Why The Epstein Files Should Inspire You, Desire, and Why You Should Embrace Being Unapologetically Yourself. Right. Now.
This is a more personal, intimate, sister essay to the first post "What is There to Do?". This can be read separately since I will not be referencing much from it. That first post talk some direct political, economical, and social topics. I also referenced the rise of television, the internet, surveillance, and technology as a whole and how new generations are able to use these tools towards class consciousness and creating opportunities without higher powers. Those are topics which are a little more concrete, I guess as concrete as culture can be. This essay will be a shorter, more personal, "think piece" to compliment the last part of that essay, citing more of my own opinions and findings. I feel the last part of the essay might've talked about how/why we must fight back and act in our current system, but it shied away from how that is easier said than done. Obviously in a physical sense there is a great risk. In a more personal sense, it reminds me when people respond to peoples' various mental illnesses with "have you tried just not thinking about it?". It is very easy to tell someone to express themselves and do whatever you can, however small that might be. However, most people I talk to are afraid of the social implications: the vulnerability, the automatic outcast on a societal level, the "cringe". It's akin to how people (including me) are afraid to creatively express themselves in public, or to "put themselves out there". The "coming out" of your identity essentially, is something humanity has struggled with forever. Political identity is wrapped within that same framework, politics being the constant elephant in the room but taboo subject not to be spoken about. A large percentage of the population struggles with putting themselves out there in any regard that has to do with their image, identity, "aesthetic", whatever your word is for it, as at this point they have all lost meaning and almost mean all the same thing at the same time. Someone who is nervous to show their artwork for the first time might feel the same about sharing a, let's say, anarchist ideal that they believe in. They might be afraid of alienating their peers or whoever, or maybe of being vulnerable in public, I'm not sure. This post is to address that vulnerability, and to serve as inspiration. Selfishly, this halfway serves as me sharing some of what has helped me, and what I have learned in the past 5 or so years to grow as a person.
I have a little bit of a taboo confession I kind of feel bad for: The Epstein Files have inspired me more than any moment in the past decade or so. Now before you report this page and sever communications with me, I hope you all know me well enough to know (and I mean especially if you read the first post) that I have ethical grounds for such statement. Now obviously there are more in those files than I could possibly cover within this, I'm really not even going to try. What I will add is a link to a good overview resource and its various data visualizations: here.
I was going to give a brief cultural history like the first post to start giving background into how the Epstein files relate to us as internet users, and I will, but first I need to clear my name and clarify. The Epstein Files have inspired me because in a "dark woke" way, it shows there really is no mystical thing that you don't have that these upper echelons of society possess. These depraved monsters have just lied, cheat, and stole their way (nepotism is still a timeless avenue though). It almost felt like an emotional breath of fresh air, there really is nothing wrong with me. There's no secret education, no gene that you need to possess or that the universe/God has to grant you with, it's not some mix of intelligence and hard work (I guess those help), nothing really separating you from the top, they bleed like you. This might sound almost naive, almost like an obvious statement, and I would agree. I think it is pretty obvious that the 1% is nothing special, but in practice people will show otherwise. People will commit their whole lives and beings into emulating what a league of exploitive billionaires have done before them, people treat companies and its operations almost like a being itself, and worship cultural and historical figures as Gods (as in they are separate from mortal beings, something unachievable). This is the true evil and ultimate force of class in my eyes, because it acts without you ever being involved. For example, a young person could meet a neighbor who has a huge house, a couple of nice cars, and successful within their career. This young person through media, societal and parental conditioning, and a natural inclination, would potentially look up to and admire this neighbor and want to achieve that lifestyle. As soon as that young person walks into a room or whatever to meet this neighbor, without ever meeting this person, already is preconditioned on how to act and think around this person. That is just in the present, future implications could be greater, since this then creates a butterfly effect of a sort of "class conditioning" and how to conduct and think around those in a higher class. That is the way most people think from what I can tell, and some even make it almost a competition to see who can copy these upperclassmen of society the most. Podcasters and writers alike love to tout "I have spoken to 100 billionaires", "I have read over 200 biographies on successful businessmen", and so on. They are just the butt of the joke because in the end, they are the reason the billionaires are making money from the biographies and the podcaster is not even touching close to a billion. We are all the butt of the joke, as all of us look up to someone at one point or another in our life who are classes above us. This is another more personal avenue for what I referred to in the first essay, where we have constantly relied on a higher institution of some sort. Whether we admire something about their character/life or maybe we see something of ourselves in them, and we look up to them because we long for having higher respect and more potential/support within our current system, and we see that they possess that.
