I find you –
In such certainty about the world, a concerning surety. Us disconcerting creatures find ignorance as our confidence, it’s a truly mystifying display. Telling lies as truths, because they’re truths if infinite assumption is granted. As if I can judge, I’m probably doing the same, who’s to tell? I won’t listen anyway. But here I am, writing—because I find ignorance through critique a comfort, distant from confronting my own notions.
Reality in light of the truth is despair. It reveals the magnitude of torturous depravity we have been slowly decaying into; tells of future tale, the amount of collective organization and work it’s going to take just to dig ourselves out of this circling of the drain. Perhaps that’s why we so resist the truth, because I know I don’t have the energy action requires. I’m here assuming someone else does while everything is on fire around me. “Someone else stopped The Hangman” are words we don’t hear—because dead men can’t speak.
We assume still, somehow the checks and balances of our system will at an arbitrary checkpoint grind to a halt this derangement brought about by those who lack any measure of self-confidence while wielding a terrifying fear of death—a bunch of wannabe dictators. We blame individuals and groups because we refuse to acknowledge our system is the jaw which houses the decayed teeth. Those cavities now filled with plagiarized Nazi ideology; taking another bite out of our neighbor’s leg.
We assume still, after we’ve given up on our “system”, somehow The one true deity will save our ideal universe just in the nick of time. Our universe which just so happens to find itself in conformity to a very specific Western thought. This all-loving deity warped to conveniently only love two nations of people in the entire history of our world while still hiding from everyone else but fundamentalist Christians by magically appearing between the neurons in their brain so they think exactly like a cross between C.H. Mackintosh and Ted Cruz.
I ask myself, what if the people I assume will stop The Hangman simply don’t?
I ask the Evangelical, what if Jesus Christ never returns to stop the Antichrist?
What if those I tasked were already, “he who serves me best”?
What if Christ is still buried within the earth or simply stopped caring?
Even if we find salvation through folkloric heroes we cast into reality,
how many must suffer in the foreground we perceive as the background through pure denial and a belief that only The west exists while actively bombing the East? That part of our globe is Mordor, a fantasy land presented through a dualistic worldview. Bombs don’t exist if I never hear them but through an Instagram reel; even though our own suffer because the money funding a genocide is now not educating, feeding, and housing the next Einstein. That one person being glanced over while sleeping on frozen concrete is another mind wasting away, solely a resultant of our folly – our own murderous waste.
That’s where,
I find you –
Just there—existing despite the flame we lit, if one could even call what we forced you to endure existing. Christian suburbanites complaining about souls on their way to eternity sleeping in the station connector under 8th & Market just to avoid freezing to death. Tiptoeing past you as if attempting not to wake a hungry pride of lions, because they never saw you as human beings. “Get a job,” as if paperwork can be filled out without a street address. As if drug addiction is a choice after falling dependent in order to cope with the reality of not sleeping under a roof or a cascading mental health crisis you couldn’t afford to address. All this so unnecessary, but the self-declared most compassionate people in human history don’t believe housing should be a human right. The only justification of their position being: housing rights are in the communist manifesto, therefore bad.
Arguing that even the concept of someone being unhoused in 2026 should be conceivable, let alone acceptable when our country is about to have its first trillionaire is an objectively evil position. For people who believe in an eternal afterlife they sure do obsess over the psyop they fell for; the one where billionaires obtained by divine right their justification to hoard this temporal wealth, buying up every asset so the working class can’t afford to live. They find this “centrist” position rational because they purchased a home when it was still obtainable for the middle class. A six day work week isn’t working hard enough to afford the bare essentials for living, that’s equality now. Equality has been burned in the flames of delusion they’ve sown.
They have lain claim to that which they blaspheme, hijacking the flame of reason and making it a mockery; a chaos-fire untethered from itself. This disorder is not found in reason. From every philosophy, this society they support defies all sense. Even naturalism from the least compassionate perspective finds them the liar, for nature at least regards self preservation as a base instinct.
Speaking of preservation,
I find you –
The person I’m too introverted to talk to, my best friend in the future. Or maybe I’ll ignore you and we’ll never talk, lost between the glare of a phone screen and the words that never found the courage to journey from brain to mouth. Or maybe I’ll never meet you because you’re currently slowly bleeding to death, agonizing under a pile of rumble; an edict directly decreed in the paperwork I mundanely filled out to complete my taxes. There sits a future day, which feels prophetic; when The Hangman decrees, “I did no more than you let me do.” Inaction is The Hangman‘s noose. I never spoke to you in sincerity or rose that voice against the oily fire-rain they cast over your home. A horrifying prospect, to know the end of our world is discovered in isolation, a failure to build community.
There is no preservation in isolation. To be without community is to concede the individual to a slow death via state sanctioned violence or the mob’s marginalization. When I say individual, that is not only to draw your focus towards the internal self, for that is not the self as a whole. The whole self is also all that is external to you, because everything a body interacts with on the external alters its internal. The concept of western individualism now becomes incoherent. We portion the brain from the external body, but your brain is affected by the sensations your body takes into the internal. Therefore, the brain and the body are one. The body then is also one with all it interacts with. For those things external to us interact with the body, giving us sensations which enable our body to interact with our brain. Just because some sensations are of less intensity does not mean they are of no consequence. In this sense, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”1 Now becomes, “what you do unto others you are doing to yourself.” The individual finds its ultimate meaning as the singular self, that being our universe—potentially something larger still. True rigid individualism, which promotes one’s own journey is a path of collective benefit.
To protect your neighbor is to protect yourself.
To build into your neighbor is to build into yourself.
To ask, “And who is my neighbor?”2 Is to miss the point entirely, because you have no way of knowing who (maybe even what) will end up being your neighbor when you require that same building or protection. Nor could you calculate all the ways a civil society can benefit you, since you can’t even comprehend all the ways it currently benefits you despite its presently oppressive nature.
I find myself –
Pondering, the self which wars against its very self. Is earth just the upset stomach of our universe? Is humanity simply the benign tumor of the one? How small humanity is as a portion, and yet; I in my claimed individuality think myself something to splendor at – cosmic dust.
From me the gross negligence of hypocrisy squeezes out from each pore. Obsession with the tunnel visioned view of self, despite acknowledging that me is more than I comprehend me to be.
I find you –
Dear reader. A neighbor. A friend. A revolutionary of my soul.
May I no longer live in hypocrisy of this truth.
May I no longer lie to myself.
May I no longer in action think you of so little value.
There is effect, even one “dull” sensation, even one neuron firing.
“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Luke 10:36-37 NRSVUE
If the man is a stranger to the universe who does not know what is in it, no less is he a stranger who does not know what is going on in it. He is a runaway, who flies from the concerns of society; he is blind, who shuts the eyes of his understanding; he is poor, who has need of another, and finds not in himself all things helpful for life. He is a sore on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature and is displeased with the things that happen; for the same nature that produces them has produced you too. He is a social outcast, who cuts his own soul off from the one common soul of all reasonable beings.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV 29
The Lambent 