Man, this one is going to be a bitch to write about, because getting it right feels terribly challenging at the moment. We should start at the beginning, which involves me sitting on my cushion, a daily discipline of mine. You know, when you try to sit absolutely still and let the sound of your breath inhabit you, thoughts seem to float over the rhythm of the air, moving through you and out of you and back again.
One morning, the word “ethics” floated into my consciousness and hung in the air for my twenty-five minutes of immobile, internalized reflection. Like many of you, I have been looking for light in the darkness of this hour. This word managed to get stuck in my mind and got me thinking, not only about the difficulty of its meaning, but trying to find a path, a way to both cope and come to terms with where we find ourselves.
The people who mine our data, everything imaginable about us, have found ways to manipulate our minds. Trump, who I will get to in a minute, is a sinister, glistening example of fake news, but not the kind he stupidly refers to. Journalism and Advertising have fornicated with each other and their bastard offspring has come to full maturity in social media. There are soulless, greedy sons of bitches, who know our entire array of buttons and how to push them, without our awareness.
A company called Cambridge Analytics harvested all of our information, millions and millions of us and they determined our vulnerabilities and preyed upon them, like vultures on a medium rare steak. Using techniques that put Mad Men to shame, they figured out how to mobilize armies of people to march, lock step, in any direction they chose. They had a number of rehearsals in marginalized countries and were able to score electoral victories for those who paid them. To date, their crowning achievement was our 2016 Presidential election. They pumped up an army of support for Trump with bullshit stories and popularized slogans about Hillary. They created news, calculated to embolden support for their man and denigrate his opponent.
Other governments and global corporations were hot on the trail of this dark, global data bank. We now find ourselves in a world, where all our minds are subject to a kind of focused propaganda, having us do the bidding of the most powerful forces on the planet and there are no good guys in this scenario. Every damn one of us are pawns in a game of angles, pushing us where we think we want to go and I don’t give a shit who you are, because there are no white hats to be found.
I want to talk for a second about Mark Zuckerberg. This kid is only thirty-five years old! Imagine growing up fairly comfortable in Yonkers, NY a wealthy suburb of NYC. You’re a bright boy and you get into Harvard, its own world of academic fantasy. Regardless of how you pull it off, you come up with this idea for linking college kids together in some kind of online, social web. How in God’s name do you think this young guy could possibly be prepared for megaton, social explosion called FaceBook? I will certainly give him credit for being really bright, with a terrific imagination.
Imagine what must have gone through the minds of some of the brilliantly, disciplined scientists when they witnessed the first atomic bomb? For them, it was an instantaneous shock, while for Zuckerberg, it kind of creeped up on him, albeit pretty damn fast. It has become easy to vilify the kid, but I have never heard any compassion. Do you think he was prepared to deal with the dark forces that lurk in the darkness?
Just like that damn bomb, forces have been unleashed upon us and there is no going back. There is a vanity attached to intellect and we are already being hopelessly victimized by it. Enter the word of the day: ethics. Good luck trying to find an easy definition. It reminds me of something called the Buddha Way. Oh, and by the way, Buddha and guys like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived around the same time, 400BC, give or take a century. They were all wrestling with what it’s like to be a human being and why we do what we do?
In my monumentally, humble opinion, while some of them thought they were dealing with the mind, they were wrestling with something far more complicated and much harder to define. Ladies and Gentleman, I am talking about our hearts. They were all looking for what it is about us that makes us so dynamic, so hard to corral with a paragraph or two, or even volumes.
If you know my writing, it won’t shock you to know I am crying once again.
We seem to be lost in our minds at the moment and I think we are losing our minds. How can it be that a man, who is so ugly and selfish and so unintelligent can be worshipped by so many? Our ancient ethics would say that continually lying for personal gain is not us at our best. How has emulating a bully, who belittles others because of their religion, skin color or sexual orientation, become a role model for our children?
Every damn one of us are being played for suckers and don’t be looking for saints on the Left either. Where is the voice of the angels? Where are there people talking about our hearts? Where is the search for our humanity? Where are people like Martin Luther King, asking us to aspire to more than where we are? Personally, I don’t give a shit about Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. I want to hear those angels within us all, who can’t be bought or twisted by the mind fucking we are subjected to every day.
What does it mean to be a human being? I was on my stationary bike this morning, listening to Rhapsody in Blue and I heard the angels.