The Situation

In Freud's crucial principle of phantasy we already have a full picture of the utopian impulse, not only because it becomes inescapably human to want and to desire and to paint pictures in our minds of the wonders we would allocate for ourselves given however long a spree, but because whatever else we do we go about our lives individually building worlds for ourselves and the creatures and stuff we encounter so that it all sort of fits into the caravan, and we each do this with the cognitive capabilities we possess, which cannot be valued like statistics, lest people who are marginal for whatever reason never have a fair shake. Your world is your delusion-formation, however nominally sane and functional you may be; no matter how adamantly you are told by the small, snotty cohort who watch the same shit on Netflix that your opinions are for sure the current correct ones. Slovenian psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests you go ahead and enjoy your symptom. What people cannot ever effectively do is take their world model or reality tunnel and set it down like a ready-made estate somewhere exotic and expect the indigenous population to fall rapidly in line. The United States found out they couldn't build Iraq with their own goods, services, and authorized personnel. For the United States to have had any success in the 'forever wars,' they would have had to rebuild Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, which in itself is no small order, because those are complex populated territories rife with intergenerational animosities where stuff does indeed tend to happen. The malevolent and truly unthinking Israeli real estate apocalypse in Gaza and the West Bank speaks to a historical moment epitomized by the grim visage of surly and physically aggressive retail customers tripping over one another to grab things and gripe. Plain as daylight: the ultimate, decisive stampede off the cliff for the state of Israel looks to anybody watching too much like that godawful Warner Brothers movie Barbie, with its gross, periscoping hypernormalization. What is the situation? Ever? This is I think why I have for so long found crime fiction and detective stories so fundamental to formulating in concrete ways how human cognitive fallibility, the thick morass of interconnected events, and the general distractedness of creatures reacting in real time, mean that we are only ever minimally aware of any situation we extemporaneously negotiate with sensory-motor agency.  The simplest things can be impenetrable conundrums. There is an old example, and a perfect one: say you go to a part of town you seldom visit and you see two friends there in quick succession who you would not necessarily expect to see on the same day or in that part of town; it is perfectly possible that the one person being in that part of town has something to do with the other one being there too, but it is also very possible that it is the kind of coincidence of which a life is made up. Now, imagine that during that half hour or so you are visiting that not-so familiar part of town and see your two friends...a grizzly homicide is committed, or a big car bomb goes off. What people are doing and thinking and saying is forever mostly a matter of conjecture, and they're seldom actually listening to one another. In urban spaces, we are crowded into a kind of phantasmal noise whose properties and dimensions we have no tools to measure except somatic or embodied ones, those of the schizo. Like...how much did the fast car go fast on a scale of one to hot fudge sundaes? As far as you could tell from the nape of your neck? A person is a pygmy prison with religions and persecution complexes for wings. All your religions are religions. Fast cars are religions. Astrology is a religion, and that's rad. Hell, I suppose Neil Gaiman himself is a religion. I bet if Neil Gaiman were here he'd tell you to be good and careful what you worship. When your world is your world model or reality tunnel and not the whole actual world entire this does provide additional emotional and spiritual support perforce you now have a large part in creating and taking in the world. In the simplest possible terms, we need a lot less distracted bumping around, passive intake, and a lot more active critical thinking, a job for which hyperintelligent machines and future silicon-based 'things' are going to be much better equipped than our immediate offspring, sorry to say. I think the worst sin is to walk around like you are competent and know what is going on and like everything is okay. What a colossal confidence operation the protestant work ethic has become! You'd have to be the silliest shill in existence to believe in the concept of an honest dollar. A person will kill you with the boots they're wearing for $300 if it happens to be that kind of day. I've fucked around and found out, folks, let me tell you, and as for phantasies and utopias and very private projects the scale of the Pleiades, I have come to the same conclusion as have so many others before me, not all of them even Italian actually, and that's that Dante Alighieri has the only simple, practical, and attractive applicable model for a buildable paradisiacal eternity that you can at least start on right now at home: 1) find a person of whom you are extremely fond; 2) find a really swell spot; 3) await the healing of time.