In this episode, we explore how we might use parody to challenge endemic irresponsibility
It’s an old joke, I know, but it still seems so painfully accurate somehow. It goes like this:
How might we prove that beer and all those other forms of alcohol have negative weight?
Well, it’s simple, really.
That alcohol must be really light, somehow, because people can carry a six-pack anywhere, with no trouble at all.
They can carry it out onto the remotest and most paradise-like beach.
They can carry it out into depths of the most deserted desert.
They can carry it into the deepest, darkest, dankest forest.
They can carry it right up to the very top of highest mountain.
And yes, people do indeed often say that their spirits feel lighter whilst they’re drinking the contents of the can.
And yet once the can is empty, it seems it becomes so impossibly heavy to carry that it must be abandoned on the instant, upon that very spot:
And the only possible explanation for that all of this, that anyone could possibly imagine, is that the alcohol must therefore have negative weight…
Ho ho. Very funny. Or not funny at all, at least in terms of the painful prevalence of unwanted litter, everywhere around our long-suffering world.
Yet what can we do about this all-too-literal mess?
At the surface-level, the short-answer is “Not much”, sadly. What we see here in this all-too-literal bad-joke is the outcome of anti-possession, a direct corollary of possession. Once a culture allows itself to become dominated by myths of possession, this kind of litter and waste is one of its many inevitable outcomes.
Remember that possessionism is basically a two-year-old’s view of the world: everything is mine!, everything must happen now!, the only one who matters is me!. Yet it also follows that after having made it mine!, anything that I now don’t want must instantly become not-mine!, Somebody Else’s Problem. It must disappear from my sight and my awareness, magically cease-to-exist, because it’s now become not-mine!.
Unfortunately, as every parent will know, this is indeed all perfectly natural and normal behaviour for a two-year-old. It’s one of the reasons why this so-challenging-for-everyone-else stage of development is so often summarised as ‘the terrible twos’. But we need to emphasise that it’s only ‘normal and natural’ for a two-year-old - and not for anyone much beyond that age. By three years old, a functionally-normal child should already be growing beyond that stage; and at anything much beyond around five years old, it should have come entirely to an end, other than in those few times where stress and the like might cause a short-term regression to an earlier stage.
In that sense, the presence of possessionism and the like within a culture ought to be very rare - in effect, limited only to those few unfortunates who are either clinically or congenitally unable to care about anything or anyone other than themselves. The danger is that any culture that doesn’t give proper support to parents to help their children grow through the ‘terrible twos’, and that instead all but forces those parents fall back onto coping-mechanisms such as pandering to the toddler-tantrums and possessive-rages, will eventually find itself becoming a paediarchy - ‘rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish’ . A culture where nominal-adults who’ve never grown beyond two years old are allowed to rule the roost, and model deeply-irresponsible selfishness and self-centredness as the supposed societal norm. Not A Good Idea…
When that happens in a culture, we not only see possessionism run rampant, but anti-possession running rampant too. In effect, whenever some once-wanted property or possession becomes unwanted, it turns into anti-property, an anti-possession. In that sense, litter and the like represent a direct metric of the extent to which possessionism has been allowed to infect that culture. The two issues are inextricably interlinked and intertwined: possessionism creates litter; but litter itself will also validate and reinforce the possessionism. Each drives the other ever onward into a literal death-spiral, where we end up drowning in our own waste. Also Not A Good Idea…
Which in turn tells us that we won’t be able to tackle littering and suchlike without tackling the prevalence of possessionism in that culture. Yet if we try to tackle that head-on, in a full-blown global-scale paediarchy like the ones we all live in right now? - well, yeah, that’s gonna be hard…
So what can we do about it?
Well, yes, there is a way. Or one place we perhaps might be able to at least make a start, anyway - though there is a note of caution that we, uh, do need to be wary about here.
The need for caution is that yes, we’re dealing with people here who have apparently-adult bodies, but in essence have never grown a single day past two years old. Which, however, should also warn us that yes, these are deeply-dysfunctional ‘adults’ who not only still have all of the two-year-old’s vindictiveness, viciousness and violent temper-tantrums, and still just as incapable of shame, remorse, or conscience as they were back then, yet now also with all of the adult-level manipulativeness and cunning that they’ve acquired over the years, and, in some cases, also all of the adult-level weaponry that our crumbling cultures can provide as well. So yeah, some real risk there of a dangerously-devilish mix, one might say? Ouch…
Yet that should also remind us of that old quote from Thomas More, that “the Devil, that prowde spirit, cannot bear to be mock’d”. And there, as long as we’re careful about that need for caution, there is our point of leverage, our possible point of change. The one weakness of every two-year-old is that they have no defence against laughter, their proud antics exposed as nothing more than petty, pointless, childishly absurd. That’s where old tales such as ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’ come into the story, and where they have their power; yet we can also do the same in a simpler way through absurdist jokes such as this one about negative-weight. Some real options there that might be worth exploring more.
Enjoyed that Tom, reminds me of the old joke that beer kills bad brain cells, and that it is scientifically proven as the night goes on when our dysfunctional adults display their newly attained wisdom.
Hope you are well.
Enjoyed Tom! Have a nice day!