The Room and Matt Christman

Alas, I’m not talking about that room. (Thank you, honey, this is a beautiful party. You invited all of my friends! Good thinking!)

Matt from Chapo is very ill. A lot of his enemies are celebrating this, saying that were the shoes reversed, his fans would be cheering for their demise. To be honest, I can’t argue with that. But I’m not cheering.

Someone with an outlook like mine could find many reasons to dislike Chapo. They’re frequently wrong on the stuff I know a lot about, so I’ve taken to assuming they’re probably wrong on a lot of other things. They’re four shades too anti-electoral for me, having overcorrected their line on Bernie (which I think was basically correct). They’re mean, and their followers are meaner, and I have a whole psychological complex around trying not to be mean due to OCD. But I love them, there’s even a little parasociality about it. I listen twice a week. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I’m not ashamed of liking them.

Their pallet of emotions is not the same as mine -publicly at least, they mostly feel rage whereas I feel grief. Yet there’s a core of shared meaning as we’ll see. Their anger is not the anger of someone who is delighted to have caught you out. It is not a prude or pedant’s anger. While I’m sure they pose on occasion, theirs is not the showmanship fury of Tucker Carlson, these boys are genuinely upset that people are mistreating people, and none of them are as angry as Matt Christman. For that, he deserves your appreciation.

Imagine the United States of America, but without a history, and shrunk down to the size of a room- a big room with 1000 people in it. Think about it as a democracy first:

For the most part, people have a vote, but:

1. One person (representing the tiny fraction of the population with significant media ownership) decides who can get on the stage to talk,

2. And only a small group is permitted to do so.

3. Further, a small group of people decide what the proposals to be considered are.

4. A number of individuals, if they don’t get what they want, have the power to make the results of the votes a catastrophe. They threaten people with this power constantly- saying they will walk out of the room with their life-saving assets if the room isn’t kept ““competitive”” with other rooms.

   These four small groups (those who control who speaks on stage, those who speak on stage, those who frame the proposals, and those who can make the results a catastrophe if they don’t like them) are highly overlapping in membership, and all of them went to school together. They’re all chums, even when one does something horrible they watch out for each other. Moreover, there is a group of security guards in the room, and every so often they hint that if they don’t get what they want, they will forcibly take over the room -think of UK generals threatening a coup if Corbyn won. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only a bare majority bother to vote.

No one would call that room democratic.

Now keep adding features to the room. And remember keep thinking of it as a room- as just a bunch of people in a room.

Think about its distribution system. Everything is done through paper vouchers. Children are going hungry because their parents don’t have enough paper vouchers, yet the room only needs about 50% of the food it has- the rest is trashed. Sometimes the sprinklers go on, and not everybody has shelter, but getting everyone shelter is considered inconceivable- even building more shelters is almost impossible for political reasons. Security guards go around and drag people who try to take things they need that they don’t have tickets for to the closet.

Think about it’s healthcare system. There are never enough first-aid courses, because the first-aiders have lobbied to keep supply low so they can claim more paper tickets. Some people are lying there, dying, but they don’t have enough tickets to get patched up. Some children are in that position too. In a broad sense, this is recognized as a problem that some room-leaders should probably get around to solving, but it’s just one of those things. If you do need to be patched up seriously, there’s a good chance you’ll lose everything you own.

Think about it’s prison system. There’s a guy, Jared, in the janitor’s closet that keeps raping people who get put in there. Many inhabitants of the room think that’s very funny. One of the guys in charge commented “Rape in prison the janitor’s closet is inevitable and provides a useful deterrent factor to those thinking of offending.”

Now think about the room’s foreign policy. A bunch of guys go out of the room to shake down other rooms for electing the wrong leaders every so often. Weaker rooms are regularly invaded to make a point, and mass deaths result.

