You Are The System
Sorry to break it to you, if The Self & The System haven’t already? The problem is not out there it’s in here. The turquoise plastic pen that I have stuck in my mouth is definitely reminding me so. As is my MacBook and my Walt Disney Little Mermaid notebook, my plastic covered diary and both my iPhones. Do you think I’m consumptive? Do you think one body shop purchase might save me from hell? Probably not. Who am I to judge the objects that I have failed to evade purchasing. God yes I am the system. I am a disrupter hopelessly complicit in the system, in a post-truth world with no singular narrative. I’ve had the same computer now for nearly 4 years and it’s is hard even now to energetically extract my karmic input into the slave labour of the human supply chain caught up in an autocratic communist system. Thus is the power of post-truth. Everyone is lying even me. Even my little gaslit self.
If stop my endless criticism of self for a moment. I have to be grateful for my minute roll and calling in this entire system. You see it isn’t my calling to be an ethical shopper of the year, nor is it my calling to reconfigure and design such as thing as a sustainable computer. I’m here seeding consciousness so that somebody else might catch up with me. What would be even better is if my writing this I contribute to the manifest destiny of an ethical MacBook. Because aesthetically I love mac along with its lack of malware. I’m an Art & Design Historian somewhere back there in the realms of linear time.
You see we are coded, coded with objects, with ideas, with programming and even unwanted processing abilities, that are designed to keep us safe. Designed to keep us compliant, designed to keep us complicit. This was never so clearly pointed out to me as when someone didn’t understand the concept of decolonisation. I was in South Africa at the time. That the whole idea of decolonisation was both absurd and bizarre as it would leave us all living in mud huts. That there was nothing world going back to. I remember my incredulousness at this idea, that everything that was ‘behind’ us must be worthless, otherwise, we would have taken it with us. Even now I’m not sure how I feel about that? The real problem for me was, is that the person who was speaking on this had only ever experienced a colonial existence and therefore had no understanding of any other way of being in the world. That only the progress of modernity mattered on the failing path of a utopian future.
This is how we embody the system we take our view as the worlds and dismiss the things that question it. You must listen very hard now and watch out for cultural appropriation in the quest to find yourself. You see all the tools we need to disembody the system are right around us. You might want to argue about it very intently, yet I promise you they are. They are in your stories, your ancestors, your land and some might say even your language or lack thereof it. You see if you look for all the the things that you aspire to and indeed what it is that you feel you are missing that is what the system has taken. You have every right to take it back. This is where sovereignty lies understanding and perpetuating the legacy of your very own personal worth and of course, that is personal activism.
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I am the only one of me in the world. However there is a chance my soul is shared. View all posts by kimberleen
Originally published at https://thelifedoula.com on October 6, 2020.
