Confessions Of A Political Atheist

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” - Ecclesiastes 1:9

In the hyperbolic environment of a highly contentious US election and a global effort to enflame disagreements of every kind, the phrase "never before in history..." is being thrown around like grass seed in a spring breeze.  Hardly.

 According to the Generally Accepted Narrative (GAN) - my term, don't bother looking it up - human emerged somewhere around 250,000 to 350,000 years ago, which equates to million of generations.  In all that time, Human Nature has never varied.  Sure, the force, scale and technology behind our basic motives has evolved and grown, but given the same set of variables, the human mind will always arrive at the same conclusions, and thus the same actions.

In the GAN, great civilizations have risen and collapsed, some well documented, others mysterious, still other we may never know about.  From the Indus Valley to the extant empires and dynasties, nothing fundamental has changed - same pig, different shades of lipstick.

From Cain murdering Abel, to the major crime families today, corruption and greed have always existed and will always exist.  Wherever power and wealth accumulate, corruption and ambition will scale up to meet the resources made available by that concentration.  It is a rule as immutable as day follows night.

One thing is for certain, when someone says, "Never before in history...," they are either woefully ignorant or deceptive.  Yes, instant global communications may be new, but what is said and how it is used is as old as coveting thy neighbor's goods.

In the wake of the first Trump-Biden debate, I have heard numerous commentators saying, "We have never seen a president like this!"  They wail and gnash teeth over Trump's bombastic character and bemoan the collapse of America.  Oh, please!  There have been plenty of similar personalities in the White House.  Maybe they didn't have Twitter accounts, but they had printing presses, and the establishment media of the time were just as fawning or contentious as they are now.  Look no further than William Randolph Hearst, or the yellow journalists, or Benjamin Franklin's own pamphlets and his Silence Dogood persona.

As far as bombastic leaders go, history is replete with them - Jengis Khan, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong.  In the softer light of time, we may revile or venerate these individuals, but they are no more or less bambastic than anyone on the global stage today.

The accumulation of wealth and power in a central location will attract these personalities, the way sugar attracts ants.  Whether they are benign piss ants or dangerous fire ants is a judgment call in generations to come, but the nature and behavior behind the personae has been and will always be the same, so long as humans are human.

As a political atheist, I reject the notion that things are different today, than at any time in history.  I reject labels like lift-right or conservative-liberal.  The definitions of these labels is in constant flux and are meaningless when evaluating events current or historic.  To a political atheist, it is more instructive to look at cause and effect.

When surveying history, one sees patterns emerge, which we can use to define Human Nature - given an equal set of causes, we can expect similar effects.  This is generally called science, with a small 's'.  It is objective and fact based.  It is not passionate about a particular perspective, but tries to discern expected outcomes based on a given set of conditions.

The political atheist sees politics as a cycle, winging first in one direcction, then the other.  It is inevitable and its pattern can be seen throughout history.  Certain personality types emerge to address certain environments, because their skill sets are ideally suited to address the situation.  Humans know this intuitively.  They do not need to be convinced.

There is no winner or loser, there is only the Tao.

As my favorite author and pundit, Mark Twain, is recorded as saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

I grew up in a highly politicized home.  My father, a politician, began his career as a Democrat, then switched to Republican in the Goldwater years.  I watched as society swug from the idyllic 1950s conservative, to the 1960s radical liberal, to the 1970s softer liberal, to the 1980s Reagan conservative, and on and on.  Just one country, just one lifetime.  The same has happened in every nation across the globe, and those patterns synchronize to create the Zeitgeist in ever larger cycles spanning decades to millennia.

As a political atheist, I do not use popularity or the majority to determine my beliefs.  Here again, I defer to the patron saint of political atheists, Mark Twain, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Rather, I view politics as one person on a see-saw, running back and forth trying to balance the direction of motion.  The slight differences between cycles are what we can "progress," though the differences are vanishingly small and often erased in the next cycle.

Politics is essentially the choice between firing squad, hanging and the electric chair.  No matter what one chooses, the result is the same, it's just a matter of how much pain one feels getting there.

