As most of us are flipping through the news, through our Facebook feeds, twitter explosions and Instagram collections, we stumble on a great deal of imaginative wonderment and human creativity. It's almost as if we've reached a kind of apex, epitome or Atlantis of sharing, communicability and interconnectedness. And then we are quickly reminded of the other face of humanity that justifies assassinations, child abuse, mosque/church/public shootings, labour and work camps, the threat to and of refugees and the powers that have created them. It almost feels like there is a moral obligation to be concerned with so much because we are politically a society of consensus. We essentially have made it a necessary practice to consult varying ideologies in order to achieve some middle ground that appeals to all people, leaving almost everyone slightly unhappy about the results because one aspect of each people's Nature was abandoned to appeal to the greater cause. It fuels anger and divisiveness. It makes problems where there were no problems before and begins to pit people into groups that will in time go head to head in some kind of civil combat of the fist and mind.
There is no right or wrong, red or blue, intelligent or ignorant, selfish or selfless component to any of the silent madness that runs rampant throughout our communities. Most of the conflict online seems to be about the way some leader responded to an event, establishing a perspective that aims at defining other groups as 'ridiculous' or unfathomably without judgement. And what this all means is that the soil beneath us is turning up the great many prejudices we hold as a people, as a species, in order to justify our ways of existing, as if the world's population could actually function in the same way as the average middle-class American. We've tried to understand the world through a single telescopic view, discarding the immoralities our own society has made use of in order to establish the "economic freedoms" we think we actually have today. I am glad that I am not alone in thinking this way; and I am doubly glad that this trend of thinking has been engaged on as much the academic level as the social movement levels. Because the only way North America is going to be able to reach outside of its whirlwind of bogus rhetoric is to come to terms with what it is and how it has tied its own tongue. Philosophy tells us that the worlds we live in are tied to varying fantasies we hold even about who we are (individually and socially). Taking a look back throughout history, we assume that everything we've known has culminated to this pristine peak of civilization... And yet we remain as ruthless as the Romans or the Mayans before us. We chuckle at their technologies and legal systems while deliberately making clean water and general health a growing global scarcity.
I'm not saying that I have the answers to the problem, but I am saying that if we cannot observe the infrastructure of the problems we face, we will only recoil back through them over and over again. And until we have ripped ourselves from the gravity of that repetitive history, we will only -ourselves- remain the strangers to our own fate.
Strange, Joshua Love's second EP, will be available in China on November 1st 2018. It will be available internationally (on all platforms) on January 23rd 2019.
