X-Post /r/unpopularopinion

Stop fucking pretending

All of us are fucking pretenders. We pretend to know, to feel, to be. Every fucking day, every fucking second, all the fucking time.

Instead of intending to understand who we truly are and to deeply connect with ourselves, we waste an unspeakable amount of time, energy, and resources in order to pretend to be, or become something we understand even less. Have we ever asked ourselves what defines us as a being? Or have we just pretended to?

Walking through the world I am not quite sure of that. All of us are pretending to be good in our own ways, following different (but ultimately the same) agendas resulting in conflict, war, death, and devastation. We pretend to be able to justify all of our actions. We pretend to be right, because we pretend to be superior and thus we pretend that we know this is the way to go. We can pretend all we want – we just cannot handle power.

We talk about topics like veganism vs. eating meat, both sides pretending to be right in their agendas, demonizing contrary opinions. All the time pretending to fucking care. “You are a monster because you eat meat!” “You are a fucking pussy ‘cause you don’t!” Someone alien to this world seeing this must be thinking: “Well, why the fuck are they fighting about something like this on such an emotional level, only caring whether they are right or wrong? Do they think, once, their planet is destroyed by all the shit they are doing to this poor cunt they call mother earth – animal agriculture and misuse of chemical agents in order to grow plant-based food both being a huge part of it – there is going to be either animals, or greens to feed themselves with?” We are so tremendously self-absorbed that we are going to absorb ourselves. The discussion is neither about finding solutions, nor about making compromises but only about being right to satisfy our own egos.

Is this really all we can come up with? Caring so fucking much about our own egos that we fuel our hypocritical lives with all this negative energy, just because every single fucking one of us cares so much about being right? Because we want to pretend just a little bit more, a little bit longer, a little bit harder. Why do we not chill the fuck out?

Just a few days ago, when I got up from my desk, walked a few steps, opened a tap and refilled a bottle with water to overcome my thirst, I realized that there are almost 1bn people on our planet who do not have access to clean drinking water. That means that at this exact moment right now, somewhere, there is somebody who would kill for the water just running out of the tap into the sink not yet cold enough to satisfy me. If you are reading this right now, it is highly probable that you experience the same luxury on a daily basis without paying conscious attention to it. It took me 25 years until that though first stoke me like that. Sure, I knew of it before – but on most levels I just pretended not to. We walk through life like this all the time: unconscious, unpresent, and uncaring. Is there really an excuse for that? Sure, we all have got our problems and there is way too much shit going on. It is impossible to pay attention to everything, blabla… but is this really a justification for our consumption? Is it really alright that people die of hunger and thirst just because we have got shit to do? Because we pretend we are better, satisfy our ego, and lock out this annoying little thing called conscience. I mean some of us even claim access to drinking water not to be a human right. What the actual fuck? Would we really dare to speak like that if we had ever suffered from hunger and thirst? How fucking far do we have to be removed from what comprises us as human beings if we can claim that satisfying ones basic human needs is not within our rights as human beings?

We pretend we are unable to fight hunger even though, on a global scale, we produce more food than we can eat. We just prefer to let it go to waste in the first world - for the sake of diversity, choice, and availability - instead of feeding the third.

On the other hand, cost of US post-9/11-wars are now approaching 5trn Dollars. Wars pretended to be justifiable, based on a highly questionable narrative of a single event and its consequences. We pretend there is no money for education, health-care, social services and the like but an unspeakable amount is put into something that can ultimately be broken down to one thing: destruction. There is no money for the refugees trying to escape being shattered into pieces in the war against terror. All of it is needed to fuel this insanity. We pretend to be good and we pretend others to be bad and vice versa. Again, from an alien point of view it must appear ridiculous to drop bombs on a country and killing its inhabitants by high-tech procedures and in return to blame them for fleeing certain death. How removed and unconscious must it appear to kill somebody thousands of miles away by pushing a button on a computer? Everything in order to fuel a military-industrial complex whose gains in money and power all depend on ongoing killing and destruction? How weird must it seem to denounce somebody for being an “economical refugee” after having destroyed their economy in the name of monetary interests? How fucking arrogant are we? Are we really not seeing this, or are just pretending to?

