The Mundanity of Dystopia//Reality is an Anticlimax

An essay on how it feels to live in America right now.

The Mundanity of Dystopia:

Humans are an fascinatingly adaptable species. I would argue that adaptability is the greatest evolutionary advantage that is conferred upon us by our superior intelligence, and has allowed us the unique privilege of habitation in even the most extreme environments; however, it can also be our greatest pitfall. Something I feel we too often don’t perceive in the moment is how far from normalcy and typical morality we can stray, as our mind tries to justify and digest the reality of our circumstances. Things that were inconceivable just a decade ago, we have become desensitized to. When something becomes consistent enough, we learn to tune it out like static in the background.

It is utterly bizarre being so politically aware, because it’s almost completely dissonant from day to day life. I spend my days watching as America buries itself, along with our institutions and fundamental principles withering into desiccation before my waking eyes. Yet, when I go out into the world, everything feels normal. People continue to conduct themselves as if we live in the same country we always did. The trees are starting to bud and bloom, the groundhogs have started to re-emerge from their winter dens, and the bumblebees are elated over the plumes of pollen covering every inch of the outdoors (and pummeling my sinuses). I didn’t expect the world to stop, but I expected something to be different, you know?

It feels a lot like the pandemic did for me — I guess I was lucky when it came to that whole situation. I was an “essential worker” when the pandemic happened, so I never stopped working, and I never got sick, so things were more or less the same for me — except there was no traffic and much better parking. I remember when it first started: hearing about some mystery illness in China, then seeing it hit Europe, then New York, and eventually here. I remember my coworkers and I gathering in our trailer to sit in on a big call with management discussing what we were going to do, and what would happen if we had to shut down for a few weeks. Do you remember how united we were during those first couple of months? Do you remember seeing those videos of people harmonizing with instruments on their balconies? It felt like we had empathy for each other for once, as we commiserated over lock downs and found new ways to connect with each other. Eventually, of course, we were shattered and redivided over the same political lines we always are. Eventually, the novelty became background noise, and we were brought crashing back to reality.

What do you think would actually happen if Aliens visited us? People think the world would change, but I’m not so sure. Everyone would be going crazy those first couple of weeks — and we’d probably run out of toilet paper for no reason other than panic —but then what? We would all still have to make money and provide for our families, hospitals still need to run, people still need to be able to buy things… Eventually we would just go back to life; things would be different, but all the same.

That was a rather long digression, but it is building to my greater point: we don’t properly take into account the mundanity that takes place between all those grand epics and important historical events we learn about. People strive for normalcy, even in the face of crisis. But things aren’t normal, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. Our president is a fascist moron hellbent on causing an economic depression and destroying our nations global influence. The man tried to overthrow the government, and we stood by like it was just another political scandal. For god’s sake, American citizens are being sent to an extrajudicial prison in another country with no due process because of the color of their skin. We can’t just go on pretending these things aren’t important. Take a good hard look at where we are, and what you have been desensitized into accepting. Ask yourself, would you have accepted the same just a decade ago? Normalcy is a lie we sell ourselves to hide from the fact that we are scared of change, and scared of what happens if we go against the current. You shouldn’t be striving for normal, you should be striving for better, even when things are good. Greatness has never been achieved through accepting the answer “good enough”. Greatness is wrought like iron in the callused hands of a blacksmith, and sharpened through hammer and flame.

Reality is an Anticlimax:

As I’ve become more adept at sieving out academic bias over the years, both within my own conceptions and within those that I consume, I’ve come to realize that we, collectively as humans, have a habit of making history and memories more “cinematic” than they really were. I’m sure any historians or academics will know what I mean by that. If I told you to imagine two fully armored medieval knights fighting, you’d likely picture a gallant and skillful sword duel like you would see in a fantasy movie. The reality of that fight would be more like a wrestling match, where the winner overpowers the other, then takes their helmet off and bludgeons them to death, or repeatedly stabs them in the face through their visor. Reality is almost always more dull, imprecise, and gritty than how we imagine it.

