Think About The Way IX

By Doctor Gonzo 

16 October 1999

Minneapolis — The cold stare was quite blatant. The voice was low and abrupt. I had been feeling superficially cheerful of late, and of course I would stop and say "Hi" to somebody that I ran into in the lobby. When my greeting was returned, however, it had been dragged through the mud of a thousand illicit trysts and the fallout from those visits. It wasn't wholly unexpected, and there was nothing I could do but unconsciously shrug it off. Even smile about it for a while. Why, yes, I could be quite an asshole, from certain points of view. There were many people who would have reason to hate me for my actions, and at least that means I am having an impact. I have said it before: if somebody hates me, that means I am doing something right.

When it happened again a few days later, however, I was not in such a reflective mood. Sure, I was an idiot who sometimes ran amok like a bull in a china shop, but everybody does. I don't want to add any hate to the world whatsoever, but the best I can do is guarantee that I don't live a life full of enmity. I could not be responsible when others became indignant at my actions. Besides, what does hating me prove? After all, those people who have a visceral aversion to me hardly have any contact with me. They no longer consider me a friend, if they ever did. They are not in a position to use their hatred to try and change my behaviour, or seek revenge. They are wasting emotion, bringing people down for no good cause. And the people that do deserve to be chastised, if they exist at all, are ignored.

I hate very few people in this world; actually, I do not hate a single person on this Earth. Those that I do hate, which number in the single digits, are not members of humanity. They do not belong to the Kingdom of Ends, and perhaps they never did. They are creatures who have committed crimes against mankind so disgusting they have given up all rights as humans, as far as I am concerned. Even this hatred is more abstract than anything else. With one exception, I have never even seen, much less had contact with, those that I have such great disdain for. They are out there, many of them, and that is something to live with. Those people who have had much greater impact on me and my life, those people who have destroyed my family, sent me into long depressions, attempted to squash my dreams with mediocrity, those people I do not hate.

People do stupid things like that. It's to be expected. Hopefully, when people make mistakes and fuck up they learn a lesson and live a better life because of it. More often they learn no lesson, but instead sit around and wonder why they are always screwing up. Either that, or they screw up without having any consciousness of the fact that they are fuckups. While these outcomes are not the best possible, one cannot argue with their prevalence, and so it is stupid to think otherwise. When somebody that I know demonstrates an inability to learn from their mistakes, I simply catalog that fact and store it away in memory. They will probably not be believable in the future, even if their words dictate otherwise.

As crazy Mr. Keaveny put it to me, I put the blinders on a year ago and charged unseeing through a plate glass window. What blinded me was the fact that I was listening to people's words instead of paying attention to their actions. As a writer myself, and now a half-assed journalist of sorts, I knew full well the power of words to placate and falsify. I have dripped honey to people using words many times, in many languages, for a long time. I usually like to think that I am at least a cut above most others, for I never knowingly lie and I am frank with my idiocies, but only a fool is so callous as to not say the words that one thinks the audience wants to hear, whatever that audience may be. People have used the same trick on me. They have manipulated their thoughts in order to create some impression in my mind that they desired. Again, it is done by everybody. No use in getting upset over this fact. Why not? It's simple . . .

"The guilty undertaker sighs . . ."

Though it was not Homecoming, the damage seemed to be just as great. In the streets, benches lay overturned, a target for marauding bands of drunk Wisconsinites. Here and there smashed bottles lay in the gutter. At one intersection somebody had gone so far as to rip the traffic light off of a pole. Whole blocks smelled of beer. The only explanation for such a night was that the next day, Saturday, was the day of the Minnesota-Wisconsin football game. And that meant roving bands of idiots prowled along the avenues, in search of alcohol, bare shoulders, and windows to shatter.

For most people who have outgrown a 13-year-old's mentality, this scene is repulsive. It is not much fun seeing people who are so drunk that they pass out in the bathroom of their rum-laced dorm. One would think that a person who has a BAC of .209% would have better things to do that attempt suicide through Busch Light. A string of marriage proposals made when inebriated to a dozen men and women cheapens the sanctity of such a union, intelligent people would say. It is not very hard to work up a fearsome contempt for these people, but it is hard to put that contempt to any use.

It is hard to see humanity dragged down to such a level, for I believe that humanity has the potential to be the greatest realization of beauty and excellence possible. Such potential, however, is far from foremost in mind when you see a couple of male examples of the species beating the hell out of each other on the ground. It's tragic, to say the least. But, what can you do?

Not a damn thing. The quickest route to depression is to take offense at every mistake and instance of evil behaviour in people. There is so much of it that the pointlessness of righteous indignation will quickly overwhelm you, forcing you to hide under the blankets on your bed. There is a fine line that some of us walk, the near-impossibility of trying to reconcile all the double-standards and hypocrisies with what we have been taught. I am bumping up against that limit again, and the result is not pretty.

