Musings of a Cynic

Imagine for a moment that you are driving down a long empty stretch of highway in Texas and you see a small gas independent station on the right hand side of the road. You pull over into the parking lot and stop the car next to a pump that looks at least 50 years old, free of any modern digital screens or card readers. You get out of the car and walk inside to find that not only is the interior entirely wood paneled and decorated with ancient cigarette ads that say things like “Call for Philip Morris”, it seems to have absolutely no modern technology in it at all. In fact you begin to wonder what is older, the decor or the Methusla of a woman hunched behind the register, complete with milky white eyes of someone whom the gods robbed of sight many moons ago. You feel unsettled and quickly make your selection, a rather dusty Almond Joy and walk up to the register to pay for the candy bar and the gas that you are in desperate need of. You greet the old woman and ask her how she is today. She replies “not so good. You see we have been having problems with shoplifting here and my children keep badgering me to install security cameras. We’ve never had them and I plan to keep it that way because people deserve their privacy.“ As she is talking you notice that on the floor in front of a register counter there is a deposit bag with $50,000 in in it that had she must have knocked off the counter by mistake. You know that you could easily pick it up, walk out the door and get into your vehicle with a potentially life changing amount of money and that you would never have to face accountability for it. If you are being honest with yourself, what would you do in this situation if this happened to you tomorrow?

I unfortunately don’t have an answer for how many people would or would not steal from the old woman, but I do know that we live in a world filled with people willing to sell others down the river for personal gain (particularly those seated in society’s positions of authority). It’s a safe bet that the people we all look up to for moral guidance in our society would likely have walked out with the money and slept like a baby. Those who are unwilling to get their hands dirty for personal gain rarely if ever end up in positions of power. One thing that can be said with absolute certainty, however, is that those who the sycophants of the ruling class would be totally unwilling to hold them accountable for a clear breach of the personal values the individual claims to hold.

The digital age and the advent of social media has compounded the obsession with self that came to a head near the end of the 20th century. Social media has resulted in people meticulously crafting a false image of themselves to present to others both online and in real life. The false image takes up for political causes and has no problem taking a hardline stances on things that would be inappropriate dinner conversation. The thing is, I wonder if these political opinions everyone seems to hold so dear actually belong to the individual, or if they are in fact just opinions fed to the masses and subsequently sewed into the fabric of the individuals digital avatar. Does Betty actually feel strongly about abortion, or does the identity she has manufactured have to feel strongly about it? Here is a question “Can someone actually claim to have an underlying moral standard in a world where political Overton windows are constantly shifting for those who have built their real world identities to reflect their digital avatars?” I propose that the general population no longer holds any value based beliefs. Values have been replaced with identity and “identity” has been made into something entirely binary. The vast majority of people are either ‘Team A’ or ‘Team B’, void of objectivity and pathologically dogmatic in their tribalism. On the surface they will claim to hold views based on personal values, but in practice these views easily shift when the group the individual identifies with moves the Overton Window. For example, take Greg. Greg constantly professes his love for his second amendment rights and decries any perceived attempts by the “other team” to infringe on those rights, but Greg is a filthy liar. If Greg’s own team were to say ban bump stocks, or discuss the need for “Red Flag Laws”, Greg will immediately mentally disassociate. His identity forces him to be unable to ever hold his team accountable for infringing on his rights and acting adversely to the values he claims to hold. Greg is unable to mentally reconcile this as the identity he has built his life around and presents to the world makes him unwilling and mentally unable to consider that his team might not be operating in his best interests.

Does the American majority hold a set of value based beliefs, or do they only claim to as long as the current cultural and political paradigm never challenges their identity? In my unfortunate experience I find that the vast majority of people are vapid and shallow, willing to endlessly consume things that reinforce their worldview and avoiding anything contrary to that worldview like the plague. Anything that threatens their false reality must be rejected wholesale and taken out behind the woodshed along with Logic and Reason for the Old Yeller treatment.

TLDR: most people are completely void of actual opinions and values that aren’t spoon fed to them by by pundits, politicians and other general demagogues.