Laughing at the World

 June 2020 was the month that humour died. It was in this month that the pitch of public outcry reached such a frenzied point that even someone as checked out as me began to grow weary of it. No longer could anything be tastefully mocked, but now commentators and citizens alike on all sides began to burn with ardent zeal for whatever position they had fallen into. 

Perhaps I don't take things seriously enough but I can't help but laugh at the person in a store wearing 2 layers of medical masks, goggles, and a face shield. Another might be rather disturbed by this sight - which is a fair reaction - but I don't see how one can keep sane if they respond to every bizarre sight with such gravity. Humour can keep men sane when the only other option is despair and resentment, anyone who has worked in a degrading fast food or retail job knows that this is true.

By laughing at the unreality of the world we recognize its falsity and refuse to submit to it, it is put below us in its proper place. Our clown world is funny precisely because it is wrong, the pieces are out of place and the image formed grows stranger and stranger. Without humour it is easy to become the inverse of this distorted image, wrong in different ways but wrong all the same.

Another factor behind the mass inability to laugh at this world is a plague of self-importance. The origin of this self-importance is nothing I can fault anyone for, as it has arisen out the universal desire for meaning in life. All the crises, social movements and phenomena of the past year or so has revealed the bizarre things people will do and believe to fill this void. When you base your life around opposing the group at the opposite end of the social/political spectrum then of course you can't laugh at them because they threaten your very being. Our identities have been reduced to transient political platforms, social goals, and silly moralisms. We are all like children playing a vast school yard game, except that we have forgotten that the whole thing is make believe and that at any second the bell will ring and we will be shocked back into reality where trifles have to be put away.

Covid-19 and Advertising

Fuck that.

Billboards – and other forms of large scale intrusive advertising – are disturbing as is, but plastering the typical Covid-19 slogans and shibboleths on them makes things exponentially worse. Modern advertising is a form of psychological violence; it is no secret that the ads that populate the screens that dominate our daily lives have been meticulously designed by psychologists to have a powerful effect upon the viewer. Having lived in a digital environment my entire life there is no doubt that the images and slogans of advertising have had a profound impact on my psyche, it is only in the past few years that I’ve developed a healthy aversion to this sort of manipulation. Which brings me to the present situation of our sterilized world, I think one of the things that the Chinavirus situation can illuminate for us is the power that advertisements have over belief.

I’ve been inclined to think that the powerful nature of advertising is the most immediate cause of the Covid hysteria and resultant changes in way of life and worldview among the population. Here the slogans and advertising serve no other purpose but to implant a set of dogmatic beliefs into the masses, and it is astonishing how readily this has been assimilated. It’s like normal advertising but on the steroid of fear. And the new sterile way of viewing the world has been prioritized over what were once more fundamental concepts like family, religion, and social norms. Now our neighbours are the enemy if they profess a different creed. I suppose this is not the first time a new radical set of beliefs has been successfully implanted into the masses through media, but now it has been done so well that there is not even any real resistance to these ideas. In a detached, historical way of looking at things it is interesting to see this in action; but in reality it’s just fucking depressing. (A great analysis of the Covidian worldview is found here on Cosmos Crouched.)

Lastly, there is no doubt in my mind that slogans like “stay home” and “stay safe” do nothing but produce a pathetic society. Living in safety is no life at all. I can’t think of a lower goal for a society or an individual than simply being “safe.” A life worth living must be dangerous, nothing is more antithetical to the human spirit than sterility and confinement.