The reason I am referencing these hypothetical people (the young person, the podcaster) is because they represent how society interacts with class, and how the people who do not benefit from their class's position in the hierarchy create almost this mindset that they are "missing" something. This "something" can be anything, a lack of education, a lack of effort, a lack of genetic gifts, the list goes on. We forever think we are missing something, even if we accomplish the last "missing" thing that was on the ever growing to do list. This brings me to The Epstein Files. These people we are reading within these files are supposed to represent the highest degrees of society. CEOs, researchers, academy department heads, lawyers, politicians, journalists, campaign organizers, so many different careers and the top people who represent them that we would otherwise be consulting Google to try to take note of, are plastered everywhere across the files. Some of these perpetrators are names people across the world study, emulate, look up to or are even subjected to, and base their worth off of (or indirectly, by basing their worth off of the society these people fostered). This should uproot everything you think about yourself. Really sit back for a few moments and ponder your relationship to this world, this society, and this system you reside in. You have been so alienated in this world that was architected before you by people who you yourself would most likely wipe off this earth if you had the chance, and now they make the rules which you must follow physically, socially, culturally, and economically. These monsters through their stakes in our system, have sank their claws into your fundamental psychology. Now keep in mind the modern understanding of psychology and sociology started way after the dawn of Capitalism, class, and free market economy. It really makes you shudder when you sit back and think to yourself: what would humanity, and myself, really be like if you eradicated class and our system that incentivizes it?
I could never, and am afraid to even ponder that question and its implications, since it would involve methods and societal rules that span across human history entirely. What I would like to shed light on is what it means to you and how you look at yourself, but first I would like to talk about Capitalism as a whole (I spend enough time critiquing it, never just factually talking about it). If I could require everyone to read one book in school it would be "Talking to my Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism" by Yanis Varoufakis as it inspired me to stop looking at economics as some mathematical study mixed with politics, and more of philosophy, a philosophical outlook on humanity's imprint at large. The book also made me realize everyone on earth should at least know the fundamentals of the economy that they're a forceful participant in, to better understand their place in it, how they are a participant and how people "succeed" in this system/it's goals entirely. Anywho, Capitalism revolves around capital, we all know this as it's literally in the name. One way we must stop looking at capital, or money at large, is as just in the terms of survival and "check to check" as most of us know it in the form of a checking account and instead as a "vote" or resource to create change, big and small. Capital can be created out of thin air with our federal reserve/bank being based on a fiat currency (money backed on trust), which then flows into banks, which then flows into businesses in the form of loans, which then flows into the individual in the form of income through their labor (or they then can start a business in the form of a loan from the bank, creating a new cycle), this is a very rudimentary explanation of our system but one that will serve our purposes (plus Das Kapital does a fine enough job explaining and critiquing our system). The theory of the system lies in the trust to businesses and individuals to use their capital as a means to create change, build infrastructure, help public works, provide healthcare, all the things basically you're missing but want. It relies on people who hold the most capital to provide for those who don't, since they in turn need more capital. Within the very columns of our system is exploitation. Capital is the end all be all, as "investing" is supposed to be the vehicle of change. Recently we've seen a rise in this concept within the United States Postal Service, a public service that has economists urging it to become privatized so investors can "grow" the "company" (even though this is a basic human right and public service, it cannot grow or be expected to profit or create capital because of it's very definition). An optimal capitalist would assume a billionaire will pay taxes to help the public and then use their investments to grow companies that help and advance the world, instead we have Polymarket and the commodification of art in the form of generative AI. Since capital is to be expected to be the optimal resource for us, the commodification of everything we know, concrete and abstract, has killed our culture and us as people. Something that we objectively would have looked at 20 years ago as dystopian is incentivized under Capitalism. An example of this is Polymarket, since prediction markets are a capitalist's wet dream, it's the ultimate public marketplace that uses capital at it's resource where everything is a commodity, everything is a market, there is no sacred grounds in which capital cannot touch. Instead of there being any respect for the fast food worker, an objectively more skilled labor that what a partner at a private equity firm does (a key player in our system by the definition of who holds the most resources for change), I can just "bet" someone will not pick up my order from a restaurant, creating a market in which we all will bet if someone will do it, and when it hits someone's ideal market price, they will go pick up my order. A true hellscape that makes humans at large a commodification, which we are already used to in the form of "temp services" and labor agencies, which is ironic that we will respect those as a means to an end in our system but will disrespect sex workers, who sell their bodies to create value in their system just as all of us.