It’s not on purpose; the mind naturally lingers upon the larger details and things that are most significant to you, much like how bright lights obscure the dimmer stars of the night sky. This is a filtering mechanism the brain does so that you focus on the things that could be most important or dangerous to you. In a social context, we often don’t think to examine or question things that are societal norms; we simply file them away as “common sense” or facts of life, and assume that the cultural context is obvious and natural to everybody. This is what causes culture shock when you travel outside of that cultural bubble. We see the results of this constantly in archeology and historical anthropology. There are tons of artifacts that we can only reasonably guess at the true purpose of, and historical texts missing important information because no one thought to write it down. For instance: if in a thousand years, future archeologists found a can opener and no description of what it did, and for some reason cans weren’t a common thing anymore, then there would probably be some conjecture over what exactly that contraption was. My favorite example of this is the mystery of the third shaker. You’ve seen or likely have the little salt and pepper shakers, and apparently in the 18th and 19th century it was common for there to be a third; but historians aren’t certain what was in it because no one wrote it down.

The reason I am writing out this, perhaps belabored and winding train of thought, is that I think a lot of people are waiting for some big announcement, or some clear and well defined line in the sand to be crossed, or even a glowing neon sign that tells them that the revolution has officially begun, and that the bad guys are on that side, and the good guys are on this side. They’re all waiting for this epic Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment, but that’s not how it works in real life. The rather anticlimactic and dull reality of that moment is that it was just some arbitrary event that was assigned greater symbolic meaning in hindsight. We focus on these single poetic scenes and miss the grander and more detailed picture. Reality is one unimaginably intricate web of chain reactions, not a single inflection point. The cascading series of events that led to Caesar crossing the Rubicon had already occurred, and the grand calculus of consequence that were caused by that action were already in motion beforehand. He already defied the Senate, was in massive debt, was likely going to be killed if he abdicated his command, and had already crossed into Italy and occupied a city at that point. The Rubicon was just another river his legions had to ford on his way to Rome. Even if he turned back, he was still a rogue general/consul with his own legions, and the Senate wasn’t just going to let him go. Let’s even say they somehow resolved that situation peacefully: the Senate was still massively corrupt, Rome still would have had internal financial issues, and Rome was already in constant turmoil and civil war against similar military leaders (Sulla, Marius, Cinna) for decades before Caesar declared himself dictator. If you zoom out and look at the broader tides of history instead of a single wave, the Republic was primed to fail, Caesar just happened to be the one that pushed it over.

The same can be said about nearly all the “turning point” moments we learned in history class. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is technically what set off World War 1, but the tension was already there before that happened. Major land wars broke out in Europe every 20-30 years since the industrial revolution and mass colonial expansion, it was only a matter of time until those conflicts met with the lethality of modern combat. Sure, the battle of Midway was a huge win for the US in WW2, but Japan was already heavily behind in supply and hitting production limitations, and their manpower was stretched thin trying to control Manchuria and the Pacific. Even if the US loses that battle, our wealth of natural resources and manufacturing capability was always going to outpace Japan’s, it was just a matter of time. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point clear. There is very rarely a definitive moment that you can pick out where the future will be certain. We choose those moments in hindsight as a part of whatever narrative we are trying to justify to ourselves.

There will never be a good time to stand up and speak out, and there will always be a reason to postpone justice. You won’t realize it, but your morals will become greyer and more muddy, things will become harder and harder to take seriously, and you will become numb to reality. I know because I can feel it happening to me. I’ve accepted a responsibility as someone who must pay attention when others cannot, but it’s just so hard to care so deeply when no one else does. I feel as though I am screaming into the void, my voice consumed by a vast well of emptiness, the sound lost with no walls to reverberate against. But I have to believe this is better than begrudging acceptance.

We all must honestly and introspectively decide when is enough based on our own morality, and no matter your decision or how much others may agree with it, you must decide. The cavalry is not coming. No one is magically going to bail us out and make everything go back to normal. The political pressure that created this nightmarish administration already existed and was in motion before Trump, and would still exist even if Trump dropped dead today. The problem is at the root, and we are far past the point of an easy fix. Inaction is a choice, and you’re free to make it, but it does not free you from the consequences of that inaction, nor does it shield you from the blame you share for anything that happens in your inaction.

I’ll leave you all with this excerpt from the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, which chronicles the accounts of people who lived in Nazi Germany. I highly recommend you read pages 166 - 173 here, which I’ve pulled the following from:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter…”

"…The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head…”

"…Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have…”

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

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National protest on April 19th: https://www.nvunheard.org/protest-listings/

Contact Your Representatives: https://5calls.org/

5051 (organizes protests): https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

The General Strike: https://generalstrikeus.com/

If you would like to know more about protest methods and organizations, here is my article on the subject: We March to Revolution: A Call to Action & Ways You Can Fight Back

And here is a more general article about Fascism in America today: American Fascism: What to Expect and How to Prepare

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Ever vigilant, your eyes in the sky,

~Minerva