The Politics Rat Race

Politics, Religion, and Other Things Which Mix Like Diet Coke and Menthos

Fossil ledges, Drummond Island. Much nicer to look at than literally-demented politicians with their boring suits.

Increasingly, since January 20th, I have been feeling like politics is mostly just a rat race, though you still need to vote. It’s pretty much the same point I made in my articles about the Gilded Age and universities and about terracore and other places. I don’t want to live in a Gilded Age building eating wine and cheese which I think are gross and expensive fish eggs and driving around a BMW and whatever. Old World politics can stay in the Old World, and ideally they wouldn’t have to deal with it either. I don’t want to be a Young Republican and I don’t want to be a Young Democrat, or a regular Republican or a regular Democrat. If anything I just want to read more stories about mutants, aliens, and wizards and I want to go look at dinosaurs, sea creatures, bugs, rocks, plants, and fungi. I want to learn more math and more programming and some more recipes. I could go read some more books, I still need to finish Earthsea and Dracula since I decided that fiction isn’t “pointless” due to “being fake” and now I have a lot of books to read. I have actually read and finished one, The Chrysalids, which was recommended to me and is much shorter than either of those while managing not to be light reading whatsoever which seemed pretty perfect.

Even rereading that would be better than politics because politics is what’s pointless. Politics is the problem and voting for the least political person you can lest the US fall to Hitler or Stalin then going back to generally not caring all that much is the solution. I don’t quite condemn politics so strongly as the people who think politics is just for people who’ve failed at life (ditto for the same argument applied to philosophy,) I myself do have some political beliefs even though I don’t really like to talk politics all that often since it’s just kind of boring when I could be talking about computers or dinosaurs or flowers or basically anything else, and I’m not so disaffected, these people who talk politics all the time are. So please do go out and vote for people who aren’t fascist dictators and then go garden or read about sharks or learn Python or make some Caribbean food that the Rothschilds and Vanderbilts wouldn’t want you to have even though pineapple and coconut is way better than stinky cheese and bland wine and whatever they like now. Throughout most of history most people have lived under horrible totalitarian systems, and I don’t even mean authoritarian, I mean really totalitarian, because religion was also tied into the state, and often the king or queen was also worshipped as a god. Even a lot of dictatorships are better than that, never mind the US government with the choices between equally-unpopular Trump and Biden. In that light everyone should be really happy to go out and vote for Trump or Biden and then, maybe if we keep up the voting, we’ll get better candidates because people will be more engaged.

We probably can and should make politics more interesting, run some more punk rockers and scientists and whoever on the local level and then move them on up and I think I’d be OK doing that too, but until people stop treating politics like religion I don’t think people will even think to do that anyway, because I honestly think awful politicians mostly come into play precisely when people treat politics like religion and they’re just thinking about politics all the time, they aren’t thinking about punk rock or science or anything. Politics really is downstream from culture, even if the people who say that want to turn the culture into something that furthers their politics, and on the topic of religion, another word for religion is cult in the non-pejorative sense and as I like to say, cult is culture (iä! iä!) There are probably bigger things going on than political events anyway, there are what I see as more natural-historical events and there might be really quasi-apocalyptic or actually-apocalyptic ones too, though no one can predict the actual apocalypse in religious texts even if you’re super wise or a precog and that’s kind of the point. So even improving politics is probably kind of a distraction at this point if you get too into it.

Cult is culture! Iä! Iä!

Also no offense meant to rats. Rats know not to engage in rat racing probably better than humans do at this point. Rats aren’t the ones who want to rat race, but humans choose to rat race.

Substack is also pretty much like any other social media but much better. You can get really good things from it, but it still thrives on people getting addicted to dopamine and adrenaline. So don’t do that.