The Fragile Ash of the Mathematical Bonfire.
Let me tell you a secret. One of the most powerful secrets of them all, a secret so damn secret no one will admit it exists: the people at the top of the hill, those with power and money, have no clue at what’s happening either, just like us others. It’s all out of control.
Once upon a time someone realized that wealth meant power, and they created more wealth and more power. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be a bad thing, it felt good at the time. Money creating wealth creates more wealth by building more kingdoms and later companies, giving job opportunities to people, which in turn invaded more kingdoms and started more companies and generated more wealth. After a while this creation became its own economic monster, a mathematical being unable to stop itself. Most components (people, companies, countries etc) in this circus of numbers did their job, no harm done, but together they created a tidal wave, an avalanche of power and poverty and wealth and money from one component to another. It’s a huge snowball of fractals creating one economic entity after another, where the later generations have no clue whatsoever why or what they’re doing, except it feels and seems good at the moment. It’s like a web of tentacles, none being able to control the other ones, but still sticking to everything around them, like super glue stuck in the hair of an old angry woman.
There’s no hidden agenda hovering over us. The conspiracy theorists always talks about They and Them and when they are unable to identify who They and Them are they’re given names like New World Order, Illuminati, the Lizard People, CIA, FBI, the Jews, the Communists, the Gay Lobby or whatever seems appropriate at the moment. It’s a world of corporations, big and small, human and non-human, and they have really no fucking idea what’s going on. Stuff is just happening. If one company is going bankrupt, another one, maybe even with good intentions, is there and buys the rest and it all starts over again. It’s a huge, organic Artificial Intelligence, working on its own, without a super computer or the elite behind it.
They and Them are just mathematical formulas to explain what’s unexplainable, the zeros and ones of something unstoppable. Society is like a slime mold at the back of a rotten log, sucking up energy and nutrients until there’s nothing left. It just fucking happens and we can’t do anything about it. Rich or poor, all helpless. Scared shitless looking into the great unknown that’s unfolding in front of us. It will collapse one day, a good collapse. The house of cards will finally tumble down, freeing us from this prison called culture and society.
Don’t worry, it will start all over again, from the bottom, and continue for thousands of years until it all breaks down from its own complex weight again. But there’s something good in all of this, and that is we can’t do shit about it. We can just stand, sit, lay down and watch the stupidity implode around us. We see how brands become more important than human interaction, how money and work, work, work will be even more powerful without any of us really understanding why we need all that money and all that work, work, work. We’re tiny salary slave ants in this ant hill called earth and if we just look up, beyond the airplanes, UFOs and satellites, we might see how small we are and that there’s nothing we can do except waiting for an unruly child to disintegrate us with the heat beam from a magnifying glass. In this helplessness we’re free, because as the components we are, we can’t do anything to prevent the world from continuing doing what it does.
So just take a deep breath, let the worries go, and embrace the fact that we’re living in the middle of a mathematical bonfire, where every glowing sparkle and piece of fragile ash is spinning out of control and fades away.
We’re here for a very short amount of time, and the only way to deal with this is to follow yourself, be your own star and god — and decide in which direction your sparkle will go.
Good luck.
Fred Andersson is a Swedish story producer, researcher and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of three books. He lives in Märsta, outside Stockholm. Join him on Twitter and Instagram.
P.S.
A note regarding this text:
I learned after writing this text that Alan Moore says something very similar, but a lot shorter, in the excellent 2003 documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which I fully agree with — but wasn’t aware of until later. Here’s what Mr Moore said: “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptilians from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”.
