John Wise

How appropriate that the name of the coffee shop in which I should finally find space to sit down has in it the word “ASS.” It was just the other day I was writing about my wife’s colon, and now I find myself in the far southwest of Phoenix, actually, a small city called Tolleson, which is out near Goodyear and Avondale. I hate this part of the Valley of the Sun. Who am I kidding? I hate almost everything in the Phoenix area.

Sorry, Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii, for dragging your image into this as I don’t dislike you at all; on the contrary, I’m thrilled you are out here and open so I can sit down and get a bit of writing in while my wife is nearby visiting with a friend.

So, which axe are you grinding here today, John? An age-old missive that is tired, worn, and just a lot more of the grumpy old man shtick I show up with on possibly too many occasions. Hmmm, I’ll try to mix this one up here; what’s eating me today are those white people who are my age and older, especially those who live in these predominantly white neighborhoods where their generically bland existences seem to crawl right up in my ass to fester and cause me groan-worthy discomfort.

Yes, I’m that judgmental, and yes, it’s all based on appearances. These people who should be metaphorical books of at least some depth are badly written half-wit passages that hardly qualify as works in progress as much they are brief paragraphs and broken sentences of insipidness. If you are wondering how I come to that conclusion, it’s writ large on their doltish faces. Whoa there, why all the hostility?

This is not the only city I’ve lived in, not the first state, nor the only country. I think I know something about diversity and attitudes as worn by faces that offer a glimpse into the local attitudes. Just as you can’t venture into a concert by Napalm Death and confuse the attendees with those who were supposed to see the nearby Rick Astley show, you can see in people’s faces their tensions and their whiteness when they are insipid intolerant bigots existing in a sheltered corner of America where their kind congregates.

This all pertains to today’s post title, In The Ass, because that’s just how I feel as I mingle with these turds. You might want to ask, “But can’t you find anything nice to say?” The cold brew here is great, but venting some spleen can be cathartic as I have to reconcile that we still live here in Arizona. To allow my disdain to ferment in my heart and soul would make the pain of being out and amongst these troglodytes a cancer that risks stealing all of my happiness.

I should point out that we live in an economically diverse neighborhood on the edges of wealth, the middle class, and poverty. From Indians and Hispanics to black Americans and Africans, even a smattering of the homeless, we have it all in our little corner of Phoenix. From our area, I can easily make my way over to a part of the valley that’s becoming a Little Asia kind of place.

How do I address the question of why I think I can see this in the faces of people I pass? What could it be in the morphology of their appearance that screams, “I’m a small-minded backwoods fascist that would join the Whitey Jihadists to purify the world if you show me where to sign up.” Is it arrogance? Their haircuts? Hats? To be honest, I’d have to rely on my intuition after encountering this type of bulwark for stupidity after so many years.

Fortunately, I don’t have to shoulder this perspective alone: Bernard Stiegler, in his book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, talks of the “Non-Inhuman Human,” well, I initially couldn’t quite understand the concept behind this description so I turned to Reddit and the r/askphilosophy subreddit, endeavoring to figure out what precisely this non-inhuman human is. Just today, someone shared this explanation: Human humans [Stiegler refers to them as “non-inhuman human”] safeguard (by transforming) knowledge, values, and other noetic things by reflecting on the consequences of their actions. Actions take place through technical objects (real objects, concepts, social organizations, institutions, etc.), which means the way “human humans” reflect is by criticizing their technical creations. All this noetic activity is a condition to the evolution of the species, keeping it from extinction… “Inhumans humans” [on the other hand] do not do this, and their actions are plainly stupid, destroying knowledge on a massive level. 

It is precisely these inhuman humans against whom I rail.

Who do we hate more today, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates? Let me spin the bottle so the universe can figure it out. Seeing how Elon Musk was just named Time magazine’s Man Of The Year and that he’s been flirting with being the richest person on earth, he’s the man of the hour to hate. Right behind him, though, is Jeff Bezos, who recently sat by playing with his rocket while 6 of his employees died in an Amazon warehouse during a tornado. And, of course, Bill Gates will always be hated because he’s Bill Gates, who started us down this path of cruel wealth while he piloted his Borg ship on a path that would end up delivering his 5G chips into our veins.

Does anyone out there really care that 100 people a day are murdered in America, that 100 people a day die in car accidents, or that 57 elderly people die prematurely every day due to poor care at private equity-owned senior care facilities? No to all of the above, but when six people die at a Jeff Bezos-operated facility (never mind that he’s not been the CEO since June), he’s still at fault due to his untaxed billions in cash that pour from the spigot on his bald head.

Why, America? How and why are we this stupid?

The wealth created by the fundamental shifts in the economy and technology benefits shareholders, workers, and the entire global economy as they change the very way we work and exchange our labor for food, shelter, education, health care, and transportation. But that means nothing when you have a wealthy class of propagandists who need to focus the public’s ire against a select few who become the lightning rods to attract the anger that might otherwise be directed at the entire ruling class that has failed to find a vision for the direction of humanity.

