In essence, the surreal harshness of reality is that shit happens. Shit happens all the time in every corner of the earth. I saw a post come up on my newsfeed yesterday, with a few pictures from the Cheltenham races, and it informed me that 3 horses died while everyone watching, drank themselves under the table while wearing fur coats and expensive suits. I looked at the comment section, while I really didn’t need to do as I knew exactly what I was going to see. And I wasn’t wrong, literally, everyone was talking about how terrible it was and blah blah blah. Yeah people got so emotional about 3 horses, who they didn’t have any attachment to, dying while racing. Yeah, that’s so much worse than the hundreds of people who are murdered every day by bombings and air strikes.
3 horses. 3. Now I can see where people come from. I mean horses are beautiful animals, my family has had a long history with horses and we have 2 roaming around our field as we speak, they are two of the most majestic beasts on the planet. Some foggy winter mornings we would wake up and take a look down the field and see the two of them galloping around, which is a movie scene in itself. There is a certain innocence that we associate with beautiful things. It’s easy to empathise with something or someone beautiful. And in the case of the death of a horse or kitten, it makes us squirm and feel instant sadness. If something is innocent it is pure. But when we think of other humans, we rarely see them as pure, with the exception of babies and children. We know that we have dark thoughts all the time, we know that we are scheming, greedy, money hungry mongrels. And so it’s difficult to emphasise with the killing of other people who we don’t view as beautiful. So thousands of people could die as a result of bombings in the east, but people only seem to give a shit when a child gets washed up dead on a beach.
Bad shit happens all the time. If you want an iPhone, someone has to break their back working to assemble one and you can bet with confidence that they’re underpaid. People die in accidents that shouldn’t have happened, but they did happen. It’s unfortunate but it happens. That's the reality. That’s how it goes. For lots of people to live with a high standard of living, some people will have to live with a low standard of living. People think socialism will solve poverty and inequality. It won’t. You want socialism? Go to Venezuela, where people are shooting dogs in the street just to feed their families. And your probably thinking ‘OMG that poor dog!’.
No matter what state the economy is in, there will always be some level of inequality. That’s just how it is. It would be great if we could make all the bastards and rapists and murderers live in poverty while everyone else rocks in the high life, but that’s just not practical or even possible to facilitate. That’s the reality. It ain’t pretty but it’s real. I think lots of people keep chasing this unrealistic approach. An approach that is glorified on Tumblr and Twitter, not because it’s a GOOD idea, but because it’s an ATTRACTIVE idea.
People will say the rich guys up top are prejudice and want to see the world burn, and all they care about is profits. But few realise that if they really were that bad, they wouldn’t be that rich. Now there are some exceptions here but for the vast majority of the top 1%, they’re good guys. Most of those guys are rich because they provided a service or product that made peoples lives easier or better. People will criticise them, however, for not ending poverty. But those guys know that such a thing isn’t possible and it would be almost impossible to even convince the general public that it isn’t possible.
When humans gather in crowds, they take on crowd mentality. This crowd mentality actually decreases the level of intellect of individuals in that crowd. In a crowd, there is more of a sense of anonymity, which increases our likely hood of taking risks. So when stupid people gather for marches and strikes and all that other shit, they become even more stupid. As a result, you can’t even converse with them. And social media has now allowed those crowds to form in cyberspace so no matter where we are we can log onto Facebook or Twitter and observe the stupidest people in the world act and think like they are the most intelligent people in the world.
What a time to be alive!
Cormac