Sex workers, and workers in general, are the backbone and unspoken heroes of human history, with the markets that are centered around the emotion of "desire" to be a force that has dictated us for just as long (a great read for this is "Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World" by Aja Raden). I could never hope to talk about the history of labor in this post, and I do not want to be another straight white guy trying to be a voice for sex workers, as much as I'd like to. I would like to talk about desire, and how it relates to us, how you see yourself and the "Epstein Class". Desire is defined as "a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen", I think about it as something else from innate instincts like hunger, sexual drive, herd mentality, etc (even though it could inspire desires) and instead see it as something from the complex mind entirely, inspired by outside influences. We might have an innate feeling of hunger, but to "crave" or "desire" a pizza is something else. Since this essay focuses on how class and capital relates to your identity, I think this is an important distinction to make.
I think it should be stated that it seems to me through everyone I speak to and read of, through the aforementioned natural desire to want a larger stake in your system, do not actually want what we previously conceive of as "power". This "power" we previously envisioned through having larger capital, and therefore larger control, in our system (policy change, lobbying, or just the sheer amount of money to do whatever you want) does not directly correlate to the common person, especially those today. It seems higher classes, or the "Epstein Class", use capital as it was intended, to invest in companies/lobby for politicians or individuals to create the hellscape (the nation/economy) that they want you, the lower class or really just anyone besides them, to live in. This is as opposed to most of you I am sure, which if you had infinite wealth you would most likely help everyone you know, buy everything you have ever wanted, etc, it is like Gucci Mane said in "Highly Recommended": "I spend cash like it's playful, I feel like that is what it's made for" as it is classism at its finest - the elite use their capital as a resource to morph the world you live in and want to dominate/exploit you, and you want to use your capital as a means to survive and enjoy your life/labor. I do not think it is inherently a bad thing to want to participate in your system (though you deserve the basic human right to not), but since in Capitalism (or fascism by definition cough cough) politics and business/economics are inherently linked, it means mostly the same small group of individuals use their capital through either their own wealth or a company's to help create a reality in which others are unwillful participants in which are the unknowing majority, leading to great further alienation. The escapism I referred to in the first post on my site on being the workers only real possession is linked here as well, since the escapism for most is in the hands of a higher class or people who have more control within their system.
Classism, that mysterious "something" you are missing, and escapism are linked as well. Our whole lives we have an idol, an inspiration, a company, something that has more capital, or just hold in our system, than we do that we crave. This desire is linked to capital through the markets they created within their audiences, the "capital" (as again it is a vote and resource, not just money) or respect / participation / approval / admiration / an overall general civility that we deserve naturally within the public and our political/economic system is undermined and put onto other fields instead of being viewed as involving class. That is a very vague and overarching sentence, I know. I'll give you an example that I'm sure you can relate to in some form. As a kid, you might grow up and be obsessed with basketball. Your favorite player might become Stephen Curry, and you celebrate and support Golden State. Your parents buy you Curry's signature shoes, you buy clothes to emulate the way you dress off of him/adjacent celebrities, you listen to the same music he puts in his posts, you buy Golden State merch and tickets, and you follow him and other stars/influencers and your basketball associated peers. You start becoming insecure about your height compared to others on your team but find solace in Steph just being a mere 6ft, tiny in NBA standards. You are naturally drawn deep down to ballet, and maybe secretly love country music, but you will never express that side of yourself because that is not embodying the basketball player you want to be, as that would just be a bad investment towards the company that is you. This is a long drawn out example, but I want it to show how class and its markets sink its roots deep into your life from the beginning. Stephen Curry was marketed to kids from the beginning so of course you were drawn to him, your parents love and support you so they then give capital to Under Armour, Stephen Curry, and the Golden State Warriors just to name a few, giving them even more control in our system. I added the last sentence about ballet and country music to add that you then reserve some parts of yourself to give into this "archetype" or some perfect fantasy version of yourself that classism and Capitalism have invented in your personal identity, creating this conflict within yourself spawning from capital, starting a butterfly effect of who knows how many problems. It then makes you wonder what are you really like, deep down, with no outside influences or class? Do you really think you know yourself, or do you just know yourself within the context of the world that was created by classes and forces out of your control?
