THE QUESTION OF BEING A DECENT PERSON IN AN INDECENT WORLD

I don’t want you to. I don’t want me to. I don’t want any of us to. 

Go on playing this game.

Pretending. That the question of being a decent person in an indecent world can be avoided. Ignored. Wished away. That it isn’t everything right now, the beginning and the end, the foundation and the cornerstone. Let’s talk for a moment. Sit around the fire with me.

I know that some of you miss my writing. And I’ll write more for you. But.

There are tons of posts and essays and articles out there. And they all now say the same thing. The same thing we said years ago. People like you and me. Do you remember those days? Back then, they called us doomers and pessimists and alarmists and hysterics.

Today, every half-wit finance and tech bro is writing screeds about the end of the world as we know it.

Funny how times change.

My job, such as it is one, is to be an intellectual. But the job of an intellectual isn’t just to pontificate emptily. Hell, I predicted all this years ago, you know it, I know it, we’ve discussed it often, and you knew it was coming, too. 

Times change, and so must we all.

Are we to go on reading these screeds about how bad and terrible and awful things are? You see, way back when we used to discuss all this, it was different.

It was a prediction. And because you and I are humanists, people with souls, educated, literate, civilized, the point of these predictions was to avert all the catastrophes we foresaw. Fascism, collapse, ruin, Gestapos, the weary masses addicted to the numbing dopamine fix of porn or crypto or hate on their screens. The point was to change it, as a wise man once said.

Now, none of this is a prediction. Well, I suppose it is for the bro-types who didn’t see it coming. But mostly, we’re now living in the world that people like you and me predicted. It’s a world that’s unravelling. It’s a toxic admixture of all the dystopias that can be imagined at once. Feudalism, fascism, serfdom, violence, rage, stupidity, folly, all of human history repeats itself right here, right now.

And so the question becomes where we’re to go.

I used to say to you: the time for warnings is over. We tried. Many of us really did. I blew up my career for the sake of trying, and found myself swiftly blackballed from American media, publishing, and and so on. Many of you have paid a price, too. Now everyone will pay a price. 

The time is now post-warning. Now the time has come to do something about it. 

You and I know what the future holds. There’s no great mystery about it anymore. Is there? I suppose there is for the kinds of people who are still in denial, but that’s ever true for them. Now, the future couldn’t be more certain. America is collapsing. It will be a ruin in a decade. No, things aren’t going magically going to be fixed. As America collapses, the world will continue to destabilize. Violence and conflict will erupt, as they are already. America will export its noxious blend of fascism and feudalism wherever it can. What’s left of power will try to carve up the world.

Is there much point in debating this? Reiterating it? 

You see, when we read all these screeds, the question becomes: why are doing it, over and over again? Freud would have called this a repetition compulsion. I think that we do it because we’re lonely. Here we are, in this car crash of a future. And as we imbibe this endless now array of essays, articles, and posts telling us how bad it really is, at least we’re less alone. Now there’s a whole line of cars, right next to us, crashing into the very same walls.

I suppose that eases the pain.

But it doesn’t change the fact that all this is a crash, and maybe your spine will break, or maybe your neck will.

The point of being an intellectual for me has never been this. This is cheap, to rub it in, to simply provide companionship while a neck snaps and a spine twists and shatters. That’s empty, it’s hollow, it’s superficial, and yes, I have contempt for the kinds of people who think things are terrible now, but scorned those of us who, LOL, told them it would be. Everyone should have a healthy contempt for stupidity, lest one ends up in its jaws.

An intellect is a lever of change. If an intellect isn’t that? What’s it worth? Do you think that Rousseau or Locke wrote just for the sake of idle theorizing? When Dumas wrote the Count of Monte Cristo, was it just a novel, or a sledgehammer of a guide to liberation, mental, social, spiritual, in an Age of Revolution?

Perhaps you see my point.

My job now, I think is to help you extricate yourself from the clutches of collapse. Havens is a part of that. A big part, if I’m honest. You won’t just “make money,” you will learn how the world really works, and how it’s going.

As for writing, I’m unsure. I think a good intellectual is always a little unsure. I’m unsure of who to be now, if I’m honest. America doesn’t want intellectuals. Anglo societies don’t. They want grifters and con artists—hence, Trump. They want self-help to maintain the pretense that individualism and materialism and transactionalism can solve problems of a systemic and institutional and spiritual and collective scale.

That’s not me. I don’t know who to be now. That’s not a cry for help. That’s just an admission. My heart is broken, now in many ways, after the period of my life I spent trying to warn, and being blacklisted, blackballed, scorned, hated, and so on. I don’t ache over it anymore. But I do find myself…freer. It’s a joy to be something else and someone new. It always is. I found myself imprisoned, too, in all that. 

And in all this, we find ourselves up against the fundamental question: what does it mean to be a decent person in an indecent world? What do you call an intellectual in a society that hates intellect? What do you call people like us who want the best for everyone, in societies that want the worst for everyone? What are we now? Who am I now? 

I don’t know. When you do, tell me. What I do know is that this is the question that concerns me. It is the great question of our age. And all the nonsense and BS I see when I walk into an American bookstore, shallow, superficial, all survival guides to implosive capitalism, basically, only reinforces just how divorced we are from the implosive gravity and the terrible truth of this most pressing and difficult of questions.

What does it mean to be a decent person in an indecent world? I ask myself this a million times a night. Is it enough for me to…just write the kinds of screeds which are so fashionable now? Does that answer the question well? Should I just..check out…and have a nice life making music? Not good enough. Where do I begin? Where do any of us begin?

Wait until these fools who suddenly clued into the fact capitalism is collapsing find out about climate change. Go ahead and chuckle, because it’ll be too late then, too.

There’s a futility in being the kinds of people we are, in societies, amongst people, so corrupt, poisoned, and withered. There is also a nobility in it. Also a beauty in it. The tragedy itself is what lends it all meaning. We find ourselves becoming history’s tears. We are the only ones with souls left to weep.

And there’s something less than tragedy in being as helpless as people have made themselves now. Something pathetic. Ugly, They’ve accepted that the world is indecent, and there is nothing that they can do about it.

And isn’t this obscene?

I never want that for you.

The more time that we waste on things we already know, the more helpless that we become. The more we resign ourselves to fatalism, the more existential nothings we become. The more we say: the question of being a decent person in an indecent world doesn’t matter, the more we die, in a human sense, not just a physical one. What’s left of us in the end, if we accept obscenity by way of resignation? Now we must find new ways to embrace one another, and make whatever future we can. 

The alternative is the helplessness that has become so fashionable now. I reject it. I abjure it. The job of an intellectual is to exorcise this greatest of demons.

I suppose I’m saying that the job of an intellectual is expansion. The expansion of agency. Of liberation. When Dumas wrote the Count of Monte Cristo, it wasn’t just a novel about a jailbreak. It was the story of humanity at that point in history, escaping the prisons of feudalism, serfdom, empire. All the poisons we find ourselves forced to drink again now.

What I do must always expand you. I hope that it does. If I’m quiet for a while, it’s because…I’m working on it. I don’t want to be another cell in the prison of the human mind this age has become. My job is to liberate you. Havens is a little path towards that. There will be more. That always has been my job, I think, no matter the price I’ve paid. I never cared about that. I’m not that kind of guy. 

You must understand the difference between this question and all the rest. The world has always been ending, and it has always been beginning. The question is which choice we make.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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