Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Points USA, recently posted this on X: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegesth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.” Hegseth responded with, “Your wish is our command, Andrew.
The mob, and mob-adjacent people in this and perhaps all countries are perhaps best understood as people with unhealed, unacknowledged and festering, generational trauma which tends to metastasize into 'identifying with the aggressor' and acting out their victimizers' blood lust in turn. The only way, it seems, out of this is for each of us, as individuals and in community to call upon our higher angels to alchemize our suffering into understanding and empathy. Which means accepting pain, in some ways allowing our base selves to be crucified and resurrected by it. No turning away, no projecting our weakness, our immorality, our helplessness upon others and dancing around the fire of burning bones. We must look, and look, and look and finally see what's been going on for milennia, then vow that "This ends with me. I will do no more harm, forever."
It is our loss, our peril to become immune to the hatred and savagery happening in our world. We are diminished as human beings, yet those of us who are sickened and disgusted by the horrendous suffering are mocked as “woke”. I worry that our pushback, our votes won’t be enough.
"Our first breath requires our last. That much is true. But I am thinking about the million or so dead from Covid, the senseless death in Gaza, the dead from mass shootings and the ease with which we see it and move on. Something in the soul gets malformed, because of the refusal to linger. And that is an American inheritance."
Is this capacity to look away, or to look and not feel, immutable as the cycle of life itself, or is it learned? And if a learned response, can it be un-learned, or avoided?
From my three score and ten perspective, seems we ALLOW(ED) our selves to become inured to the horrific.
Not dissimilar to an addict, MOST of us CHOSE to expose ourselves to ever-escalating levels of soul-numbing, visual and auditory violence, to achieve the full neuro-stim yield of the next more shocking, thrilling, morally wrenching, over-the-top block buster movie. Or 'news' reel, or viral clip. Or chart-busting dystopic serial whose next episode we Just Can't Miss.
So, the other immutable truth in my view, is that we are born with rather simple, non-password-protected buttons all over our exterior (aka, our 'attack surface') that media, advertisers, evangelists, political power-brokers, and AI tech bros have learned to push to help us emote, spend, believe, and behave in a manner compatible with their best interests as they believe them to be.
And somewhere, somehow we have CHOSEN to carry and use devices that brilliantly push our innate buttons to feed this horror into our hungry and increasingly insatiably numb souls - and those of our under-age children - 24x7?
Youth, I personally know, DO understand they are addicted, and they are lonely, and they ARE depressed.
This gift is the fruit of our appetites. Who can blame us? Our buttons were hacked by the best. Perhaps some oldsters are still not full-on high stimulation junkies (tho, I'm 72 and know I am!), but such hypothesized non-programmed humans are quickly aging out of the population.
Violence, screams, conflict, sex, anger, horror, bright red blood pain and anguish (your pupils are dilating) - these compel our attention, and it is thanks to these inputs to our human buttons that we are the grist in a 'now and forever' attention economy.
We are not the consumer in this brave new world. We are not even the product. We are the substrate from which the product is made, that is then sold back to us.
If you are unusual, and do NOT WANT to expend your sensorium and awareness buried deep in a horrible violent life, you can part ways, and just chose to spend your attention elsewhere. Right? You. Can. Just. Say. No.
Try it. Divorce your phone, silence the voice in your car, the screens in your home and at work, and the AI in your ear. Abandon your virtual friends and life on social media. Take a walk with a body. Anybody - they just need to be present with you.
Rinse, repeat. For a decent detox interval.
And then forever.
...
So yeah, for most of us this is the truth: we cannot 'just do' this - cannot simply opt to escape our need for the 'personally customized for max engagement' prompts, high stim media, the ersatz connections, and virtual relations, any more than any other addict can 'simply' say no. When we don't have it, we crave it. For quite a while. We get viscerally anxious, and depressed (with and without!).
But very slowly we CAN 'get better'. (And much faster in a detox group, studies have shown.)
