That is an over-statement.
It is the link between Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro, all the biggies, the multi-million moguls who ride slipshod over the rules and regulations.
I’ll take you to Dostoevsky.
I was reminded of this after listening to Darryl Cooper’s Podcast ‘The Underground Spirit’.
He compares the lives of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
Specifically, elements such as the scene with the horse in Crime and Punishment and the conception of the Superman.
Both men experienced similar acts of cruelty, barbarity towards an old horse that shaped their future lives, both men wrote about the Superman, the over-man or uber-mensch.
This isn’t someone with laser eyes, faster than a locomotive, with flowing cape, more, an individual for whom the rules of society do not apply. They are out of time, out of the restrictions that limit us normals.
If I drive too fast in a restricted zone, I will receive a parking ticket. An uber-mensch will receive the same ticket, the difference being, I’ll fret, the uber will remain focused on their mission, whatever that may be.
Moving forwards when I refer to the supermen – really, super-people, I’ll call them ubers. Again, not because they are such amazing physical or physiological specimens, more because they have crafted an existence that is outside the laws and conditions that affect us, everydayers.
And the point?
Well, it is an explanation of much of what happens in the world today.
There are us. That is, the 99.9999 per cent of people who work, who turn up at the hospital when we break a leg, who wait, who surf the internet in our free time looking for inspiration or reduced prices on clothing or other unnecessary items who study, work and rest as per the hours of the day, who button our own shirts and pull-on our own pants, without servants or maids or helpers, who must negotiate the filling-in of online forms, all the day to day chaff that is being an adult in the modern world. And then there are the 0.0001 per cent.
Don’t try to calculate the number, I made it up. It is to make a point.
The guys whose pockets have been lined by the World Cup, who profited astronomically from the pandemic who are the tech giants. Mostly men with yachts and multi-storey, multiple-site homes, with security details, their own jets and private airports who exist a little like God, in a time and space outside everyday experience.
I mentioned the Darryl Cooper Podcast. Currently I have been listening to his series about Jeffrey Epstein. The possibly murdered, possible suicide who money-laundered and dealt big-time in the sexual affairs of children and young women, aided, and abetted by Robert Maxwell’s daughter.
In the series he mentioned Cyril Smith.
Remember him?
The oversized Liberal Democrat (in more ways than one) politician.
My sole recollection is of his struggle to fit through the underground gates in London, such was his girth. Oh, and he was a paedophile. Protected by State for decades until the revelations after he was dead.
It is perhaps too easy to slip into a conspiracy-theory mindset, believing there is a Bond-like villain pulling the strings, manipulating. Too easy to imagine Zionists or Old White Men in ivory towers scheming, coordinating the next steps in the saga that is Global Warming (not a climate crisis to them). (The folk who have purchased over-sized plots of land in New Zealand, thinking ahead).
No, no, it isn’t as coordinated as that.
There are bad people, or perhaps good people who are bad or good people who behave badly, thinking they are good, whatever. It is perverse.
It is too complicated to be part of a system.
I know this for sure as I work in a complex system that is healthcare. I see the best made plans of mice and men.
It is those who, having mastered the cognitive dissonance I mentioned yesterday, rise to the top, who can compartmentalise their ideas of what is good and bad, acceptable, or not.
Who are emotionally congruent nursing their baby when they oversee, accept or acknowledge the deaths of others.
It is Stalin and his million deaths.
It is you and me as statistics.
As points on a curve that are not representative of humanity, but to name a collegiate blog, ordure.
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov demonstrates very well his failure of uber-dom. He senses guilt, he feels the burden of the murder, it is destructive.
He is not one of the guys who can appear on TV or on the cover of a glossy, smiling and pretending their innocence. He has the idea, but his honesty is too great.
Well-tuned psychopath. Not me. Not I.
Time-lord, manipulator of right and wrong, of truth and reconciliation, or remorse and regret.
The finite, the stopgap, the end of all things.
My solitary Tweet is lost, yours shakes a mountain.
My power is internal, it comes around and destroys only me, yours sends waves across the planet, echoes without end.
You can hire and fire.
You are bulletproof.
Beyond, above, around.
Omniscient, omnipresent.
Your listening devices are tuned-in, you have listeners who listen to the listening, who oversee the watchers, who manipulate the moment.
You are the comic-book hero who sups Kool-Aid.
You are the first and last.
We humans, so fragile.
The beating of a heart.
The passage of minor electrical currents through microscopic pathways of the heart; organs that perfuse, that push and pull oxygen to brains that exist beyond the complexities of the universe, capable of achieving the greatest and the worst, able to beat an old woman senseless for the pennies in her purse or thieve the pension of a million, able to deceive and explain with sincerity the essence of our hearts. We are the good and the bad. We are the under-men and the overmen, the boy, the girl, child, innocence and experience, the teacher, and the student. Able to listen without speaking, talk without hearing, we are obfuscation, confusion and manipulation, organised crime and disorganised government, we are the staffer who phones in sick, whose duvet-day costs the lives of a family, whose wrinkle or ripple in time is the start of a movement that impels others to drop out or not bother turning in, the break of dawn and the setting sun and all that is in between. The ice, frozen underfoot that fractures, that quakes from money-making, misguided fracking, the burning, oil and gas substrate that fuels the economy that gets you to work or home on time when the strikes are not in the way and you, you sitter outside of time know that none of this affects you, you anti-pleb, sit nicely, chauffer driven car, Mercedes or other, funnelling you along the one-way streets in the high and low country. Caviar and only made for you foodstuffs that resemble fish and chips and salt and vinegar crisps the way black is white and white black, the yin and the yang, the swinging pendulum of forget-me-nots. You can’t change the seasons although you can holiday in your holiday home in the capitals of the north or south, you can navigate the world, Olympian, like the game is only starting and you make the rules.
Fin.
Dr Rod’s Odd Blog (almondemotion) 