That’s how I see the world. It’s wholly morally equivalent to the room. All the categories and ideas and reasons and speeches and all of that are ultimately fake. The veil of law has no reality, there are just people doing things to others on the orders of others. We are in hell. In a profound sense, the only sane reaction is to start screaming and crying in rage and kicking the wall. The truly sane thing to do though is to fight, and ‘any tool is a weapon if you hold it right’.

I really appreciate Matt (and Amber, Chris, Felix and Will) because he gets that. Because he understands that this situation of ours is not “A Very Serious And Unfortunate Tragedy” or “A Grave Failure of Policy”. It is ashes and blood in your mouth.

I just wish I had the words for that. I just wish I had the words to tell you that law, custom, property, nation, bureaucracy, prison, income distribution, war - underneath it all there are just apes with souls hitting each other with sticks. I wish I could not just convince you of that, but show it to you. Somewhere in your brain, something is screaming that it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s been like that from the beginning. It’s been screaming out to all of us:

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, The alien or the poor.

I don’t know if there’s anything supernatural or what all this means in a cosmic sense, but I hold to all those things, we are in a hell of our own making and a voice is crying out to us to overthrow it. I don’t know how that overthrow happens. I don’t if it takes hundreds of years or days, but it must happen. I once heard a US politician, Right Wing, of course, talking about how every Christian should be ready to call fire from heaven! Imagine that! What do you think the fire would burn senator?

And Matt, bless him, said it:

“Like, how can you look at someone, who didn’t choose to be born, who did not choose their abilities and facilities in this world, and say “you deserve nothing but pain and torment until a horrible death. And I deserve everything. I deserve riches and I deserve greatness and I deserve comfort, for things that I similarly had no choice in. Had no influence in. I am a winner of a genetic lottery, and as a result of that, I should have everything and you should have nothing. And the difference between us is the flip of a fucking coin.” That is the monstrousness that I can’t abide! To think that there are people in this world who accept that, and think that’s how it should be! That you should condemn people, in millions, and billions, to torment, and agony, and death, and fear, and loneliness, because you need to have everything, because you were born with everything! The vile maxim…the vile maxim…Adam Smith’s vile fucking maxim. [”All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” — Adam Smith]

And it’s hard to confront, because it is so monstrous, and so evil, but it’s something that your neighbors believe, that your parents believe, that your loved ones believe. It’s something that people accept as just the way it is. That is what life is. You’re shot out of oblivion, into consciousness, and you will either be cursed or blessed based on the whims of genes and geography. And that is that. And the people who say that that is that are of course the people who “achieved” the extraordinary beneficence of luck, and decide that they’re going to ascribe that into the universe, and turn that into an un-mutable truth. But it can’t be like that. It doesn’t have to. We have it in our power to make it different. And maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll keep burning carbon and killing each other until we all just cook in our own fuckin’ juices. Or maybe we’ll break outside of our bubbles of fear and distrust, to accept common humanity, and embrace the burden of that, but also the absolute liberation, the liberation from fear. ‘Cause like, those alt-right cocksuckers who want to live in a world of racial holy war, the world that they imagine is a nightmare realm, where you can never be safe, you can never feel secure, you can never feel love, because you’re under constant siege. It’s a nightmare! But a world of solidarity, a world where every life that is brought into being without its consent, given facilities and abilities without their choice, can live surrounded by safety and love, instead of misery. That’s a world we can have.”

That’s what I love about Matt Christman. He gets it. He gets this isn’t very serious people making the big decisions. He gets that this isn’t the regrettable operation of the so and so. He gets that: WE ARE IN THE ROOM. LITERALLY NOTHING IS DIFFERENT IN OUR SOCIETY TO THE ROOM EXCEPT THAT IT’S BIGGER. YOU SHOULD FEEL EXACTLY THE SAME WAY YOU WOULD FEEL IF YOU WERE IN THAT ROOM. SEE IT NOW.

All caps and bold? A little cringe? Good. This isn’t irony. None of this was ever about irony. Nothing could be more serious, and if that be cringe, then let cringe be my based.