So, the discussion in this forum is downstream from the central problem as I see it. As an epidemiologist, I would want to get upstream and stop them from throwing people off the bridge, instead of continuing to try to drag each drowning body to shore, often failing.
Our info-sphere is dystopic AND addictive - both - and we struggle to not attend, but we fail.
The media structure (human attention economy) is the part that is population-fixable, NOT our nature. At least not with current education methods and understanding.
Again, to do this, one MUST get upstream of the human attention business model (medium, content, distribution, and elicited response), and FIRST make sober decisions about what really is beneficent/good/healthy for people (what we should want), before we just DO (unleash our appetites) in whatever manner consolidates power and wealth for those few who first harnessed the info-sphere to their ends.
We have seen that an unfettered appetite (for wealth, pleasure, power) creates a steep downhill path to in-humanity, as Eddie presents. A priori, human institutions catering to such appetites need a revisit, and their own detox. Also not simple, but essential.
Your insights are spot on. When you talk about a critical feature of our politics being indifference “to the suffering of those who aren’t worthy of life as they imagine it,” you are really centering our thoughts on what we are witnessing. No matter the policy decision or action taken, we are being given the answer to a fundamental question about our humanity: who is worthy of dignity and who is not? And the underlying premise of that question is what the seismic events of America’s founding (territorial conquest, extermination, chattel slavery, confinement in reservations, a revolution, a civil war, and Jim Crow laws) were all about.
The pus that underlies, coats, and in fact is a main ingredient of this nation and its history continues to ooze up and more and more of us are witnessing the magnitude, its heart-breaking stench, and the scope of its embededness.
The mob, and mob-adjacent people in this and perhaps all countries are perhaps best understood as people with unhealed, unacknowledged and festering, generational trauma which tends to metastasize into 'identifying with the aggressor' and acting out their victimizers' blood lust in turn. The only way, it seems, out of this is for each of us, as individuals and in community to call upon our higher angels to alchemize our suffering into understanding and empathy. Which means accepting pain, in some ways allowing our base selves to be crucified and resurrected by it. No turning away, no projecting our weakness, our immorality, our helplessness upon others and dancing around the fire of burning bones. We must look, and look, and look and finally see what's been going on for milennia, then vow that "This ends with me. I will do no more harm, forever."
It is our loss, our peril to become immune to the hatred and savagery happening in our world. We are diminished as human beings, yet those of us who are sickened and disgusted by the horrendous suffering are mocked as “woke”. I worry that our pushback, our votes won’t be enough.
Thank you Eddie, for trying to explain what is so difficult to understand.
I would rather live in outrage than indifference. But ugh
Thank you for remaining steadfastly grounded in your humanity, serving to help us try to do the same. 🙏
We need to get rid of I, me and them and be a we, us society
WE are the only ones who can STOP Them. Keep Speaking Out and Standing Up for HUMANITY!⚖️☮️❤️🇺🇸🌎
all this killing - its just a modern version of the colosseum , "are you not entertained!" :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_jyeDZ3Sg
Your dart is in the middle of the dart board on this explanation of maga-savagery. The question is, what will the rest of us do about it.🤔
Savage 1. a brutal or vicious person.
And yet, these people call themselves “ Christians”. I beg to differ!
This is chilling but also brilliant. Am sharing widely. Thanks.
Nicely expressed, Eddie:
"Our first breath requires our last. That much is true. But I am thinking about the million or so dead from Covid, the senseless death in Gaza, the dead from mass shootings and the ease with which we see it and move on. Something in the soul gets malformed, because of the refusal to linger. And that is an American inheritance."
Is this capacity to look away, or to look and not feel, immutable as the cycle of life itself, or is it learned? And if a learned response, can it be un-learned, or avoided?
From my three score and ten perspective, seems we ALLOW(ED) our selves to become inured to the horrific.
