| HN Mirror

There's an anecdote from Philip K. Dick that goes something like: You turn off the outside light and you go to bed, then you get up and look out the window to make sure the light's off, this is when you know you're crazy, when you know what you've done, but you can no longer trust your own mind.

We live in an age of numbers. My own state managed to drastically reduce unemployment. They did it by limiting unemployment benefits to six months. And only those who get unemployment are counted as unemployed. And I know a lot those people who are no longer unemployed. Some of them have already died, some from medical reasons compounded by lack of insurance, others suicide, overdoses, etc. Some of them are working on it. Couples work each two jobs, struggle to payback loans, to pay for the car they need to get to work, always seemingly one payment away from disaster. Children go home from school on the weekend and won't eat anything until they come back to school on Monday and get a free breakfast that there is talk of being cut. Certain of them are dying, not for any technological or medical reason, but because they have no insurance and can't pay any other way and couldn't take off from work even if they did, and it's not that they want to die, it's just that that is the only option on the table. Those with their homes lost, those living in motels. Those who make too much to qualify for food stamps, and those who make too little to qualify for insurance assistance.

This is not some abstraction. I can touch it. I can point: over there is an old couple who don't have enough money to heat their house through the winter, over there is a guy who needs a tooth pulled, but he can't afford it.

Perhaps we've made an error in calculation. Yes, we have stuff. Even the homeless have cellphones now. And yet the society we inhabit, that which was ostensibly supposedly had been constructed to buffer us from the brutal savagery of nature, now mirrors that savagery, so many always one step, one mistake away from maiming and/or death. Yet, yes, many do live in many ways better than kings of yore. But a phone doesn't cure cancer or an abscess or kidney stones or dull pain. But we have stuff. And we wouldn't trade it for anything, not to have medical care, not to feel less lonely, nothing. In one sense, however, at least the jungle, the real jungle, was honest about itself, it would eventually chew you up and compost you. And what use is it to live like a king without the power of one? A kind of Schrodinger's paradox: to live as a king and as a peasant, one in the same, at the same time. A postmodern version of the Prince and Pauper, perhaps?

But, then again, maybe I am crazy, maybe I can't trust my own mind, maybe all of these things I've been seeing around me for a long time aren't real. I don't know anymore. I'm not sure it matters.

I think the world has two futures. In the first, the world simply becomes Dubai. I think that's already happening. Compare what is said there to here[1]. Are the justifications really that different? In the second (the utopia one?), there's a swath of people, how many I can't say, maybe a few hundred thousand, maybe a million, maybe even a billion, it's just a number (to quote Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."), but it is this number of people, this swath of the human population that needs to die so that the remainder can live as millionaires.

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-har...