We have a monetary system we pretend to understand. We enslave ourselves in the name of debt, interest, taxes, and the like and pretend “It has always been this way; I am not the one to change this”. Finally, when the system fails because a short number of egomaniacs do not give a single fuck about gambling with our lives and our children’s future, we throw more money at them so they can go on. Just so this holy and well-established system, we all pretend to be so dependent on, is too big to fail. None of these people goes to jail, even though, the consequences of their actions eventually lead to poverty, desperation and death in millions. On the other hand, if I sit in the park consuming certain plants or mushrooms, growing all over the world in nature, I risk going to prison. A (private) prison industry, controlled by corporate interests, ultimately making money by putting more people in there and having them work as slaves. How can we still pretend that this is the way to go? How can we still take our “leaders” balls-deep on a day to day basis, praying for them to jizz more lies into our mouth so when can then spread them ourselves? Only, because we are afraid to lead ourselves, because we want to pretend that what they do is our best interest. We just want to cuddle a little bit longer under the sheets of false security so we do not have to deal with the reality that is put onto us. Thus, we are making it worse and worse every day. Instead, we could grow the fuck up and create our own reality. Well, we had to stop pretending to do so, of course.

Our health-system feeds of the ill – not the healthy people and neither the ones who die but the ones who are constantly keep alive depending on medical support. With capitalistic interest in mind research is never going to find a cure for diseases like cancer, diabetes, or AIDS just because it is not beneficial for the institutions selling the meds people currently need to live with their conditions. Every big player would act like this in a system where the premise for power, influence, and most of all money psychopathy. Yet again, we have to ask ourselves is this really the best we can do? Or are we just pretending?

We pretend we want to work. 60 hours a week, six or seven days a week – so once our reward arrives, we can use it to pretend even more. Do not get me wrong, I think everybody should work for something they believe in, that helps them grow, and supports others every waking moment. Nevertheless, why are we all this ambitious of putting so much of us (time, energy, nerves) into companies whose actions ultimately lead to destruction? How can so many of us really pretend there is a justification in any fucking regard for what we are doing? “I need to support my family!” “They are not all that bad!” “If you knew, what I knew you’d think differently. Of course though, I cannot tell you! But believe me!” Last time I checked, job descriptions for multinational enterprises did not contain “…looking for devastated, poor cunt struggling to feed his or her seven kids on a daily basis for a coaching position of our top management…” Sure, take this job if you want to, some of us eventually do so either way, but please do not fucking pretend to not be responsible for everything that comes with it. Do not be a fool and ignore the consequences but be aware of them. Be conscious and then decide whether this is truly worth it.

40% of college students think that, one day, they will make up the 1% population of the richest people on the planet. Well, congratulations there. The upper percentile of the so called elite owns more than the other 99%. In 2016, the richest 62 people on the planet hold as much money, as half of the population of the world. A few years ago they were twice as much. They too are eating themselves up. You do not need the have an MSc in Mathematics to see were this is going. We cannot handle power. Therefore, we find bliss in ignorance.

Nine out of ten multinational enterprises avoid tax money by offshore havens. Unfortunately, this is the very reason they are world leading enterprises. In a competitive society you climb the ladder of success by abusing and bending the rules of the game. You get to the top by outcompeting others and by focusing on your own interests. The higher goal is never us, it is me. This is true in every single, fucking regard throughout the whole capitalistic world. Sadly, money is the perfect tool to do so.

It is not even the rich who are to blame for that. They are just continuing to do what works best for them. Almost everybody born in such an environment, completely detached from the reality of the remaining (poorer) population, would likely do what works best for them out of experience. Even if they are evil, dumb as fuck and whatsoever: They are few. The system only works because the rest of us accept it like it is. You cannot blame the poor as well, if you are born into a life denied of education and support what are you supposed to do other than survive. We have to blame the well-educated, supposedly critically thinking middle-class. We have to blame ourselves for accepting this shithole, ultimately, being nothing else as modern slavery. We think we are free but enslave ourselves voluntarily to a system that in the end results in its own destruction. Instead of cutting it out, we happily feed the tumor by brainlessly believing in, what can be described in the broader sense as, the American Dream.