Not dissimilar to an addict, MOST of us CHOSE to expose ourselves to ever-escalating levels of soul-numbing, visual and auditory violence, to achieve the full neuro-stim yield of the next more shocking, thrilling, morally wrenching, over-the-top block buster movie. Or 'news' reel, or viral clip. Or chart-busting dystopic serial whose next episode we Just Can't Miss.
So, the other immutable truth in my view, is that we are born with rather simple, non-password-protected buttons all over our exterior (aka, our 'attack surface') that media, advertisers, evangelists, political power-brokers, and AI tech bros have learned to push to help us emote, spend, believe, and behave in a manner compatible with their best interests as they believe them to be.
And somewhere, somehow we have CHOSEN to carry and use devices that brilliantly push our innate buttons to feed this horror into our hungry and increasingly insatiably numb souls - and those of our under-age children - 24x7?
Youth, I personally know, DO understand they are addicted, and they are lonely, and they ARE depressed.
This gift is the fruit of our appetites. Who can blame us? Our buttons were hacked by the best. Perhaps some oldsters are still not full-on high stimulation junkies (tho, I'm 72 and know I am!), but such hypothesized non-programmed humans are quickly aging out of the population.
Violence, screams, conflict, sex, anger, horror, bright red blood pain and anguish (your pupils are dilating) - these compel our attention, and it is thanks to these inputs to our human buttons that we are the grist in a 'now and forever' attention economy.
We are not the consumer in this brave new world. We are not even the product. We are the substrate from which the product is made, that is then sold back to us.
If you are unusual, and do NOT WANT to expend your sensorium and awareness buried deep in a horrible violent life, you can part ways, and just chose to spend your attention elsewhere. Right? You. Can. Just. Say. No.
Try it. Divorce your phone, silence the voice in your car, the screens in your home and at work, and the AI in your ear. Abandon your virtual friends and life on social media. Take a walk with a body. Anybody - they just need to be present with you.
Rinse, repeat. For a decent detox interval.
And then forever.
...
So yeah, for most of us this is the truth: we cannot 'just do' this - cannot simply opt to escape our need for the 'personally customized for max engagement' prompts, high stim media, the ersatz connections, and virtual relations, any more than any other addict can 'simply' say no. When we don't have it, we crave it. For quite a while. We get viscerally anxious, and depressed (with and without!).
But very slowly we CAN 'get better'. (And much faster in a detox group, studies have shown.)
So, the discussion in this forum is downstream from the central problem as I see it. As an epidemiologist, I would want to get upstream and stop them from throwing people off the bridge, instead of continuing to try to drag each drowning body to shore, often failing.
Our info-sphere is dystopic AND addictive - both - and we struggle to not attend, but we fail.
The media structure (human attention economy) is the part that is population-fixable, NOT our nature. At least not with current education methods and understanding.
Again, to do this, one MUST get upstream of the human attention business model (medium, content, distribution, and elicited response), and FIRST make sober decisions about what really is beneficent/good/healthy for people (what we should want), before we just DO (unleash our appetites) in whatever manner consolidates power and wealth for those few who first harnessed the info-sphere to their ends.
We have seen that an unfettered appetite (for wealth, pleasure, power) creates a steep downhill path to in-humanity, as Eddie presents. A priori, human institutions catering to such appetites need a revisit, and their own detox. Also not simple, but essential.
Your insights are spot on. When you talk about a critical feature of our politics being indifference “to the suffering of those who aren’t worthy of life as they imagine it,” you are really centering our thoughts on what we are witnessing. No matter the policy decision or action taken, we are being given the answer to a fundamental question about our humanity: who is worthy of dignity and who is not? And the underlying premise of that question is what the seismic events of America’s founding (territorial conquest, extermination, chattel slavery, confinement in reservations, a revolution, a civil war, and Jim Crow laws) were all about.
Those kids in those lynching photos were voters in the 2024 election. 🇺🇸
The pus that underlies, coats, and in fact is a main ingredient of this nation and its history continues to ooze up and more and more of us are witnessing the magnitude, its heart-breaking stench, and the scope of its embededness.