In effect, politics is choosing how much pain we want to feel getting to the next cycle.  Sometimes, the environment is so disturbing that we choose more pain to get it over with, but at other times the environment is serene and we choose as little pain as possible.  It is effectively choosing how fast we rip the bandage off the pre-existing wounds of the last cycle.

In the Grand Scheme of Things, who we vote for has little or no effect on the path Humanity is taking.  One choice may get us there faster, and another slower, but the destination never varies.

The Future is a cliff in front of us that we cannot avoid.  We can choose to crawl off or jump off, but "off" is the only viable option we have.  The political atheist has studied all the various roads taken to arrive at the cliff and realizes that Universe put it there, and no single choice along the way did anything but vary the scenery we passed along the way.

It may seem that politcal atheism is a nihilist Weltanschauung, but it isn't.  It is the Traveler's viewpoint of enjoying the process rather than fretting over the schedule.  Either way, the Traveler will arrive at a destination.  Whether the destination was the intended one depends on an infinite set of variables, all of which can be enjoyed for what they are.

In a tapesty, each stitch has no choice regarding its color or position in the overall image.  It likely has no clue what the overall image is, nor that it is a stitch in the first place.  It only knows where it is and can choose to fight that fact or accept it, but it doesn't change the inevitable.

As a political atheist, it is comforting to let go of caring about labels and which side "wins" or "loses".  Instead, it is entertaining to watch the mud-slinging "shit show" and the hand-wringing, and the punditry, and the sales jobs, all trying to control the piles of wealth and power.

It is far more instructive to enjoy the process - the view - along the way.  It is beautiful to try to see the colors and positions of the stitches in the overall tapestry.  It is certainly entertaining to watch the histrionics and hyperbole of the competing factions, knowing the futility and meaninglessness of it all, yet drinking deeply of the financial and emotional investment so many put into these things.

We appear to have arrived at one of those fascinating periods in history where all the cycles align.  From what I have learned, this seems to happen every 500 years or so.  We humans have already chosen our course by the collective actions of our species, and most without a clue as to what we have done. 

Adopting this or that label, ideology or candidate changes nothing but the experience each individual will have getting over the cliff.

Kabuki Apocalypse

I really enjoy writing about politics, because no matter what I say or which side I appear to be on, it always elicits a lot of responses that span the range of human emotions.  It's no wonder the Reader Survey had politics as being the number one topic that people loved to hate.

I get accused of shilling for this party or that, or being a "fence sitter" for declaring myself to be a political atheist.  I should mention, for those confused by the term, that a political atheist refers to a complete disbelief in establishment politics and has little or nothing to do with religion.  That's a completely different conflict.  In the end, I get accused of being everything, since I believe in nothing, is the way I read it.

But how does one get to be a political atheist, you ask.

As I've mentioned before, my father was a politician.  He was first elected in 1960, as a Democrat from Houston.  He served three terms in the Texas House before switching parties, due in large part to the corruption and pure evil of the Johnson Machine.  For those unfamiliar with this term, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was a Texas politician who became president upon the death of John F. Kennedy (in Texas, but there are books on that connection).  Johnson's network ran Texas politics with a platinum fist, fed by oil money and raw lust for power.

In 1966, Dad jumped parties and was elected to the Texas Senate as a Goldwater Republican, and in 1972, ran for governor, coming within 200,000 votes of becoming the first Republican to hold that office since the Civil War.  Of course, the jump came just in time for the corruption and paranoia of the Nixon years, which ultimately resulted in Nixon's impeachment and resignation in 1974.

Watching all this as an impressionable kid, I grew disgusted with politics, having seen that there were no sides with clean hands.  I also saw the toll it took on my father - the frustration, anger and ultimate withdrawal from the process, since one could never get a message directly to the voters.  There were always layers upon layers of control in between that had their hands out - ass, gas or grass, nobody rides for free.

When the time came for me to receive my enfranchisement, I didn't want it.  There was nothing there that I found appealing or desirable.  What I did learn, though, was the power of the media.  I had already spent my entire life to that point on stage.  I was a political prop, rolled out at the appropriate moment to enhance the "family man" image.  I instinctively understood this.  I saw how it all worked, and I liked the power of controlling people without ever being seen.

