2022 – A year of competing cults & wounds

2022 was a competition between competing cults & wounds.

I don’t think we have comprehended the psychological carnage social media and alienation have combined to become a threat to democracy.

The unique universal experience of lockdown is causing internal ructions and currents through the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of NZ which all magnified this year.

The algorithms of social media Hate has amplified toxic debate in ways we are barely appreciating.

Into this vortex cultural fault lines are rupturing.

Vulnerable communities in a pandemic angry that their well being is collateral damage for the rich.

A distrust of Authority while being utterly dependent upon them.

Social isolation and a growing sense of dislocation.

Qanon lunatics who are impossible to be reasoned with alongside Woke lynch mobs on never ending cancellation purges.

The poor whose poverty has become survival level subsistence.

Renters locked into debt servitude.

Damaged kids ram raid and the fear its brazenness exploits scratches the veneer of public order we all require to burn in private.

Such shamelessness by youth rocks our sense of society and stokes fears that only harsh measures sate.

We are seriously arguing about putting ankle bracelets on children for fucks sake.

Not actual funded wrap around services.

This year there are 5000 young people transitioning to adult hood from state welfare guardianship, after 18, the State simply pushes these vulnerable kids onto the streets. We have less than 200 permanent beds where those kids can go at 18, what the Christ are we doing for the other 4800 transitioning wards of the State?

One solution would be a law preventing State Agencies who have guardianship from releasing 18 year olds straight to the street, and instead require them to assure housing first.

But no, that’s not being considered. Ankle bracelets on children are what our easily spooked populace have been triggered into demanding from a media whose click bait crime porn ratings bonanza is paying the bonuses at underfunded newsrooms this Christmas.

We only ever seek vengeance, not solutions in this country.

Māori were reminded how angry frightened white people get when they perceive someone else getting something white people don’t think they already have.

The racism, the naked cracker braying racism has been honky levels of banjo twanging this year.

Watching red necks blaze crimson in spittle flecked fury over Māori representation on organisations and democratic infrastructure they couldn’t name or identify would be amusing if it weren’t all so petty and basic.

Micro aggression policing trigger thresholds where the quickest to take offence wins in a never ending grim roulette of intersectionist grievance where a cacophony of wounds jockey for social hierarchy.

Farmers who have been given so much economic and political muscle are now finding derision for them via social media as domestic consumers are forced to compete with 40million overseas middle class consumers pushing up prices while polluting waterways and making climate change gases.

This cultural resentment played out by Groundswell and corporate polluters interests keeps dragging progress backwards because we are a juvenile settler nation afraid of deep thinking and big ideas. A low horizon imagination people with all the cultural maturity of a can of day old coke-cola.

All these have become building blocks towards barriers that divide while cocooning us all into echo chambers.

In 2022, we ran out of patience with one another.

In 2022 we set the lawns of New Zealand’s Parliament on fire and we never recovered.

In 2022, social media algorithms allowed for a toxicity of debate that was easily manipulated.

A symphony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening.

Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.

It’s like Twitter on Elon out there.

Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.

Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.

People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.

Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!

The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.

Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and weed combined.

Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty where everyone more mentally ill than you is toxic and everyone less mentally ill is privileged.

The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.

The Left has lurched into woke ‘Social Justice’ territory which alienates more than it attracts.

Economic Justice does more than banning Gay Conversion, criminalising speech or gerrymandering the legal system to ensure anyone accused is found guilty, it redistributes wealth and makes direct provision to the cost of every day living. Beneficiaries and working class people care less about pronouns and the correct pronunciation of te Reo than they do about how to pay next weeks rent and power bill!

Pure temple doctrine divides & alienates. Broadchurch universals build solidarity.

Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the Professional Managerial Classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.

I am interested in Economic Justice and the immediate welfare of the poorest amongst us while providing immediate life condition upgrades.

In this age of subjective rage where there is no objective truth, there is only your measurement of triggered micro aggressions to decide what is innocuous and what is a hate crime.

We are now a cult of wounds, all so quick to expose our scars in the intersectionist roulette of victimhood, a social media ocean that screams our pain for cultural hierarchy.

Currently we have a compulsory mass group therapy session where people’s feelings are the only currency.

We desperately needed a cup of harden the fuck up in 2022.

While we unforgivingly tie ourselves endlessly into the next cancellation noose, National intend to throw disabled young people off welfare, the Banks posted billions in profits and the planet continues to melt.

In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth

By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals

In 2018, it was 42

In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.

And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.

In 2022 the richest man on Earth bought one of the most important social media platforms.

The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.

Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford.

We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected.

Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.

This isn’t progress, it’s Corporate Feudalism on a planet of ash.

Our brittle weakness is collectively beneath the challenge of our times.

Happy New Year.

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