To answer these questions, and to add context within uplifting your spirits, I would like to refer to western philosophy and the idea of Plato's "Forms". The concept is defined as "a theory that posits the physical world is a shadowy, imperfect reflection of a higher, unchanging, and eternal reality. These 'Forms' are abstract, perfect idealsâsuch as Beauty, Justice, or mathematical shapesâthat exist independently of space and time, serving as the objective, intelligible templates for all things". I'm not going to bore you, just know a "form" is the perfect version of something in your head. If I asked you to think about a chair, you will most likely imagine what in your head, is the perfect chair. Western philosophy builds a lot on this concept and applies it to our governance even, it proposes the "perfect citizen", a perfect ethical code for its citizens to follow, etc. It wants the individual to use its "Forms" to change the external world to make it perfect, including changing someone else, especially someone they control. I think the perfect quote to encapsulate this, and should apply to culture and society at large, is when Roque Dalton Garcia said
"Laws are created to be followed
by the poor
Laws are made by the rich
to bring some order to exploitation
the poor are the only law-abiders in history.
When the poor make laws
the rich will be no more."
This should be applied to what we spoke about in the paragraph about our dear young basketball player who's life has been choreographed and spoken for by capital, and the influences class has had on them and their peers. The laws of society, "professionalism", intellectualism, being "cool" or whatever the fuck a "normal" person is, basically everything we know has been a physical or invisible law that has been imposed on us by a higher class from a distant, older world that are used to then protect that world from "them" or "us". People who have larger stakes in our system use their capital to create the world around us, which we must liberate ourselves from. In times like these, almost the most rebellious thing you can do is be unapologetically yourself. This is why I would like to relate all of this back to you, and The Epstein Files.
A lot of this essay so far has just been more abstract explanations of how class interacts with us and is intertwined with even how we look at ourselves, but I did say this was going to be a little more personal. I cannot remember for the life of me where I read the articles I wish to cite, it is part of the reason I started saving everything I liked, but alas you'll just have to believe me of their contents. The articles talked about how we must recognize the contradictions within ourselves, our emotions, and our thoughts, and not to lean too much on inner reflection. Our brain, just like anything, is prone to be false or to exaggerate / misremember / stretch reality and has a infinitely complex ecosystem we are still trying to figure out to this day, leading to negative emotions/thoughts on yourself and life (or anything really). We should instead prioritize empirical influences instead of our inner "forms", our intuition, our connection to the outside world and embracing our individuality, instead of using the platforms "The Epstein Class" made for us to impose classist laws. For example, a girl might really follow the "alt" trends because she enjoys the aesthetic, not knowing she is falling victim to the very people who marketed to her in the first place and hold the biggest stakes in our system, and then changes herself, her personality, her identity as a whole, to "invest" into this larger "aesthetic" that she wants to embody. Instead of just wanting to be herself, she has now bought into the framework that will then culturally and socially trap her. It gets even deeper on a societal level, as within the ecosystem or "market"/"community" the girl puts herself in, she might then feel insecure and not like characteristics of herself because she does not look like the "alt" influencers/higher figures she looks up to (maybe they're "more attractive"/have the body or face they want, have better clothes, just seems cooler, reminds her of having more freedom, whatever reason, turning something subjective to only themselves that they can empower into something falsely "objective"), who of course hold the capital in her same system she resides in. This feeling this hypothetical girl faces is all a farce, it is fake, as she is not insecure about her real self but instead focusing on "working on" the self she has created based on a classist context. She has alienated her true self which was her destiny to empower and express, just to chase a false, "perfect", "objective", hypothetical self.
