Your 2022 Reality Check & Good News
It's time we spoke plainly about some things, not all of them bad!
Hi, everyone, I hope you enjoyed the end of the year. I went ahead and skipped the Christmas edition, thinking perhaps most of you’d have something better to do that day.
Today (yesterday now. holidayitis…) you’re hung over and thinking about the year that ended and where this one’s gonna take us (or where we’re gonna take it), so that makes it a perfect time to rip off a few band-aids and get to real talk.
Let’s begin. We’ll frontload the doom and gloom and save the upbeat for the last chorus.
First Things First
Look, I hate to mention it here but things are super tight for me right now because nearly all my energy is going into the “invisible work” of getting the Musk For A Minute project up and running in a meaningful and effective way.
By super tight I mean I don’t know where rent is coming from, I don’t know where my hosting bill that’s due in a few days is coming from, I don’t know where food is coming from. I wouldn’t ask if I had something to sell, including plasma (I take lithium, I can’t.)
All of my income is being tallied into the ongoing totals for the MFAM project as well. If you can help me out with five bucks or five thousand, I can use it immediately and it’ll help save my life and advance my work which is currently at a critical cusp. Easiest way: https://paypal.me/JohnHenryUS. I don’t want to get wrapped up in feeling all beggy and ashamed or pestering people for money either, but it’s serious right now - if I don’t get at least a couple hundred bucks in over the next week or so, I’m not going to be here…and I genuinely have no idea what’s up with my rent, not even when it’s due again, but I suspect my landlord’s going to show up on the 20th going “yeah, I need your rent.”
*shrug* this is the cost of not having paywalls and such. What we’re doing here, including my work, needs to be out in the world, and that right quick. I don’t have the luxury of waiting until I can afford it; I have to work.
I’m targeting the end of the week to have the MFAM site live so the world can finally see comprehensively what the heck I’m talking about and trying to do, and I can get to work making it all happen and continuing to create and improve all the other great content you’ve known me for over the years. But right now I’m not gonna make it to the end of the week without some help, so if you can, please do, and thanks very much.
NB: You can also choose to contribute via the MFAM project directly through GoFundMe. I’m not pushing that hard yet either - I will once the site’s finished - but it is up and running and ready to go.
Enough of that, to the trenches!
A World Without States Is Impossible
My friends in the hardcore libertarian (left or right) range will hate this, but it’s just a basic reality. The only way you can have human life without a state is if there’s only one human life that never interacts with another. Every human interaction, be it greeting or attack, fight or flight, feeding or fornicating, constitutes the foundations of some form of state. If you and one other person exist on this planet, the very same moment you communicate in any way, you have established two states. If you agree not to hunt in each other’s space, you have borders and international resource management agreements. If you agree not to kill each other you have established an international peace accord.
You can not avoid “the state,” as a thing. You are wasting incalculable precious time and resources trying, because you think that’s the “easy mode” solution to the problem of how to create a system of states that respects and advances all the rights and privileges of humanity without exploiting other humans. It isn’t; it’s a dead-end tangent.
In the end, the “solution to all of this” is and always has been love, community, and compassion. This is true for any given value of “all of this,” any point in human history when people have felt like there was an “all of this” that required solving. Focus there and leave the “you’re not the boss of me” posturing on the playground where it belongs.
Before anyone accuses me of being soft, let me point out I’ve been living up to my name basically since I was born. “John Henryism” is, according to wikipedia, “a strategy for coping with prolonged exposure to stresses such as social discrimination by expending high levels of effort which results in accumulating physiological costs.[1][2].”
The part of that sentence after “with” is a pretty good description of my life. I’ve raged against machines for decades and scuttled more than one. I’ve never been here to cater or bow or pander to power of any type, including social approval.
We all have a lot of fast growing up to do right now, and it’s not just the fascists and totalitarians and powermongers who have that problem.
In my (very) left wing, (very) libertarian band of the spectrum (I’m like waaay down in the bottom left of the Political Compass), I absolutely believe that abandoning delusions like statelessness or anything remotely approaching actual anarchy is a critical part of the growth we need at this time. All that energy we’re wasting trying to load vaporware can be spent more effectively to more progressive ends more successfully in other ways.
“If This Goes On —”
The following subheads address our current situation and how things will happen if we don’t undergo a radical change of attitude immediately. By that change I mean we stop thinking about “money” and “the economy” and “how are we gonna pay for that” and all the other archaic nonsense, and start thinking about “how do we create the best possible lives for everyone?” We stop pretending we can ship our plantations to some other locale and that makes them not slavery. We stop pretending that we can continue rapaciously exploiting our planet’s resources. We stop pretending science is political. We stop pretending poverty isn’t a deliberate policy choice. We make these things right.
That is how we “get out of this.” To some details:
Triage
I’ve seen a sharply rising number of conversations along the lines of this embedded tweet.
This conversation, the question of refusing to treat people who have refused to vaccinate against covid when they become infected, should probably be louder.
I don’t agree with the idea that we should refuse treatment to the unvaccinated. That’s inhumane.
I absolutely believe that’s where we’ll be in a month unless something changes for the better, radically, before then. You’re already starting to see it, and whether you or I think it’s right, it’s going to happen if we can’t avoid and mitigate the current and rising levels of stress on our health care system. There are stretches of hundreds of square miles right now without an available level 1 trauma center because they’re too full, and we’ve barely started with Omicron. Another mutation with similar or worse behavior, we’ll have no choice but to start including the question of whether a person has refused vaccination in our evaluation of their treatment priority.
