Writer's Diary
5/29/24
Anxiety is supposed to be about survival. But anxiety has become malignant. Anxiety is an ever-present thing that filters all our emotions—or displaces and replaces them. A parasite.
Anxiety is tool to warn us not to go down that dark path, or that the mold on our bread might be dangerous, or that the yellow in grandma's face might be a sign of disease, or that the far-off thunder might soon arrive here.
Now—it's just a net that's been thrown over reality, obscuring it.
Homo sapiens is phono sapiens. Phono sapiens is an anxious being. An anxious creature doesn't have an unanxious state. That's its problem. Phono sapiens is an anxious being.
The difference between communism and capitalism is planned versus unplanned inequality. Oppression wears the mask of the market or the bureaucracy.
The great lie of politics is that there's a way, a scientific way, actually, to create equality. And that politics just needs to follow the science of equality production. For many reasons, but also just because nature is heterogeneous, inequalities will always persist.
But humanity, dignity, space for joy, learning, and sharing—maybe this is possible, despite difference. Maybe the more than century-long experiment in leveling differences can stop. And the polyphonic jostling of differentials can resume (without anxiety).
And at that point—when difference is permitted again—our perspectives can actually be represented democratically.