In response to the diaspora of negative emotions we feel, we need to stop, understand and then embrace, even reframe, our relationship with them. That is what helped me at least, so I'll try to explain. Once I got rid of these "forms" in my head, and realized I am just human, and to embrace ALL sides of me (positive and what I'm insecure of/experiences and how that led to the totality of me), my intuition over thoughts that led to over thinking, and looking at myself as a vehicle of myself and a REAL person instead of just this theoretical being in my head, everything changed. I hope that does not sound concerning to my mental health, I am fine, do not report me to anyone please :(. Like everyone else, I wanted to change myself to fit this "perfect form" of myself in my head. I still reserve that right, and it is healthy to strive towards bettering yourself for your entire lifetime, but this was just an unrealistic goal I imposed onto myself, and was imposed onto me by outside forces, like class. I, like most people I know, saw anything I did not like or was not used to in myself as wrong, and that I needed to change. Any negative emotion I felt I shunned, I did not see it as a perfect way to be so I should therefore avoid it. This is stupid, as what really helped me was recognizing the thought/emotion as it was objectively, rationalizing it, having empathy on myself like I would others (since like I said, I need to recognize myself as a vehicle for myself in this world, a human like everyone else) and moving on. I read this cool story from a basketball player (I do not want to name them, they have charges I did not know about at the time) about this feeling that led to me doing all of this research on self identity, learning more about eastern philosophy and more importantly, leading me to learn more about myself. The story was that they felt nervous before a game once only, and how they prevented it from ever happening again was to recognize it objectively as it is, and rationalize it. I do not remember the direct quote, but it was something along the lines of "I was nervous and it was all I could think about until I stopped and realized, this is the biggest game of my career. Of course I am nervous, it is perfectly normal and rational to be nervous at this time. I should drink some water, breathe, and talk to my teammates and practice to prepare". Then it hit me, why can't I do that? If I fuck up in a situation by putting myself out there and am embarrassed, okay that made me embarrassed, let's learn from this mistake and show ourselves it is not that big of a deal and laugh it off, why would I not deserve that same treatment as someone else? Now this is of course not a one size fits all solution, as schizophrenia cannot be rationalized against for example, as it can construe rational thought in the individual itself. I started embracing myself and accepting all parts of myself. Yea I'm a hip hop historian and I love Yu-Gi-Oh, so what? So what that I look this way? That is apart of me, and plus even one of GQ's highest voted sexiest men turned out to be a pedophile, so I will be okay. So what I embrace all self care and what we call "femininity", and that I love women's wear/bags/lingerie? I own a firearm and can probably sleep with your girl while talking to her about these topics, as none of this really matters in the real world with real people, these fake capitalist charades are all in your head. As they say - "you are your biggest enemy"/"you are in your own way", this is partly true as this separate entity that was manifested via Capitalism's social/societal influences on your own "self identity" is the culprit. This also wraps within class and privilege on a geopolitical scale once you compare ourselves to what we are expected to look up to. That influencer you follow probably has allegations, the CEO of the company you have bought the most clothes from is a pedophile, the meme account and twitter user you laugh at all the time are actually Mossad or CIA operatives, children are being blown up all over the world, the world is being created right in front of you, and we sit here and wallow in our American self pity because our mild anxiety stops us from doing anything? Or why you don't look like that one person you follow? Or why you just can't seem to get your Stan account big within your fandom (which this might be the evilest example of all, since this was all created as a ploy by shareholders in a corporate room)? Do you see what I am trying to get at?
Everyone I know is either clinically depressed or has anxiety, and that's just the essentials, not including the other slew of mental illnesses on the rise today. New mental illnesses and conditions are also being created faster than they can be documented or studied in today's techno-fascist/capitalist landscape, leaving us nowhere to look for answers. Recently we have seen "AI Induced Psychosis", where LLMs and AI companions have led users to literal psychosis. That is a more extreme one, but you could already see what can be done on a smaller scale within modern media (i.e. social media, television, etc). I think it is also not coincidental that the ushering in of late stage Capitalism and the collapse of the the world as we currently know it, even on a geopolitical and international economic scale, coincides with the rise in everyone entering a immense depression where they feel like they are always missing something in themselves, and they are: class mobility/consciousness, their own identity (a place in this world, community, themselves, a purpose, etc), and true freedom. At the very least, you must fight back against this class that is keeping you against yourself. There was a tweet I read that I can't find that essentially said humanity has infinite potential, but capitalism needed the optimal worker, their "Form", and did the unthinkable and terrible feat of stooping humanity's potential down to it's needs. This will probably come as a surprise to you who know me personally but I do not listen to the artist formerly known as Kanye West anymore. This will probably come as no surprise to you who know me personally, but I would like to quote a couple of his tweets here that reflect somewhat of the same idea, just more personal and without Capitalism:
"You have the best ideas. Other people's opinions are usually more distractive than informative. Follow your own vision. base your actions on love. Do things you love and if you don't absolutely love something stop doing it as soon as you can."