So, if you are a billionaire, you need to be prepared to have the weight of the world thrown upon your shoulders, such is the price for your fat wallet.

But John, it’s more than that. If these fat cats were properly taxed, I’d feel compensated and would be able to luxuriate in the knowledge that they paid their fair share, which would ultimately lift me out of my current difficult financial situation.

Consider this: the average rent for an apartment in the United States is $1,124 per month. Now, take the combined wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates (the majority of that wealth is mostly locked up in stock), which is approximately $535 billion (a considerable but fluctuating amount), and force them to divest themselves of every bit of stock they own. Your share of those three’s vast wealth would be $1,623 after dividing it between the 329.5 million people who live on our shores. Then again, if you are a homeowner whose average monthly mortgage payment is $1,487, you’d only have $136 left of your share after making a single payment, but wait, after the average electricity payment of $114 per household there’s hardly enough of your share of these billionaire’s wealth to buy your family a meal at your local fast-food drive-thru.

It seems that NOBODY considers or cares that the combined market value of the companies these three people started is now worth $5 trillion and that the $4.5 trillion owned by the public and other companies is wealth shared by those who are invested in these people’s ideas. How about these armchair experts/haters think about what would happen to the price of Tesla’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s stock if their three founders were to suddenly dump all of their stock? Those valuations of $5 trillion could be reduced to not much more than $1 trillion, which to the average person would still be seen as a lot of money for sure, but…

Jeff Bezos’ stock is currently worth $3,400 a share, but if he were forced to sell his 53,000,000 shares, the price would likely tank down to below $1,000 a share in a fire sale, he’d still net over $50 billion as the price was run down, but you’d destroy the investment of all those who’d invested in Amazon and paid more than $1,000 a share.

Now extrapolate that to the fortunes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other tech titans, and let’s make them all pay their fair share, strip them of their untaxed stock wealth, and just yank some $8 trillion of wealth from investors so we can recoup $1 trillion from these billionaire despots.

I hope you see where this has gone; we are idiots and collectively have no real idea how much of anything functions on the scales that things operate. The wealthy certainly know this as they are smart enough to offer us the sacrificial lambs that can easily insulate themselves against the crackpots and stupidity of the angry horde. Just keep Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg in the headlines so we don’t blame the larger part of corporate America, our politicians, or the media that feeds this gas-lighting of the sheep.

Welcome to your place in the perpetual Rube Goldberg machine whereby, sharing your bias and uninformed opinions, you contribute to the greater stupidity of everyone around you just as though you were but one more piece of the machine that dazzles our imagination as everything is toppled in a succession of cascading disinformation, ignorance, and inability to see our own intellectual shortcomings.

Today’s Image: Copyright © 2001-2021 Cluley Associates Limited

Today, I offered my two cents on a question posted on Reddit in the /askphilosophy subreddit:

“Could constantly learning new things be a way to give meaning to life, or is it merely an illusion that we are trying to create?”

I cannot offer insight into studies or schools of thought regarding the question, but I can answer with regard to the insights gained by my wife and me, who are approaching our 60s. Both of us constantly delve into often difficult/complex areas of learning as we’ve noticed that for us, this is a form of play but, more importantly, a way of discovery. At various points along our journey together, we were asked what the “secret” to our happiness is, and what I came up with was that the intensity of exploration experienced at the beginning of our relationship never relented.

This led me to look at those around us who were falling into pre-relationship behaviors because the deep discovery and exploration of the partner that arrives with the early days of falling in love, were waning. Moving into routines, many seem to grow bored or unsatisfied with things.

On the other hand, we read a lot; as a matter of fact, when we travel by car, my wife, who doesn’t like to drive, reads to me. We do not listen to audiobooks; we’ve tried, but I insisted we turn away from them as I’d already grown familiar with my wife’s voice, and so it became the preferred choice of what I wanted to hear as we’d drive the 600 miles between locations. We also have hobbies that are able to evolve and require new skills. Add to this mix that we don’t watch television, play video games, or invest decades in the same activities we were doing 30 years ago, and the world seems to stay new.

We are not rich, we share a car, rent a small apartment, do not have university educations and yet we vacation between 3 and 10 times a year (some of those travels might only be a weekend out of state). We have time and the means to explore various cuisines such as Korean, Burmese, Thai, Indian, Chinese, various European, and of course American. I’m sharing the info about food as it, too, lends itself to the objective of constant learning.

I cannot tell you that this constant learning for the two of us has definitively given us greater meaning or happiness, but I am certain that without this “play” (when I was a child, we referred to discovery, exploring, and learning by the word “play”) we would be fearful of the situation that might curtail our ability to be in this constant state and maybe that would lead to lack of meaning and diminished happiness.

Happiness may not give meaning to life, but it makes many of its uncertainties bearable, and when learning becomes a constant instead of the inanities of modernity, I find that we have the drive to learn even more in order to discover meaning in that exploration of the unknowns still unfolding in front of us.

Photo of us volunteering during a recent charity food packing event held nearby.