This is the blog version of the same-named mini podcast episode.

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Happy Americult weekend

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Sometimes you hit a crossroads in this gig – what do we talk about when everything is imploding? You don’t want to freak people out more. But you don’t want to hold back words that might be supportive. And you don’t want to pretend NOTHING is happening, just as much as you don’t want to over-play the potential fear and obsessive trends stemming from the event.

Also, if you’re me… you might be a bit of a traveling kid – an old half-crustpunk – who has a lot of things to say about society versus brains. And brains bouncing back to ruin society. And how trauma isn’t so much as trickled-down from the people who run the show, as it’s poured down like cascading champagne glasses from gloved hands up above, all the way into our dirty cups down below.

I see this more as a line of men wearing suits, each turning and spitting in the mouth of the person below them until it reaches your parent’s bosses, your parents, and then you. But, you know… let’s go with white gloves and champagne.

Point being.

Everything is upsetting out there right now. This IS an opinioned platform, despite trying to make trauma information accessible for whoever wants it. And although I don’t want to disrupt our complex trauma talk or start any fights – at the same time – society IS a contributing source of complex trauma AND, eh, I’m pretty used to people trying to fight.

At least you’re not my family member. Probably. Please don’t be my family member. We’ll have to stop talking.

So, fuckit, let’s shallowly dig in. Not into abortion rights, exactly. But into the system that’s allowed them to be taken away. If you’re not on the market, don’t listen. Listener’s choice.

We all accept by now, our brains are those of social animals, which means we’re bound by social learning.

We’re taught from day 0 what’s allowed and what’s impermissible. What’s right and wrong. What makes you good and bad.

This doesn’t need to be stated explicitly, we just need to be punished or rewarded for our actions and we’ll get the picture. Ignore us and we know we did something that didn’t earn us social reinforcement, so don’t do that again OR try a different strategy and be louder about it. See what happens.

We have no choice in this, our heads get started immediately and we’re forever fated by whatever brains come out of the mixer, because changing them is – NOT IMPOSSIBLE – just very resource-heavy.

And the resources we need are… the ones we are not allowed to have. Time, space, energy. Time to think and feel. Space to get perspective. Energy to… do anything. To think, to feel, to gain perspective, and to carry about any behaviors we decide we should execute.

Unfortunately, that’s not what our world has granted the majority of us. We show up on this rock, find out that alllll these things about us suck and people have the capacity to suck very greatly, as well. We also learn the lesson that “life value” = “life work.”

What do you want to be when you grow up? What’s your dream job? What do you want to do for a living?

I mean… live. We want to live. But instead, we’re given nothing but reinforcement for falling in line with the social system. Go to school every day. Do your work while you sit at this desk for this amount of time. Now go to a new school, pay a lot of money for it. Keep reporting to those desks and meeting the demands of people more powerful than you. Even if it’s menial busywork that doesn’t matter or a subject you don’t need. Do it anyways. This is what smart looks like. Now get a job, sit at THAT desk. Get ANOTHER job, because the first one doesn’t pay enough to cover your student loans. Keep doing that work for some – obvious fucking idiot – even though you’re now POSITIVE it doesn’t matter at all… or, else, how could this jackass be the boss around here? Keep earning “acceptability nods” the entire way. Take the reinforcement of stickers, of stamps, of smiley faces, of someone calling you gifted or special… dwindling down to “95/100” and no one gives a shit, except to keep paying you meager wages.

But you’ll keep working for the reward, because the reward becomes your only way to survive. Which, honestly, school felt like MY only way to survive for all of my life. Not because of money, of which it only drains me, but because that was the only way TO earn approval. That WAS my acceptability and safety.

Anyways, you go through this training course and come out a hard worker, devoted parent, homeowner… or just striving for one/all of those, if they haven’t come to your generation very easily….

And find yourself… miserable. You did all the things. You got all the reinforcement you could – which may have been REALLY hard to come by. You learned to “mask” yourself and hide your wounds. You learned to edit your behaviors and sequester bits of you. You’re doing what you were told, by all the systems, and maybe even created your own with an important relationship or procreation.

And then… nothing is working, though. YOU’RE working. Constantly. But life isn’t producing the outcomes you were promised.

You struggle, you scrape by, you do what you were taught to do.

And when the system doesn’t work out the way it was set up when you were a kid, learning all these ropes of life… when you’re flailing and getting frustrated and exhausted and losing your motherfucking mind under the pressure… then the system tells you, “you’re not trying hard enough, that’s all.”

It’s not that THE SYSTEM has skewed the game. It’s that YOU’RE a terrible player.

And all the people who the system HAS worked for? Will agree. THEY did it. Why can’t you? What did you do wrong?

And, even moreso… that difference becomes a point of pride for them, as it becomes a personal thorn in your own side for you. YOU are mentally terrorized by the comparison and societal gaslighting. THEY are too big for their britches, seeing how they “won the game with absolutely no advantages besides their sheer power.”

Of course, that’s 99% of the time not the case. They were born into and reinforced by a totally different set of systems – from their family to their standing on a global economics scale.

But the point is, our brains start deducing the differences between us and “them” when we sense an obvious discrepancy in our relative successes and levels of contentment. WE – me and that weird looking guy – must be different because of THIS.

THEY are right and I am wrong..

