I’ve been thinking a lot about the Infinite lately. We all know about it, know that we were born from it, and that we’re doomed to someday return to it, yet we cannot talk about it. Only in the most religious or philosophical settings can we admit that none of what we see and here is real, and most of what we know about reality is conjecture. I’m not alone in thinking, “If what I see in my mind is indistinguishable from what I see in my mind, how do I know that what I’m seeing is real?” But we don’t talk about it nearly enough. We talk about conspiracy theorists or evangelical Christians as though they were freaks, oddities, outside of the norm, and not merely a slightly more extreme version of humanities need to avoid seeing the Infinite.
It bothers me because our world fell apart in 2020, yet those in charge insist on pretending that nothing happened. I’ll be the first to admit, finding meaning when the world ends yet everything looks the same afterwards is hard. The world that ended wasn’t a world that was bound by physics. But it did end, and our leaders won’t even talk about it. Worse than that, they’re doubling down on the behaviors that made 2020 so awful.
It wasn’t just the pandemic that destroyed us, of course. It was the Trump presidency, and the decline of the Republican party into a plague of madness. But is unity truly the best we can do? No human has ever joined a group just because they said they were a group, they joined a group that was based around something. What, exactly, is America based around? Freedom? The police keep killing people of color and the Republicans insist on banning any book that has even slight hints of “wokeness”. Equality? Why was one man able to buy, and subsequently ruin, Twitter then? Religious tolerance? Then why are the only people elected to politics the same brand of Christian nutcase? The problem isn’t that we’re disunified, it’s that nobody believes in America anymore, and certainly not in the American Dream. Yet when people complain that they can’t believe in the world they grew up in, the only response those in charge seem to have is, “Well participate in it anyways.”
I don’t know what sort of message will be sufficient enough to bring us back together, but I don’t think I should be the one deciding that in the first place. I don’t believe in society as a concept anymore, let alone in the country I used to sing songs about. The world I imagine when I think of a Utopian future is so far removed from this one that it’s not even on the same planet. I just know that it wasn’t that long ago that people genuinely loved America and wanted to see it changed for the better. It could be that all we need to do to fix things is to simply start enforcing the messaging that brought people to America in the first place.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s that simple. As much as I, and many others, loathed Donald Trump, people still elected him. It may have been a fluke that got him into office, but he’s still popular among a lot of deeply broken/evil people. Even after destroying Twitter, Elon Musk is still beloved by a group of people who still, somehow, believe that he was sent to save us. I know Fascism is unpopular, but it’s also loud, mean, and has a bad habit of getting its own way. I’ve seen plenty of people on the left say, “You know, maybe we’d actually make progress if we stopped trying to be nice all the time.” And that’s just it. The messaging that brought people to America in the first place is a great foundation to build a community, but there still needs to be a direction for that community to go in, and all we have now is capitalism.
Whether capitalism was a good idea in the first place, I honestly don’t know. I just know that it keeps breaking on us, and the flaws that keep it from working as we want it to seem to be built into the system. To me, the biggest issue that it’s focused on increasing the amount of stuff we have, and that’s all it really tells us to do. It doesn’t tell us anything about how to make friends, what kind of things we should enjoy, it just tells us to keep buying stuff and making stuff and making more room for stuff. I get that it’s not the economy’s job to tell us about religion, but in America our economy has become our religion.
There are a lot of reasons we aren’t as religious anymore that I don’t have time to get into, but the core issue is that our economy became our religion, then Covid caused the economy to collapse, after we saw clear evidence that America wasn’t what we were told it was with a president who wasn’t committed to any of the stated ideals who stayed in office despite being loathed by all not inside his inner circle and being impeached twice. We don’t have a world to believe in and our leaders don’t have a reasonable response to this. I would think the bare minimum would be for someone at the top to acknowledge that Donald Trump represented none of America’s values, and that we the people need to work on fixing the problems. There’s your message, right there. “We know things are bad, we know we haven’t done enough to fix them, we promise we will hold all the corporations accountable and make them work with us to bring the country you knew back, only better, brighter, and more focused on happiness rather than just making things.”
But that won’t happen, because our leaders aren’t equipped to admit that, deep down, they know the world they built isn’t real. Like money, Santa Claus, and God, it has to be believed in, or it ceases to exist. But they’re at the center of society, the least equipped to admit that the ground they walk on isn’t holy. Fixing America would be a major blow to their worldview, and to the worldview of those who keep them in power. The fact of the matter is, in order to be saved, America has to die. It’s just a matter of who’s the first to kill it.
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