"Be here now. Be in the moment. The now is the greatest moment of our lives and it just keeps getting better. The bad parts the boring parts the parts with high anxiety. Embrace every moment for its greatness. This is life. This is the greatest movie we will ever see."
"Don't follow crowds. Follow the innate feelings inside of you. Do what you feel not what you think. Thoughts have been placed in our heads to make everyone assimilate. Follow what you feel."
These are more vague type of quotes you would see on a teacher's poster, but they are important to take note of within our work here. I hate when people say "everything happens for a reason" or believe in some sort of cosmic destiny/predetermination, as it implies some sort of spiritual hand is guiding your free will and you do not control your greater potential and overall future. However, I think it is partly true for us today, as some of what we think of as core "experiences" we all hold as close identity were really ploys and byproducts of shareholders and executives. A small personal example is I know someone who has an older Nissan Altima they bought cash. They saved up and bought it, a true personal achievement in today's economy and geopolitical climate. They are slightly insecure about it because of the Altima memes you see on Reels that usually depict an often racist and classist caricature of people driving older "run down" models fast because usually, pre owned Japanese commuter cars are synonymous with the "go to" car for when you cannot afford a "nice" car. It's deeper than this because essentially that was what Nissan designed the car for in the first place, an affordable commuter car for gas shortages and post-WW2 Japan. For the American markets though, they are just marketed to low income families or as rental/travel cars sometimes, as Japanese commuter cars are known in lower and lower middle class families. So in a way, these memes and this insecurity this person has about their car which they should otherwise be proud of, was all "planned" by some shareholders before this person was even born. Is that a form of predetermination? Instead of a "cosmic" destiny, is it some sort of sick Capitalist destiny? Since these events only effected their psychology, we laugh it off as we cannot physically see it, but it's implications run generations and worldwide.
These examples I give are within isolated experiences, hypotheticals, and rooted in psychology, which I am not trained in. At the very least, I feel like you can relate to this on a personal level. Through generations of this methodology evolving and becoming more complex, we delegate these issues to just âmental episodesâ or âanxiety and depressionâ, or just the psychology of the individual itself. It is an oddly debated topic to recognize the outside forces out of the individualâs control create their psychology and suppress the free will of the individual. The constructs I mentioned before created by class and capital have become so engrained we recognize them as real, verified topics to research and not to question. Another largely glossed over one is the concept of âgrowing upâ, the human brain is already designed to mature and naturally through social interaction, education, and community/policy create the best platform and frame work for the individual to empower themselves (this is obviously assuming from an ideal state and basis), there is no need for an extra layer of conditioning that Capitalism calls âgrowing upâ. Really what most people mean by âgrowing upâ is becoming an optimal worker, or if youâre lucky, to become an optimal successful Capitalist. To achieve these standards, you must first relinquish and alienate your true self and âburyâ the real you that you want. Most of the time we see it as parents, family, or peers to condition a person to assimilate, or âgrow upâ, as they are implanting class ideals into their head like Capitalist agents from the movie Inception. This sounds counter intuitive I know, but the reason youâre thinking this way is through the hustle / entrepreneurship / grindset culture that has formed, and the natural âFormâ I spoke of earlier of how Capitalism rewards the most efficient, optimal, and full self sacrificing capitalists. The 90s and 2000s archetype of the âslackerâ is gone, as since we viewed them as comically lazy, we steered away. Really the slackers were showing us that no matter what, a human or citizen reserves the freedom/right to do nothing but just delve into their passions and hobbies if they choose. You might be insecure because you donât have all your shit together like some of the people you know, but those are also all classist thoughts entered into your mind. âHaving your shit togetherâ means youâre an optimal member of a capitalist society, and you served your purpose of the lower class in the greater system. Do you understand? I like having long hair, I love it, I will never cut it. âProfessionalismâ tells me I must sacrifice that part of myself and be insecure about it to assimilate to a capitalist society and âwinâ. Which is ironic because the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has long hair, curses more than any frat bro, and never dresses "professionally". By all definitions of modern business and politics he is immensely successful, as he helps the US government target childrenâs hospitals, assisted the FBI in searching the data for The Epstein Files, and has a PhD in Social Theory (which he used so called "marxist principles" to then start a wealth management company). So really âprofessionalismâ is meant to keep you down. These insecurities you have and face are just constructs to keep you away from yourself and your real potential. You might be âfatâ, but thatâs okay, thereâs billions of people out there who love âfatâ people and I just so happened to see a certain email in a document released by the government that showed a âfatâ individual who is a billionaire and is well connected internationally, so it must not be a real hindrance. So fuck it. Embrace it all, embrace being ugly, embrace the outfits that other people might think are tacky, go start a fight with your manager, post an essay about how obsessed you are with your special interest that nobody you know likes, embrace YOU, every part of it. No matter what part that may be.