OR…. In the broader conversation we’re having about needing to control other people… we might decide…

I am right and THEY are wrong.

Based on? All the same things – the patterns of reinforcement and social acceptability. Versus the opposite options of punishment and social fear.

And nothing more.

So, people who believe they should be telling others what to do with their bodies or brains or lives? Are doing so because that’s what’s been reinforced in their past. EIther, to them directly, or by demonstration.

THIS is what’s right – being a strong male or a nurturing female.

And THIS is what earns social reward – being those roles loudly, in front of others.

And THIS is what’s wrong – being the opposite of those things. NOT having kids. Living an alternative lifestyle. Having different genital preferences. Identifying with different genitals, altogether.

And when all those opinions are smashed into each other, frenzied by fear that’s being generated from the system operators at the very top and fed down into the zeitgeist of isolated populations… you get… America over the past few years.

Reacting to the same words they hear ALL THE TIME with previously-learned and rewarded behaviors. Expressing the same thoughts, receiving social reinforcement. The narratives building on each other, as it becomes increasingly positive to talk to folks who feel the same. The more extreme those thoughts get, the more you all egg each other on. Your fearful assertions that those THEYs with different stuff than you add a lot of fire to the closed system.

And you get a bunch of people with only extreme (black and white) perspectives available to them – because they absolutely never entertain a moderate (gray toned) thought – because even THAT was way too soft and controversial to ever gain reinforcement in the group in the past.

Meanwhile… the system that prevails over all these sad fuckers? Let’s go ahead and say it, uses them only for their resources. We’re mined for our time and energy. And there have been threats NOT to keep handing those over so freely since the great resignation.

So what can the system do? Capitalize on those radical narratives which have become so reductive they don’t have a shred of reason behind them anymore? ALL fear response statements, adopted by even MORE fearful people, to keep whittling down the actual thought and logic that they contain? Remnants of reactivity, absorbed and echoed by people who already thought in line with those paper thin, based on archaic times, arguments, somehow turned into chants that people are willing to die by?

Turn those social media warriors into proponents, for instance, of working three jobs until your fingers fall off as a measure of “doing the right thing”?

Or, I don’t know, drum up the religious fanatacism across the board… so they can twist that “common point” between the .1% and the rest of them… to convince the rest of em to do whatever the .1% has in mind?

Like… growing a new, bolstered, generation of forever-workers…folks who are increasingly desperate and have no other options… so they’ll put out just as much as work as they have to, in order to survive? Which is a lot of work. In shit conditions. That they have no basis for escaping from. Because they were born into circumstances of being unwanted and unsupported. Thereby, creating more springs for the corporations and government best buddies to draw from, forever. I mean, no one is MAKING them work, they just have zero other choices in this system because the system that insisted they needed to be born against everyone’s will. , Born (quote) “voluntary slaves.”

And… whoops… there it is. I said the thing.

Everyone who eeps asing WHY is this reproductive rights war happening? This is why. Population control. And farming for human productivity.

It’s FOR the system, but enabled by folks who followed the rules of the system and then got scared about that system ever changing. If it did, then why would they have developed THEIR lives this way? That’s just… not right. What THEY did was right. AND they have to believe that. Or everything is a sham.

Put those people together in a room, tell them their masculinity or femininity – identities and roles that they’ve TRULY developed themselves by – AKA, their egos and perceived safety – are at stake, give them some guns and megachurch preachers, and you’ve gotta militia with radical religious views on your hands.

Turn them against the laws that are protecting the people who think and live differently than them. And there you go.

You got a system-created set of drones, doing your human-exploitative bidding and calling it the lord’s work.

Not to say that those of us on the other side aren’t ALSO educated by the same – and different – systems. That we don’t have the same exact pitfalls to watch out for. Brains basically work the same, even if the content has been dissimilar.

JUST to say… Fuck this.

Don’t be a pawn of the system anymore – the invisible “they” at the top, creating the entire structure we try to live within down below. No matter which side you fall in line with. Don’t give them your brain, your body, your time, space, or energy. Don’t give them your life.

Free your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from whatever shittery they’ve been running on a loop for your entire life. Heal those inner wounds. Get your brain back up to an integrated, efficient operating condition. We’re all learning how and it’s working.

And then let’s put better perspectives into action. Instead of continuing to chant the same state- and social media-fed narratives in the streets.

Obviously, after 5 decades (on this particular abortion issue) of fighting with each other in the same way – having the same exact conversations – that hasn’t been working.

Let alone all the issues that have been raging for a lot longer. Like, policing, race inequality, living conditions, and income gaps.

It’s time for a new approach. I don’t know how to start a revolution, offhand. But I’m working on it. We all are.

Motherfuckers RISE. And let’s keep having these talks at major crossroads. Seems like a lot of us are about to take a new path, before it’s selected for us.

If you’re into this kind of societal trauma talk… I’d encourage you to check out the private patreon podcast stream – get your private RSS code so it auto populates your favorite app. And get into the conversations we’re starting to have, about making even BIGGER change, than the ones we’ve been making for a few years in our brains.

I’ll see you there. Cheers Fuckers. Hold steady, and lean on others for support as we find our footing again. We may have taken a stumble, but we’re resilient Motherfuckers. Always going to get back up.

Dirtpunk, out.