I spent many hours in TeeVee studios and back stage.  I was agog at the technology and machinations that turned into programs and productions.  I loved listening to the production meetings - throwing out ideas, anticipating responses, calculating demographics.  It reminded me of all those WW2 movies my father loved and forced me to watch.  The generals in dimly lit rooms, smoking furiously, moving pieces around on a map.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life - and what I didn't want.

What I didn't want was to be in the political system. I preferred the position of being on the outside, watching the rubes argue and lambaste each other.  When they were done, they came to me to polish and present the results of their bloody in-fighting.  I enjoyed being above them, looking down with mild distaste at their grubby faces as I bestowed my talent, knowledge and skill upon their message.

Through all of it, politics and politicians were potential clients.  I never invested any importance or meaning in their system.  All I wanted was their money, and all I gave them was a product.

Eventually, I came to realize that I was deceiving innocent people in the process.  Sure, they donated to the parties and were active in campaigns, but they honestly had no idea what went on behind the scenes - the cynicism, corruption, greed and lust.  The masses truly believed that they were doing some good by supporting this or that cause, party or politician.  They were completely unsuspecting of the blackness that sucked their money and passion away and spit it back at them.

The other day, I posted a link to an Infowars video on my private Facebook account.  It was a hidden camera recording of a DNC delegate saying Hillary would ban all guns and destroy the Second Amendment (right to own guns).  Almost immediately, I got a response from a good friend and the person I interned with lo, these many years ago:

"Stop posting these links to bullshit sources.  Can't you see what he's doing?  He's leading that poor idiot to get her to give the answers he wants."

Incredulous, I replied, "Really?  You and I have done that exact thing to elicit the response we wanted from an interview hundreds of times.  And Infowars has more followers than many cable news hosts.  What makes them less legitimate than any other source, especially given the revelations in the past two weeks concerning Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, and Politico?"

I thought about it for a few minutes, then added, "You know as well as I do that there is no such thing as an objective reporter.  Every story has at least seven people injecting their personal views into every story that goes on the air.."  I was referring to the producer, reporter, editor, news chief, owner, sponsor, and viewer.  Each places their prejudices and assumptions into a story at every step of the process.

There was no response, and there can be none.  It is true.  Because I grant more credibility to one source over another does not change the process itself, which is the same for any media outlet.  For every form of communication, there is a standardized process for encoding and decoding information.  Regardless of who or what is communicating, the process is the same.  In any given language, the rules of grammar must be followed or the message is scrambled and unintelligible.

Ultimately, I have withdrawn from politics, media and as much of the bullshit as I can.  I prefer pure entertainment now, like the stage and film.  The reason is that at some level, everyone in the audience understands that the actors and scenery are a lie.  TeeVee crosses that line by pretending to reveal reality - but whose reality?

As I disucssed previously, it is all magic.  It invokes spirits and presents possession as a mirror of reality, however distorted.  As a professional in "show biz," I have come to see media as either benign (theater, film) or malignant (TeeVee, especially "news").  In the benign form, the audience is aware that they are being manipulated, so they have a fighting chance.  In the malignant form, the audience believes what they are seeing is at least some form of truth, which of course, none of it is.

In the end, I have washed my hands of politics and mass media, and have tried in some small way to absolve my sins.  Generally, though, people don't want to hear it.  During election season they dive in, regardless of how much distance they keep during the "off" years, and most people reach for the TeeVee remote almost immediately upon coming home from another day as corporate drone.

We have all been so conditioned that we can't imagine, much less remember a time when life wasn't like this.  It seems quaint to think of days when TeeVee didn't exist and campaigns rode around in trains, giving stump speeches along the route.  We have pulled the wool over our own eyes, seemingly as a choice, but really what choices do you consciously make?

When you vote for a candidate, do you think, "I can't choose a third party because they will lose.  I want to go with a winner."  Ask yourself this: regardless of which party won, have you ever won?  Have you ever been happy with the choice you made?

Remember back when Obama was first elected?  There was a kind of religious aura about it.  None one could say a cross word about him.  It was a sacred moment.  Now, it is hard to find someone who will admit to voting for him.

That's why I'm a political atheist.