This world has imposed on you conditions in which you did not volunteer to bear, and there's forces you cannot control and cannot understand sometimes, but you will always have yourself and others. Against all odds in this system and in this world today, you must embrace what makes the real you, YOU, and get out of the fake hypothetical version of your head that was created in reaction to it (overthinking, body dysmorphia, etc), and reject this "perfect" narrative the ones who hold all the power have pressured you into. You are worrying about your image in relation to others while visiting Walgreens, all while a verified, documented pedophile who controls more people and wealth than you'll ever see, can call drone strikes to kill millions of innocent citizens at any moments notice, never thinks of such trivial lower class things like self reflection (this is obviously in critique, not support of that ideal). It makes such mundane problems romantic in a way, but pale in comparison to the real problems holding you back in our modern society. The best time to start that dream project, or to post that selfie, or to release that song, or whatever you want to do in life that you feel like you are "missing" something to achieve, was yesterday. There is only one you in the entirety of history, that so many coincidences had to occur just to happen, many people like parents and teachers have dedicated themselves to making your life better (hopefully that is the case for your life - it takes a village as they say), you have the right and deserve to love/express yourself 100% at all times, against all odds and no matter what law presides over you. You must embrace and empower your instinct and subjective experience/character, and find your community and embrace others' subjective experiences as well. I always loved that classic quote, "the most punk thing you can do is be yourself".
To close I'll give some quotes from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" to ponder all of this on a cosmic scale, which since stardust resides in us, on a smaller scale, can be applied to us in relation to our place in this world and society at large and how we see ourselves, and I would like you to compare yourself with earth in these quotes:
âOnce we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.â
(In reference to the Pale Blue Dot photo) "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known".
I understand this essay is a little more scattered than the first, and that is somewhat on purpose. There will be more essays that I have started that deal with these same topics, but I wanted to start with a more vague overview of desire and how class is a circus like mirror that distorts the way we see reality, ourselves, and our place within it. These quotes from Sagan encapsulates this vagueness, this larger complex ecosystem that should make you "snap out of" the rather mundane problems we have within ourselves, which are just products of Western Capitalism's version of individualism. Plus the "problems" you concern yourself with like vanity, status, etc, are problems posed upon you by classism and the products of Capitalism, and are there to confuse you from the REAL problems you face. For me, realizing the problems and insecurities I face were just a small instance in a greater battle of class struggle, almost felt like a weight off of my chest. It then made room for me to be 100% myself and be proud of that, no matter what system I reside in. When I read The Epstein Files it confirmed to me that even the key players that hold the keys to the classist system I'm in were just a bunch of dumbasses that I feel like I would be "punching down on" by arguing with, empowered me to a degree I cannot describe. It showed that if those monsters, those idiots, those people who if I did not know any better with context would probably just assume is some lost person from an estranged generation, are nothing compared to the intelligence of the average 24 year old I meet. What I am getting at is you, and we, will be okay. You see how those losers act? And you're really worried about yourself and think you are of lower status and intelligence? You possess greater potential than they ever will, and need to treat yourself and with the responsibility, as such.