We pretend to understand concepts like psychological disorders and its cures even though we basically just cure symptoms of a concept, we made up in the first place. Where is this dementia, this schizophrenia, or Post-Traumatic Stress? Does it run through your veins? Is it neurons firing in your brain? Is it both, or none? Is it maybe only the result of environmental influences? These are emergent phenomena, not stable material objects. They only exist as nonlocal, transitory appearances fluctuating in time. I am not saying this stuff does not exist. I am just saying it is a working hypothesis we use for treatment. In some cases it does work well, in other it does not. Certainly, we will never ever understand its ultimate reality, since it is a construct.

Language is a construct as well and every one of us has a subjective idea of it, none of the others is ever going to be able to fully understand. But we pretend to. We pretend to understand right and wrong; truth and lie. “You shall always speak the truth” and we pretend to do so. Nevertheless, all of us lie on a daily basis. Some people are allowed to lie without consequences – politicians for example. Every day, they boldly lie into our faces, eventually justifying their actions by saying things like “Well, this was not a legal statement, but a political one.” We consume this bullshit, sometimes getting angry, or depressed, or sad – but ultimately going on, pretending there is no other choice. “They know what they’re doing, they’re politicians.” No, they do certainly not – they pretend to.

Our lives are basically dictated by these systems we are never going to fully understand. Science is very good in understanding its parts, gathering more and more information about its features. Referring back to the example of language: We know a lot about what makes it up: Morphology, semantics,… but by gathering more and more information about their parts we are never going to understand the whole, complex constructs. The characteristics of a whole cannot be determined by the description of its parts. These concepts can only ever be described probabilistically. Unfortunately, people still pretend to speak the truth and we pretend to believe them. All of us pretend to know and all of us pretend to believe each other.

Have we ever asked ourselves what of the stuff that surrounds us we truly need? What of the things we own and, buy and, consume do we really, really need? Do we need them so badly that we cannot abstain from them in order for others to get their share? Do we need them so badly that others do have to suffer and die for them to be in our possession? In the end, our biggest power in a capitalistic society is our choice of consumption. Is our consumption justifiable – or do we just pretend it is?

Another good, yet rather specific, example of how spoiled we are can be found in the music industry. It appears conflicting to me to listen to some lyrics illustrating social, societal, and political problem in a deeply reflecting manner. Whereby, whilst singing them, artists decorate their bodies with jewelry and blood-diamonds. Afterwards, they drive home into houses that could easily contain thirty people and more. How fucking hypocritical is this? What is even more hypocritical though is that ultimately these blood-diamonds are paid for by the very people addressed in the afore mentioned lyrics.

We destroy our planet, the very source of our existence, just for a few years of ecstasy and consumption that eventually never satisfy us. We are constantly running in a hamster-wheel longing for more and more to throw in the voracious black whole of our need for power, our longing to be someone we are not. Whereas, we do not think a minute about what really, really defines us and thus are never going to find ourselves, nor be ourselves. We only pretend to.

Some of us call our Earth mother – certainly then, we are motherfuckers.

Now, what can we do? Apparently, we should aim to become more conscious of our actions and decisions and most importantly of their consequences. We have to become more conscious of our consumption and we have to stop pretending. He have to stop pretending to know it all and we have to stop pretending that there is any justification in our actions. Surely, we cannot change everything from this day onward but we can try to raise consciousness. If we want to continue to buy shitty products and support companies that lead to the destruction of the environment – that is fine. Nevertheless, we have to do it consciously so that every single one of us has to be aware of the consequences of his or her actions and then has to decide whether he or she can and wants to live with that.

Right now, all of us are fucking pretenders