What Good Does It Do?

It. You know. ANY of it. Any of the terrible feelings, any of the knowledge of how #^@&ed up things are, any of the daily struggle. What good is any of it? Turns out there is one small benefit...

You know you’re off to a scary start when the initial answer is, “Define good.”

Cue Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control.”

What good does it do to be angry? What good does it do to be depressed? What good does it do to tell anybody how you feel about how absolutely fucked up things are?

Well, it’s true that humans put an awful lot of stock in feelings. If you don’t seem to have any, they call you “inhuman,” and that’s a dangerous categorization. Humans have an abysmal track record for things they consider to be nonhuman. Nonhumans, according to the terms of unforgiving set theory, are either animals or objects, and, as either, they can be owned or exploited or destroyed at whim—though sometimes some of us can be a bit precious about animals. The cute ones, anyway. Probably not mosquitoes.

We have entire genres of speculative fiction dedicated to the trope of some beast or artifact stapling on a soul or crowbarring open that mysterious inner portal to magical emotions to join the ranks of humanity—albeit second-rate, just-barely-qualifying, automatic-targets-of-unceasing-bigotry humanity.

Welcome to the bottom rung of the ladder. Better hold on tight. Sometimes they even get a medal or a badge to go along with their tattooed-on “KICK ME!” sign.

It’s not a great look for humanity is what I’m saying. Especially when emotions are just the monitors for internal states that we were issued by evolution before we developed anything like common sense or rational capacity. The more we study animals in the wild—hell, the more we study mushrooms—the more we begin to suspect that most life forms, even microbes, get basic emotions for free.

Here’s how they work: “Hmm. I appear to be unhappy. I guess I should refer to the checklist…. Let’s see. Am I hungry or thirsty? Is something choking off my air supply? Is one of my limbs missing? Am I being devoured? Is my environment killing me? Have I lost my cushy social status in the troop?”

You know the list.

If what you can do about the emotion is covered by instinct, you’re golden. Just do that, whatever it is. Eat, screw, sleep, whatever. But if instinct isn’t enough, you have to rely on something more recently learned. Something most people are kind of bad at, to be honest. Logic. Math. Rational behavior. Long-term thinking. Self-restraint. Any term complex enough to require a hyphen.

Every emotion is a sum at the bottom of a spreadsheet of a number of easily measurable internal states, presented to us as squirts of juice from internal glands, just in case something has changed internally or externally that we might not have otherwise noticed, because no part of emotion hinges on wherever the hell that spotlight which is our attention might be pointed. Emotion interrupts.

There’s the value. There, by logical extension, is the concrete value of what some people swear up and down is the totality of the human soul. (They’re wrong, and that’s covered in detail in a lecture or two in the official lecture halls, so I won’t get into it here.) It’s a device that can slap you in the face with information when you might be concentrating on something else.

And we’re trained from birth to learn to ignore our emotions by (and for the exploitative purposes of) the systems into which we are born—our families and extended tribes and economies or whatever else you want to call them. We spend millions of years as a species developing these fancy systems that squirt juices at us when it’s time to notice a situation that affects our very survival, and then we, individually, spend a couple of nifty decades being told that our families, our tribes, our economies, and our governments will straight up kill us if we don’t ignore all of that shit about how we feel and just do what they want us to.

And now somehow we’re all mentally ill. Somehow it’s all these squirting juices that are out of whack, making us miserable or, worse, secretly giving us joy when we do something destructive or antisocial.

This diagnosis of illness comes from within the Exploitation Engine, of course.

So what good does it do to feel bad? To feel anxious? To feel happy?

Here’s where we find out that we don’t have to define “good” after all, which is kind of a relief. Here’s where we find that it doesn’t do anything to feel anything. Nothing happens. Your internal system just rewarded you or punished you for something, but whatever that something was, it literally no longer has anything to do with survival in the modern world, so it doesn’t matter. Might as well ignore it.

You are disconnected from the Circle of Life and embedded instead in the Exploitation Engine, which I picture as something akin to one of H. R. Giger’s biomechanical fantasies, which was, I would dare to guess, the entire point he was making by painting them 40 or 50 years ago.

The Exploitation Engine maintains you, or milks you, or remakes you, or discards you as it sees fit. These emotion thingies give it an approximation of control, but only up to a certain point. The refinement process is ongoing, however. If you can’t function inside the machine then you are pushed out. Or straight up murdered.

Some good news: as a species, adaptation should only take about ten or twenty thousand years or so, where it will only be a few sports and throwbacks that are lost every year instead of, at the current point in time, literally millions. Wars and famines and plagues are a function of the machine. They’re how the Exploitation Engine prunes those who are unfit to be incorporated. Breed millions, incorporate dozens, purge the rest. Call it artificial selection. Or selective breeding, if you prefer.

It might sound wasteful, but it’s a viable strategy. Nature does it all the time. It’s how all the niches get filled after extinctions, after new niches open up. Just look at where the lifespans are the shortest. You’ll see it.

Where human life spans are shortening, that’s where it’s happening on the human scale.

Back to that Joy Division track.

The transition point between a society and a society-scale exploitation engine is where you no longer have a voice to make changes, have complaints heard or have a vote. If there are those who have no voices in your society, then it’s a society for you and an exploitation engine for them. In the United States, society is still and always has been an exploitation engine for indigenous people and people of color and for women and anyone else who fail to find themselves represented fairly in positions of power and influence. But since the Great Disconnect between GDP and compensation for ordinary workers that coincided with Reagan’s arrival in the White House, everyone is increasingly disenfranchised. That misplaced GDP drains straight into huge-ass towers of incorporated money that buy up every chunk of government from every branch as soon as it gets put up for sale. And since those towers are controlled by bigots and racists, every scrap of equity and self-determination won by all of those who have been traditionally exploited and reviled is now under dire threat.

It’s been 45 years since the Great Disconnect, and the USA is now an exploitation engine for absolutely everyone who isn’t wealthy enough to buy themselves a cozy pocket of immunity from the machinery. Every organization that tracks the health of democracies worldwide can show you the receipts.

We’ve lost control. We’ve lost control again.

Look around at all the crazy shit our Federal Republic—a government supposedly for and by The People—is doing. Banning elements of critical healthcare for women. Imprisoning refugees and splitting up their families. Banning books and dictating “sanitized” educational curriculum. Pumping weaponry and manpower and know-how into genocides. Making a big show of pretending to hold megacorps responsible for fouling the water and sky and earth itself and letting them buy their way out of their punishments with back-end bribes. Letting individual billionaires buy Supreme Court justices. Letting individual billionaires interfere in foreign policies and foreign wars. Letting foreign investors buying up bits of the government even faster than the local guys.

Did we vote for that? Would we ever? Would we elect representatives who would? No. We’ve lost control.

This exploitation engine—as it applies to all of us now, and not just minorities and outcasts—was more than fifty years in the making. Every year it gets more and more efficient at exactly two things: manufacturing record profits for its owners and thinning the herd of all those who fail to comply.

So what good does it do to be angry? What good does it do to be anxious and upset?

Well. It doesn’t do any good in and of itself. It just keeps you aware that you’re in the big ol’ Giger-esque biomechanical landscape, being driven by the gears and pistons behind you and driving those in front of you in turn, being milked of whatever you’ve got in you until you’re a dry husk than can be ground to a paste and recycled.

If there’s good to be done, it’s whatever you do with that awareness.

One of the other things I like to stay aware of is that complicated engines are far easier and faster to break than they are to build. That may literally be the only thing going for us.

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