F-Society

By Michael Blevins

It’s hard to find objective measures for the health status of our society. We have to strongly consider that our modern way of informing ourselves of what is going on, is actually doing more harm than help. The news is noise. It is good for the same reason that a loud BANG! is useful: attention. Media, as a profit seeking mogul and power hungry machine, is simply a noise maker to get you to look. It is usually clamoring on about this or that under the pretense that it is important for people to be aware, but they are simply after our awareness. Ad revenue is the main goal of news media. What is most important on a 24-hour cycle has nothing to do with health, safety, or current events, but spreading the word that there are new appliances and detergent that you can’t live without. We use a gunshot to start a race because it has faster reaction times. This comes from bypassing all of the filters involved in decision making — in essence — it bypasses logic. The news and media bypass logic, sometimes using gunshots in order to do it. There are very few things that are worth your direct attention that aren’t immediately in front of you. Those events will be obvious. The news that matters most comes from signals within, not noises that are screaming at you about products you can’t live without. The signal I’m getting now is that as a society, we are fucked.

Do you ever wonder why talk of an apocalypse seems more and more prevalent? The end of times has been a constant throughout human history. Prophecies of a rapture or a great reckoning permeate almost every single civilization. I have to imagine that every great technological advancement that has helped humanity, has also carried with it the possibility of demise. The Bulletin of Atomic scientists have maintained the measurement of The Doomsday Clock since 1947, after the destruction power of atomic energy was realized. That’s right we have a secular, nonprofit committee that’s sole purpose is to tell us just how fucked we are. And because we have been a few minutes to midnight since its invention, its noise is not concerning. Ultimate collapse is now a common theme in our entertainment, this has an uncanny ability to implement itself into our culture. In the last few years, I have found myself in conversations with friends and even the odd stranger about what some might deem “prepper-light” talk. Food storage, firearms, water filtration, and HAM radios are becoming normal considerations in an age that most have never grown or killer their own food. This seems like histrionics, but the normalization of believing your future enemy walks among you, starts to change your behavior. And really, who is really thinking that living underground for years, eating freeze-dried space food, and re-filtering your urine for potable drinking fluid resembles anything that anyone you know could tolerate? With all this doom and gloom, and the inevitable zombie outbreak, the view that you want to survive whatever is going to cause this is the ultimate optimists point of view. Remember when you were forced to stay in your house for 2-weeks, only to be consoled by UberEATS and Netflix? What do you think a nuclear winter is going to feel like?

Imagine owning a business, a successful one, where all involved are at least profiting from it to a degree that allows the simple pleasures of life: good food, social interactions, and the odd vacation. Sure, there are ups and downs, a crisis or two to avoid. It helps to have someone who is disproportionately affected by worry. They sound the alarm, maybe too much, but they are useful as a reference point. Now imagine that despite the company’s success, the vast majority of employees start to believe that the business is doomed to fail. Employees are so convinced by this that they are taking days off to find other employment. They are selling shares and assets in order o insulate against the impending collapse. This would not be a functional business. As a society we are not functional.

Society is fucked because we feel like it is fucked. And it only feels that way because other people feel that way. Our idea about the world is largely influenced by what we are shown of the world. but this idea of impending doom is self manifesting, we need to acknowledge that our own disbelief in our future, is our future. We are not receptacles of reality. We are mongers of emotion, merchants of fear, an “F-society.” This IS the game. And to be clear it is not what “I want” but what “I feel.”  I feel fear, I am fear. All of this feeling is terror, it is playing on our natural reaction to an emotion that we have little control over. Fear is a sales pitch. It is the time tested emotion of manipulation. Everything we have ever declared war on is essentially just opening a market place for the fearful. You see it in any place that people are not prepared or confident in their ability to adapt. We buy our way out of panic. We purchase ease, like we might if it were just another apple in the produce isle. The irony is that who we consider “preppers” are generally just people who over-consume products, they haven’t prepared their minds to handle fear. Because the fear never leaves, no matter how much you spend, it just shifts and becomes another brewing anxiety waiting for the next grifter to wield. 

Fuck society for making me fear it. And for what, so I can have the newest iPhone? All of this Doom and gloom so that publicly traded companies can continue to grow an annual 14%? A large percentage of the population believes that some sort of end is inevitable, and because of that, Black Friday will go off without a hitch this year. I want to say that I won’t become that. I refuse to stockpile ammo, to believe that in my lifetime, trips to Target will be punctuated by intermittent machine-gun fire. That my hopes of getting a new Dyson might be unraveled by mortar fall on aisle 6. 

We don’t need a community of preppers, we need a fucking functional society, an “F-society.” A place where our worries and fears aren’t amplified as reality entertainment television, and sold back to us in low interest payments. A functioning society is not a utopia, but it certainly isn’t one that the vast majority of its people believe is going to implode. This is an individual problem, it is our thoughts as multiplied and manifested in the scale of humanity. What you think will happen is the foundation and the direction that the future will go. This is the power of ideas. Our world is made of ideas, culture is simply the aggregate of beliefs in the collective organism known as society. Collective living organisms, of which we are a part, can either fester or flourish, it simply depends on what you feed it. You are either the path to a better future or the pathogen that diseases it. 

A fearful-society can’t be a functional-society. It’s either fix-society or fuck-society.