What do you think will happen to you when you die (aside from cremation, interment or entombment)? This question rarely comes up in public. Our death-phobic West avoids the subject. Too modern to fear God, we dread oblivion instead, enough that we’d prefer to dwell in a self-made hell to defer the unknown. Habitually living as if half dead already, too many folk aren’t fully conscious at death, let alone beyond it. But imagine if you were… What version of death would you want?
Because what we want is the bottom line, our top priority in the West. Capitalism keeps asking that question, while making tempting (if empty) suggestions. And the more we tell it, the more it tries to sell us: Would you like fries/popcorn/cream/an endless stream of cute memes with that? Capitalism won’t fat-shame you, it just expands its plus-size range and panders to your appetites (which it had a hand in whipping up). Can-do, slaphappy, crap-filled, corrupting, culture-cancelling capitalism…
It keeps on asking us what we want even if no-one else gives a toss. When was the last time some campaign or company sent you a survey? Five minutes ago? And these relentless, inquisitorial, personal-data-gathering questions lull many subjects into the fantasy that their answers actually matter. But all these surveys are just a diversion. So why not forgo this fake flattery and forget our precious preferences for long enough to ask a few questions ourselves?
Like, what does capitalism want? And what does giving it cost us? Because, let’s face it, at the end of each 24-hour day, capitalism is faring better than we are. For starters, it doesn’t need sleep. The less downtime for us, the more profits it reaps. Need coffee to keep up? You’re welcome, says Starbucks; service with a siren smile on its disposable cups. Need pain relief, sedation or entertainment to unwind? Pfizer, Netflix etc. can’t wait to oblige. Capitalism uses our stress, pain, exhaustion, boredom, loneliness and depression to sell us ever more products so it can swell to yet huger proportions – a planet-sized abscess ripe to be lanced. What would it take to drain it? Wouldn’t we drown in a deluge of pus? And hey, who can afford to pull the plug? We all need a job, a pension, sponsorship. Which reminds me… Notice who sponsored the latest Grammys? But let’s forget about pseudo-music so bad that it seems designed to reverse the upward flow of your kundalini and stifle your life force, and get back to the question of how you’d want death and its aftermath to be…
Or does that depend on the meaning of ‘you’, as in soul vs. ego? The soul has been debunked by Science, and the ego is a fragile construct, liable to collapse under pressure. ‘You’, in this inauthentic culture, can change its identification from one update to the next. Better, then, not to think of death, but of how you’ll be commemorated… Dismembered by hyper-digital capitalist conditions, then remembered in emoji-studded posts on social media or in the minds of mourning, maundering loved ones. But meanwhile, who can you turn to for guidance re what goes down when you die? Science will give a vastly different answer to a priest. But no: we’ve anointed biologists with divine authority. Our spiritual advisers are scientists and doctors. Ergo, life must be preserved at all costs: sacrifice quality, wave bye-bye to autonomy. Speaking of which…
Despite brisk business-as-usual rhetoric (amid calls for a ‘reset’ from an opportunistic elite), a malign and widespread contagion has hastened the slide of our civilisation over the last three+ years. Transmissible without human contact, defying hand sanitisers and masks, spanning oceans and landmasses in one click, destroying old allegiances, ravaging reason… This scourge is fear, its seeds sown by the mainstream media for Big Tech/Pharma to harvest. Fear, mystified in the underground media as ‘mass formation psychosis’ (jargon on par with ‘polymerase chain reaction’), has made an obscenely rich few far richer and a vast poor underclass poorer, while creating even more waste: masks and PPE, vax vials and syringes, pizza boxes, styrofoam cups, plastic packaging etc. And the masquerade isn’t over yet.
But why co-opt the word psychosis? To beat the system at its own game? Most medical terms for altered states borne by humans for millennia without psych intervention serve the mental-health profession more than its highly suggestible patients. A surgeon can remove a tumour without having had one because the task is purely mechanical. But the psyche is far subtler than any machine. Trauma tends to precede misfiring brain chemistry, so empathy gained from having been there has more potential to heal. In days of yore, insanity spelled evil enchantment – the gods made men (or women, or other gendered identities) mad. And when one God displaced them, demons got blamed, so exorcists, with their chants and charms, became the new shamans. Today, we bow to Medicine, which wields its power by naming: ritual diagnosis to banish uncertainty, even if relief is just psychological because the knowledge confirms that suffering, with or without a cure, will follow. Of course it can also curse if a prognosis is terminal and final days measured lengthwise vs. depth-wise. Yet to name is to tame, and so the patient, after submissively waiting, can undergo chemical/surgical treatment or palliation.
Psychosis: an umbrella term for a plague of classifications so vague that they often overlap, as Medicine stands outside looking in, not through the windows of the soul but the lenses of its unblinking equipment. Effecting miracle cures with implants, transplants, prosthetics etc., reversing cruel acts of fate and revising errors made by nature, challenging the spectre of death in its quest for the grail of immortality while leaving a grisly trail of collateral damage, Medicine gains power through mass fear and ignorance, whether or not it delivers.
And Big Tech is on a mission to enforce and compound this ignorance through censorship of dissent, endless mind-numbing repetition of officially sanctioned ‘facts’ preferentially ranked to seize and hold your attention before it can stray from the beaten track and stumble across alternatives to the establishment narrowtive narrative. Unwitting (or uncaring) beneficiaries of countless products tested on animals, we too are captive lab rats trained to chow down on pellets of ‘information’ calibrated to keep us docile and functioning in predictable ways – the better to control the outcomes of planet-wide experiments. A paranoid narrative? Been there, done that – way back in the ’80s. And since that brutal initiation, I’ve ever so slowly gotten saner, only to observe the world rapidly getting crazier.
Young children and psychotics share at least one notable feature: both dwell in an enchanted world. But parents, guardians, teachers and digital media at large keep telling children that fairies, nature spirits and ghosts aren’t really there until children learn to ignore their presence, then lose any natural power to sense it. And for those adults who succumb to so-called psychosis, or use psychedelics, or both, the system offers treatment and won’t always take no for an answer. Psych drugs designed to suppress enchantment can be mandated, while mind-expanding drugs outside of authorised clinical settings get banned. Luckily, drug-free methods exist to enhance our inner potential. And the less we delegate our immense imaginative faculties to relatively unsubtle – if, in its insistence, compelling – technology, the more possible it becomes to rediscover and follow these age-old pathways to soul retrieval, healing and wholeness.
observer of times 