So You Wanna Take A Holiday?

So You Wanna Take a Holiday

 

First, horror beyond imagining:  remember to stare directly at it for as long as you can bear to and try not to look away.  I know that everything in your body will try and convince you to do something, anything else, but it is vital that you do not ignore it if you are to understand, viz. that it works on you BECAUSE you ignore it.

 

 



 

"By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy"

-Lasch, the Culture of Narcissism

 

Imagine:  You've accidentally raised children with no inner resources.  You're 45 and relations with your spouse have cooled.  You have no idea what's gone wrong and you are in the process of despairing.  The lack of inner resources means that you are your child's only resource in the absence of screens.  Hence a problem:  you cannot change your aesthetic reality i.e. go on holiday without being treated like an IPhone by your offspring.  Do you want to know what it feels like to be clicked on?  You're about to find out.

 

In other words, you're straight out of a textbook.  The purpose of this advert is to conceal the fact that you are an expected and accounted for byproduct of modern life.  Instead, the entirely predictable development of your way of life and the attendant ennui is, in the course of this advert, presented to you as being a mistake, an accidental wrong turn which Capitalism can correct.  This is a false premise because it is Capitalism which ushered in the reign of this problem.  Why would it rob Peter to pay Paul when Peter and Paul are both at Cannes sipping Cristal?  You think that's Sea Air you're breathing?

 

The problem that this couple have is not a lack of time to "Relax".  They have more time on their hands than any previous generation.  The problem is a lack of inner resources, that is, a lack of those things which make time pass without stimulus.  When the quirky host child holds up a book and says "there's a chance you won't get past the first page", that is an instruction, not a warning.

 

"No time to chill out - what's that all about?"

 

Chilling out is a completely new concept for human beings.  In the past we spoke of reflection, contemplation, meditation, but these were seen as aspects of striving, of living.  This is a new era, where you are expected to empty your mind other than through the performance of repetitive tasks. 

 

It doesn't work. 

 

There are two reasons.  Firstly, instructing yourself not to think is impossible; it's a classic way of inducing the mystic state.  Truly kind masters ask us to perform impossible tasks precisely because they know how spectacularly we will fail, and that THAT is the lesson.  Cruel masters ask us to try and improve ourselves in ways which seem feasible ("finish a novel on holiday") but are more ruinous because, when you achieve it and aren't Enlightened the problem must be you "didn't do it right".  Hence every college student asks his instructor for Frameworks and a generation raised on porn defers to quantitative measures to decide if they enjoyed sex.  Hence lifecoaches.

 

When Jesus told us that anyone who thought adulterously was an adulterer, the point wasn't that you, subjectively, were cheating.  The point was that everyone, objectively, was a hypocrite.  But you only get to say that with any justice if you've honestly tried to stop being a monster.  Protip: you are a monster. 

 

This brings us back to the couple in the advert.  They're not monsters, they're not even adulterers.  That is because they are fictional beings.  Only a lunatic would call for their stoning ever.  "Who Stoned Roger Rabbit?" is self evidently absurd and yet, admit it, you were bearing their feelings in mind weren't you? 

 

However, the double bind is that millions stone themselves every day for their failure to not want to stone themselves.  They know they should aspire to rock hard abs and children who speak Mandarin but honestly, who can be bothered?

 

The answer is nobody.

 

The answer is, also, everybody.

 

That's the only Enlightenment that the 21st Century is offering, take it or leave it.

 



We're All Connected And It's Awful

We're All Connected and It's Awful

You're Telling Me

Darryl Revok

This was a test campaign used in 1947 to market a new product. The product was a drug, a tranquilizer called 'Ephemerol'. It was aimed at pregnant women. If it had worked it would have been marketed all over North America. But the campaign failed and the drug failed, because it had a side effect on the unborn children. An invisible side effect.

Cameron Vale

It created Scanners.

There is a scene in Scanners where Vale (the good scanner) falls in with a bunch of Hippy Scanners.  If you haven't seen the film, Vale is a hapless psychic who is recruited by No 6 from the Prisoner to stop the Bin laden psychic, Darryl Revok, who later lost an arm and cropped up in Starship Troopers telling Denise Richards to put em away, love, we've all seen them.  At this point he is making people die with his mind and warming up for a career in the Space Marines by taking over literally the entire planet, which given that it's a planet imagined by David Cronenberg he is pretty much welcome to, everyone being busy growing teeth out of their eyeballs or whatever.

Revok's name backwards is Kover.  Which means the same thing as Veil/Vale.  We'll return to that.

Brr

What happens is this: Vale forgets the sage advice of No. 6 and goes way off task; he ends up having a hippy love in with the wussy Scanners.  No. 6 said this would happen.  Don't get caught up in that Utopian Bullcrap, he said, just make Revok's head explode then go home.  At least I think that's what he said, I was flicking between this and something on Channel 4.