This isn’t new. Try getting a lung transplant as a smoker and you’ll see the exact same thing happen. Like if they’ve got a surplus stack of lungs laying around sure, but they’re not gonna give a smoker lungs that’ll add 4 years when they can give a non-smoker the same lungs and add 30.
Welcome to the cold equations, folks. It’s not about what I think ought to happen. What I think ought to happen is we ought to go home and stay there until. Until when? Until it’s no longer necessary. I don’t want anyone to die from this, and I said that 850,000 bodies ago, or thereabouts, in the US. It’s insane that we haven’t used the last two years - the last fifty-two years! - to innovate the entire concept of human employment nearly out of existence, at least in leading modern nations and heading that way everywhere. We have every resource we need to allow every human being currently alive in a state of what would be, to most of them, luxury.
We refuse because some of us are selfish, and that must end. Not because it’s wrong, though it certainly is by any ethical or moral standard. No, it must end because it violates the universal ethic, the ultimate morality, the immutable basis for all collective priorities: survival.
Generally struck
The early returns on the impact of omicron are Not Good. If the trends continue even generally in the direction they are, one of two things will happen by the end of this month or shortly thereafter:
You will start seeing mandatory shutdowns and major restrictions again. If this is the case, a relief payment will be back on the table quickly thereafter.
Whether organized or organic, we will see conditions of a “general strike.” People are going to stop going out whether we tell them to or not. People are going to decide that not only their lives but the lives of those around them and the ongoing escalated risk of further mutation with greater - potentially cataclysmic - danger simply aren’t worth the paycheck, and it’s not their fault, and they’re not going to just give up all their stuff because the “leaders” can’t get it together.
It still hasn’t quite sunk in to people that “mild” is relative and when you have a rate of half the hospitalizations but ten times as many people are catching it, you have five times as many hospitalizations. I think it will in the next couple of weeks, without some kind of tangible mitigation of this thing.
I’m already seeing early-birds stocking up on bathroom tissue again, people who are fortunate enough to be both able to do so and smart enough to think of it now are starting to stock up again. All of the social signs are in place for this to tip over into a de facto shutdown again, whether it’s “mandatory” or some group decides to stage a “general strike” on a given day or the most likely scenario: the percentage of people who have just plain had enough of this crap hits critical mass and a major national epidemic of “to hell with this” breaks out.
Of course I could be wrong, I’m human. My feeling however is that the probability that I’m wrong can be very closely calculated by the degree to which infections and hospitalizations increase over the next ten to fourteen days. If it stays roughly on the current curve, it’s gonna be very tough. If we plateau or see a good drop, the risk of this whole scenario playing out at all drops considerably, at least for a moment. To make any closer prediction than that with any confidence would, I think, require more data on hand than instinct built from a lifetime of data analysis, and right now this is instinct.
The Good News
I promised you good news, so let’s talk about that.
There are solutions and pathways to not just survival but genuine progress, as I have discussed many times elsewhere and will continue to do. But we have to change our thinking about some things, and we have to do it now. All of this stopped being about what “we want” a long time ago - decades - and we’ve made it this far by bluffing and ignoring reality around us and shirking our duty to confront complex social issues head on in a forthright manner for the best interests of the people.
That is ending, very quickly, and that is very, very good news.
The best news will be if we decide to do it the easy way and cooperate with this ongoing evolutionary surge.
Assuming we dodge the Big Bad Bullet that we’re continually risking as long as Covid is out of control, if we are mindful and work toward the collective positive progress that this surge brings with it, then things will be fairly painless and we’ll get through it to The Real Future intact, more or less.
If we fight against it and try to pretend we can keep propping up all this nonsense for one second longer than is necessary to get us to the next level…well, that’s the hard way, and it will make things harder.
But the good news is, it’s happening. So many of the truths that so many of my heroes have inspired me to keep telling, so many of my own they inspired me to find, are at our doorstep right this moment. We are moving forward, we are speaking out loud, we are finding ways to solve problems without destroying each other and our planet. We are demanding humanity for all humans, and we will have it. We are pushing autocracy and plutocracy and fascism into the landfill of history, and it’s just about there.
We are moving forward, evolving, and the future is incredibly bright.
What remains in question is how hard we’re going to make it on ourselves to get there.
Put plainly: the train is loading and the engine’s hot. You can choose to get on board. You can even choose to stay behind. But the train will move, and while you certainly can choose to stand on the track holding your hand up and stomping your feet and explaining in twenty thousand word oratories why you don’t believe in trains, if that is your choice then you are choosing suicide and, as will we all, you will have your choice.
Unless you think choosing to stand on the tracks is a good idea, this is probably the best news the human race has had in at least two thousand years.
We just gotta make that last mile, and that’s here and now. My love to all of you, my appreciation to all of you who are on board and working toward that bright future whether it’s contributing directly to support the work of people like me trying to herd everyone on board, or helping spread the message by engaging via like, share, subscriptions, tweets, comments, loves, and so forth.
We are changing the world. The group of folks who have stuck around me for years as I’ve slogged through so many challenges have changed the world, and they’ve watched me change the world. I couldn’t do what I do, without your support, and neither could anyone else who’s making the effort, whether they can afford it or not.
I should be back “on schedule” with regular Saturday columns here on Substack next week. Thanks again for everything all of you do and have done to support me personally and my work and the ongoing evolution of the species. Much love to you all, and don’t forget to keep your eyes out for major announcements on the Musk For A Minute project before the end of the week!
Coming up to speed, John.