[You
shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.]
93
What we hate is a
mirror of who we are. If there was not
some piece of us reflecting in the sentiment, the reaction would be impotent
rather than rile our fervor. Such
despise has little to do with the object, person, or action sensed, but with
the internal compass we choose. Killing,
fucking, violence, death, birth, embrace, encouragement, loving are a spectrum
to which we find repugnance or compassion based on the security in our
identity. Disgust is the inverse image
of self-identity of a healthy self-actualized person or the repressed desire of
one who displays a façade to costume one’s core.
First-world Christian
white-males have been stationed at the apex of the Meme for most of the world’s
recorded history due to the possession of superior technology over competing
cultures. Some party has to be held at
the top of the Meme. Race, ethnicity,
religion, and gender alone do not determine status, but they often exclude one
from being permitted to enter such supremacy competitions.
This position
makes first-world white-males immensely insecure. A human afforded such advantage at minimum
subconsciously knows he is no more or less deserving of such status as any
other iteration of human. This confliction
ranges from angry, self-entitled, judgmental, oblivious, to guilty. These are opinions of who one is which make
it difficult for an individual to segregate one’s core personality from how one
might differ if these fundamental variables of personhood were altered.
Would one still be
as competent? How would one’s education
and station differ based on the cascading effects of such alterations flowing
from parents of parents of parents into self?
How would one’s interests change?
How would the looks of others towards one shift? Would one have been interviewed? Would the conversations one has been privy to
in the journey of one’s life been muted or reworded? Would anyone at the top of the Meme-pedestal
really want to trade? Would the bottom
do the same?
The thought crime
of the tenth commandment of wanting what your neighbor has can be simplified to
wanting to be who your neighbor is or to see one’s self as superior for not
possessing what your neighbor possesses.
This includes these demarcations of race, ethnicity, religion and
gender. These are the inscrutable
possessions of human life.
Humans are born
either in body or mind to be these traits, which have greater or lesser value
in humanity based on the interplay of perceptions in one’s environment. The Meme wishes to order this interplay into
a consistent predictable global or at least regional standard. This is why those who first acquired the
preponderance of wealth wrote the history books and never let go of the Meme.
The Meme makes a
thought crime out of wanting another’s home, which is surface. The underbelly of the Meme is teaching us not
only to want another’s goods, but to want to be like them, to want to emulate
behavior, and finally to look, appear, and embody their life. In turn the reverse is true, we are taught to
not want to be like certain people or to emulate, look or appear or embody
their life.
This is the cult
of celebrity, advertising products, heroes whether they are in a football
pitch, street corner, boardroom, or holy book.
This is the defamation of the Poor, of the satisfied with what you have,
of non-consumerism, of non-wanting, and of not fitting a beauty ideal. This is the female African American hair
industry. These are distractions form
the inescapable volition of the self.
94
The Meme wants
more than any emotion for us to be insecure.
The Meme wants us to define who we are and how much we are worth through
the standards of pro-Meme society. If
morality must come from a book, rather than innate to the self, how could
something so less imperative to existentialism like esteem be independent of
how one feels one is perceived by others?
In this logic we have no identity, but that granted by others so in we
live a significant measure of non-existence.
The anti-Meme is
recognizing that we are alone. We are interdependent in life, but we are alone into eternity in the most joyous
sense. We have this finite time here to
develop our self to make an impact good or bad to cascade not into a judgment
or benefit that is ultimately selfish by leveraging salvation or perdition, but
clean into the choice, the act, the moment for its wholesome goodness.
This alone gives us the power to do true
goodness. This goodness bears not the
guilt of one’s position in the Meme attempting to pass through the eye of the
needle or to please a sadist. This
goodness screams love at the universe demanding no requite. This alone
of the anti-Meme grasps one’s existence by the throat, startles our body into
action to live in a weapon of unparalleled abandon in the universe.
For in the
anti-Meme, one sees today as the last day one may have not on Earth, not when
convenient, but ever. If not ever, for
this cannot be proven or disproven, then one holds one’s self to the structure
of a decision on the matter to live as if there is nothing beyond this speck of
breathing. One invests the same totality
whether an afterlife exists, for one has chosen and maybe delighted to be
proven incorrect later, but nevertheless made the most of each day absent the
vapid drain of worship and debate.
In the anti-Meme
one is drawn to pay attention to one’s surroundings to see where one’s
capability and availability fit into the puzzle not set upon the stage by a
grand plan, but by the volition of all life including a worthy self. Each is alone
and choosing. This majesty is the table
of time knocking decision dominoes like a virus of mistakes and dumb luck to
ram volition through systematic disparities to which one aids, acquiesces, and
suffers.
These are the cogs
of community that life cannot be fair.
Fair is an illusion of the confluence of what one feels entitled,
blessed, or cursed to endure based on the calculations of what one might
experience if such fundamental accoutrements of self were different. What if I were white, black, or brown? What if I had a penis? What if my genetic predecessors had copulated
in a varied iterations to prompt my non-existence or if the ladder-rung
combination of my combining parental gametes would have arranged in an
alternative sequencing so that I was less like my older sister and more like my
younger brother? What if I knew her
sacred words? What if I was taller? What if this subcutaneous fat did not demand
this waist size? What if my mother had
not chosen suicide? What if I had that
abortion?
These crimes of
thought wanting to be who we are not or others to know what it would like to be
who we feel we are parade and empower the Meme.
For the anti-Meme is not concerned with appearances, what was, how tough
or easy only what one chooses to do in the now.
There is this moment, what did we do with it? What are we doing with the next in the
ungraspable present?
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