Anyway, Vale finds himself sat in a circle of gooey love with some people wearing hemp whilst they all chant "We are one - We are one".

In other words, he goes on Twitter and stays there.

To Find Out What Happens Next, Click Here

Couldn't be bothered to watch?  I'll tell you what happens, they all die from Shotguns.  The ones who don't die are rendered catatonic or idiotic from the shock of being inside another's mind when they died.  Why? Because being connected into a beautiful overarching consciousness of fragile intersubjective Scanning super shamans is horrible, and Revok is the wrath of a disconcerted universe.

"Lose yourself to the group will" - you're damn right I'm frightened to do that.  Every time anyone tells you to open your mind it's probably just so they can put something in it.  What on earth is wrong with these people?  Why do they never listen to No. 6, he beat the Combine once, sort of.

We're all out here looking for kicks, but what happens whenever a decent fun starts?  I'll tell you, an elderly buffoon who barely survived the last Revok convinces you that this time it's different, that Voldemort doesn't have his old power or whatever, and that you need to hook into the overmind to commune with the infiniverse.

Enough!  Harry thinks Vodemort's Thoughts and he's going to lead him right to you and then it's shotgun time.  That's the coded message: that connection to other people will destroy you utterly.  In this sense it's missing something: connection to The Other is compulsory:  for the Other.  The choice already go made for it, by you, when you were asleep, or drunk, or high.  In other words, you got sarged so hard by your Unconscious that you barely know how to get back to complaining about stuff.

Do you start to see what the Vale Kovers?

That's right:  You ARE Revok/Voldemort, and everyone else is plotting your downfall.  The only comfort I can offer is that they are plotting their own as well.  The only thing left to do is unKoveR the conspiracy, you'd better hope your telepowers are good and limber.  Sincerely, I wish you luck, I'll be hunting for you as much as the next patsy.

What was the name of that drug again?  And what was it supposed to do?  Surprise: the only reason to tranquilise you is so that you stop trying to impose morality on something horrible, so that it can be the most horrible it can possibly be:  Listen to No. 6, he needs to debrief you:

be honest, you found him funny too

Ahhh, No. 6 was playing the long con (never mind that this is a different film, that's so far from the point right now).  Let your petty little ego be swallowed up, it will only hurt for a second.  Repeat after me: I am not a number oh wait I always was.

"Safety" in Numbers

Numbers are the most effective way of distancing ourselves from the universe, thanks Hegel.  We will do anything to avoid reality and the first priority is always going to be to shut down the senses.  The problem is that people know there's something missing and now you've got a workplace full of frightened neurotics who won't shut up about banal nonsense.  Congratulations, you killed their minds and turned them all into parrots who are really good at repeating the last soundbite they heard in a frantic bid to fill the silence that they intuitively know is the opposite of comfortable.

The cure definitely isn't to cut them off from their numbers.  They think they need those now and if you tell them they can't have them best case is catatonia worst case is you end up like the Tsars.  Plus, you don't even exist, this is a conversation I'm having with myself and the imaginary spokesperson for a conspiracy of secondary minds which really run the show.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague apparently works EIGHTEEN HOURS a day.  What does he do?  I'll bet my own face that what he doesn't do is fix international affairs.  The person I want to get at is his organ grinder, and unfortunately for everyone but most of all for Hague they share a body.  So there are two William Hagues, Earth 1 Hague and Earth 2 Hague or "Anti-Hague".  What are we doing about this?  Nothing, Earth 2 has been running the show ever since people first started feeling bad about stuff they couldn't change, i.e. when we started telling ourselves that slaves had it good.  Slaves have it appalling, and the clear priority for anyone who isn't retching their own lungs out in a sanatorium is to avoid that outcome.  

Hold on, did Number 6 just say that Christ was a psychiatrist?

What Number 6 wants is for you to give him your National Insurance number, it's the same old scam, but just like all cults this one has a new twist otherwise nobody would join.  The twist with this one is that you laugh at people who use the word "Individual" like it matters.  This is a great idea because I do that too, so now I feel like I have a pass.  This cult has co-opted irony and the best thing about it is it doesn't even exist, so the gap in the market is there for anyone who wants to go full L Ron on it.

Except there isn't a gap, the market IS this cult.  We are all of us living under two sets of masters, the real ones and the symbolic ones.  The real masters can sack us or blacklist us, nobody is afraid of them, they're good peoples and you'd go to their barbeques.  The ultimate badasses don't even exist, they wear the invisible mask of logic and you're so scared of them you won't even give them names.  If I tell you there are Sixteen of them and their secret faces look like insects I do it because I want to help but I think I might be making it worse.