There is one solution. Stick all people in the realm of inanimate objects. This simple answer will make almost all interactions with people tolerable, if not enjoyable. Use as an axiom in your logical framework the notion that people are not responsible for their actions most of the time, and thus it is not worth it to get angry, let alone try and change them. Of course, this attitude may be seen as mildly patronizing ("Besserwessi"as those crazy Germans say), vaguely utilitarian, and downright cynical. But the alternative is to continue to expect people to think before they act, and proposition that is not likely to be realized anytime soon.

That aside, however, this belief is not as cynical as one might expect. Just think about how many times you do not have a choice in actions, that you must do one thing. If you work for a collections agency, you don't have a choice but to send out your goon squads when some person decides to welsh on a large loan. If you are a cashier at a liquor store, you must pull out your shotgun and threaten the idiot tries to pass off a fake, unlaminated Wisconsin DL as his own. Even I don't have much chance for independent thought in my job: when somebody is eating in a library, for example, I have to tell them to knock it off. It's automatic.

It is a widely accepted truism that inanimate objects have no free will. My car does not decide to break down simply to spite me. Electricity does not decide to run through my arm when I grab live wires. Money does not get up and leave my checking account of its own accord. The fact is, cars break down, money gets spent, and electricity will shock you when you grab hot wires. It is utterly pointless to get angry at these events (though some people do). So my car broke down. Who cares? What did I expect?

The same thing holds for most people most of the time. When I see some punk-ass skateboarder on campus, I must tell them to get lost. It is University policy that there is no skateboarding on campus, and it is my job to enforce such policies. It will do them no good to protest, because I can not change the statute. That is not my job; my job is to get them to leave. If they insist on giving me shit for it, that will piss me off, and once again I have no choice but to call the police to get them to comply. When somebody is non-compliant, I call the cops. End of story. Does this stop people from getting pissed, from yelling "Fuck you, toy cop!" as they slink away in anger and disgust? Hell no. These people have not mastered the technique of selective anger. They are generally angry. They are not happy, except when they have a reason to be angry. That way, they can feel slighted, and bitch about how nobody likes them, how that goddamn security monitor is out to get them. Bullshit. I don't care about them one way or another. I have already forgotten about them. They are faceless. As long as I am on duty, I see offenses, not people. I have to.

Are people inanimate objects all the time? I would like to think not. But that is only because religion has made me impervious to existentialist arguments. Those tricky Catholics. I can reject most of their explicit morality as ridiculous and outdated, but I cannot escape that goddamn guilt. I implicitly believe in the inherent wisdom in delayed gratification. Don't act out of weakness now, because you will be rewarded later. When that will be, I don't know (and it is kept pretty hazy). But never question that fact. Dwell at the right hand of the Lord, etc. etc. etc.

So it is basically religious guilt that keeps me from denouncing all humans as automatons. If I could live the existentialist life, just doing whatever seemed right and proper at the time, never believing that I had any choice, I would be happy. Sure, some people would do things to piss me off, but I would get mine because I would return the favour in spades. Running amok, trashing relationships and paying little attention to whether people are better or worse off for my actions. I have to maximize my happiness now, because now is all I have. That's what everybody else is doing. They don't have any choice; they are inanimate objects.

I can't do it. I don't even believe in heaven, but I have this extremely overpowering tendency to think in terms of doing "The Right" thing, whatever it may be. Don't sacrifice some uncertain future payback for temporary enjoyment now. You don't get ahead in life by telling self-righteous old men to go fuck themselves, because though it may feel good now it will come back to haunt you later. And so forth.

Would society be better off if everybody lived for the moment, or if sacrifice and calm planning were the rule? Either one would work, I think. It only becomes a problem when expectations don't match reality. We expect people to think for the future, but they act like goddamn inanimate objects without free will and they choose to live for today. If my car had a free will, it wouldn't break down until it was at a garage and I didn't need to drive for a while, because that would make the most sense from a future reward standpoint (and it did . . . perhaps Gonzo does think). If people thought ahead, would they slash my tires out of jealous rage? I doubt it.

This philosophy is missing one important aspect, however, and that is when to view people as inanimate objects and when not to. Though people may not be able to change a lot of the things they do, hopefully they can change some. When somebody treats me like a pariah, I would hope that there would be a choice, and thus a reversal, on the matter. It can be argued either way, however, depending on how far you want to go in your analysis of a person's actions. It is not a pretty sight, for the most part.

And I have seen. People are more easily read than one tends to believe. You just have to look.