slowly evolved into conscious beings on a paradise planet (the only life-bearing planet we know of in the entire Universe), and that over an incredibly short period of time, let’s say the last two minutes, we developed an parasitical economy based on the continual exploitation of ourselves and of our paradise planet.

Imagine we formed (or were violently forced into) social systems that segregated us all into various classes based on gender and race and arbitrarily determined social status, where each group was allocated different levels of power and opportunity and dignity. Imagine some of us were elevated to positions of seemingly unlimited power whilst others were enslaved for no better reason than we were born into one of these groups.

And imagine that this lunatic short-sighted social/economic system eventually drove our paradise planet to the brink of collapse with oceans emptying, forests burning, ice caps melting and mass extinction happening at an ever increasing rate.

And imagine that we were completely and totally aware of the fact we were doing all of this. That we all talked about it all the time. That we studied our paradise planet and wrote reports about the very fact we were destroying it and made documentaries and even had a young girl who organised school strikes and begged someone to do something while poetically telling the UN that “The house is on fire”.

And imagine that even though we knew what we were doing and we read the reports and watched the documentaries and agreed with the young girl, even then there was nothing we could actually do to stop all this madness because the feelings and desires of those at the top of our invented social hierarchy were more important than the actual paradise planet and everything that lived upon it.

And then imagine that we knew for certain that those individuals at the top of our invented social hierarchy were emotionally broken and scarred people who had been fucked up by their very own family lives, and that they were now inflicting all this hell onto the rest of us and our paradise planet because they couldn’t help themselves.

And on top of all that, imagine all this continued on and on because we just couldn’t retell those stories we once told ourselves, we couldn’t get away from those little islands of symbolism and metaphor we invented to protect us from the confusion of being conscious beings in a sea of nothingness.

I mean, can you imagine anything so utterly ridiculous?

3.

Because of the way I’ve lived my life and the jobs I’ve had, I’ve found myself sailing through in all kinds of social waters. I’ve knocked about with every class. From supping cocktails with Ambassadors and Billionaires to breaking in to a sweat with roofers and labourers. I’ve shared intimate agonies with the precarious poor working dead-end jobs to pay outrageous rents and I’ve listened to the whining self-pity of people born into astronomical wealth. I’ve broken bread with bankers and bakers and diplomats and dressmakers.

I’ve always been a social chameleon because I’m smart enough to never judge a person by their so-called social standing. I’ve been lucky enough to always see the actual person, their emotional architecture and their soul. I’ve never been blinded by the glittering or the lacklustre social status. Instead I’ve had X-ray vision and seen directly into the heart of every human being. I am the boy who cried the Emperor is naked and I am the boy who didn’t. It’s a blessing and it’s a curse.

All these peculiarities and experiences have in some ways qualified me to make certain observations about our social system and the rewards and punishments it doles out.

Here’s one observation I’ll share with you: The further one travels up the echelons of social class the more psychopathic the behaviour one encounters. The most dangerous and selfish, cold-hearted and untrustworthy people I’ve ever encountered have almost exclusively been the richest and most powerful people. Yes, there are people who display all kinds of hostile and harmful behaviours in every social class, but without doubt the powerful and wealthy are the supreme experts.

Some say that our social system rewards psychopathic behaviours and I think that’s true. Psychopaths suit a psychopathic system and are certainly fast-tracked to power and wealth. But even the ordinary (non-psychopaths) who have accumulated wealth, or were born into wealth, are also cultivated toward anti-social, selfish tendencies by the micro-cultures in which they are socialised. They learn to be dreadful by design.

The people at the top of our invented social hierarchies have suffered as many and varied scars from sharp and subtle emotional family knives and anyone else. That’s just human behaviour in our cruel and competitive social system that foists value upon the worthless and makes worthless the invaluable.

But those at the top also believe themselves to be exceptional, and deserving and are terrified of losing their life styles and their status. So they learn to see everything, from oil reserves to virgin forests to stock markets to other human beings as a resource to exploit for their own benefit at any and every cost.

Wealth and power have an isolating effect. The more isolated a person becomes the more dangerous they become. Infantile emotionally deranged billionaires throwing tantrums isn’t the exception. It’s the norm. Rampant inequality combined with power in a world of broken emotional people is a recipe for death and destruction. And right now we are cooking up a storm.

4.

As I said, you already know all of this and I already know all of this. So maybe, just maybe, we should stop inhaling the smoke from fires lit in the past and take a good look at our paradoxical, ridiculous, destructive behaviours. Maybe we need to realise we are both subject to and objects of a trauma creating social/economic machine that we invented ourselves. But equally and actually, because we invented ourselves, it might just be possible to dismantle it ourselves too.

Instead of continuing to blindly cook up a storm, maybe we need to level out our social world, reduce rampant inequality and pay attention to our internal landscapes.

Maybe we need to place true social value on emotional maturity and self-reflection.

Maybe we need to recognise that love and kindness to all of our fellow living beings is the only really valuable thing we’ve ever had on this precious planet.

Maybe we need to open some of those closed doors to air out the cruelty and stupidity and the destructive behaviours that thrive in the dark.

Maybe we need to stop partitioning every human soul according to class, or race, or gender, or any other divisive little category invented by long dead storytellers and fire lighters, and maybe we need to learn to treat each other with dignity and care regardless of what we look like, who we sleep with, or on what side of the tracks we were born.

Maybe we need to worship new social categories based on kindness, or consideration, or gentleness, or thoughtfulness, or humility, or forgiveness, or open-mindedness, or integrity, or compassion or just plain gratitude for being alive at all in this gorgeous world.

And maybe we need to think long and hard about all of this right now, or we are going to wake from this dream in a funk of emotionally barren and spiritually broken stupidity with infantile billionaires dividing us into warring groups with the sole intention of destroying everything that’s beautiful and good because they just can’t help themselves.

And that would be truly ridiculous.

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