I don’t like to use the word hate, as a matter of personal principle. It makes me disgusted with myself. Yet sometimes you just develop certain prejudices, fair though they may be, no matter how hard you try.
Example: I hate vacuums, the Chinese government (for so many reasons), cartoons, Sarah Palin, and numbers.
Vacuums – understandable, you are probably saying to yourself right now, and I appreciate your support. I agree with you, who likes vacuums? No one interested in being happy, that’s who.
I assume the Chinese government probably likes itself fairly well, or at least parts of itself like itself, but I wouldn’t think it’s hazardous to assume anyone else does, aside from bizarre Satanic cults interested in the spoiling of the Olympics and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese.
Cartoons? Well, that’s kind of an unrelated argument.
But numbers - I just might hate numbers more than anything on this list, with the possible exception of vacuums. Numbers are the cold byproduct of the pisspoor attempts by society to rationalize and organize itself. Numbers lead to scientific progress, which borders on that list of things I hate – particularly when ‘scientific’ is blindly used as an adjective to justify literally anything (let’s see, things that count as ‘progress’: industrial waste, the atomic bomb, cloning of full human beings like in Moon, the perfection of handguns and other devices designed for the sole purpose of ending another person’s life, online report cards, and the perpetuation of a culture of instant gratification which thereby spreads severe lethargy with the effortlessness of, let’s say, a Mad Cow Disease, or a Foot and Mouth Disease. Your preference.
There are a lot of things and a lot of people which you can blame for those little horrors, but to me it comes down to numbers. Motivated, also, perhaps by a vicious desire to avenge those tortured and wasted hours of my youth with my nose buried in a geometry textbook.
I realize now, looking back on high school, middle school, even college, that my epic struggles in Physics and Calculus were not solely the byproduct of my lack of ability. Something deeper lurked in my hatred, one of those things that you always know about but cannot quite put into words, something defined by emotion and gut instinct more than organized communication or logic. But now I think I have a grasp of what it was: numbers were just so irrelevant, just so antithetical, to what I wanted the world to be and to what I wanted myself to be, that to spend so much time seemed such a waste.
It’d be like if Jesus had gone to an ITT class over at the temple, straightaway after woodworking. Just ain’t happening.
Numbers not only take away from a focus on more relevant topics of study, they guide us into the same line of thinking which has caused immeasurable suffering in our world. Specifically, I mean scientific ‘progress’, as in what Kurt Vonnegut spent his whole life trying to curtail, time and time again.
To justify the death of numbers, it is only fair to give them a farewell by noting one of their positive upsides: statistics. Without statistics we could not measure the harm which numbers have done. Before numbers came to places like Africa, where a large portion of the world’s suffering occurs today, life was much better. Imperialism, colonialism, and missionaries were the carriers of this number-born disease just like they were the carriers of so many other city-borne plagues, except this one - the plague of numbers, more commonly known as unthinkable suffering, widespread poverty, genocide, persecution based on race and religion - has no known scientific or medical or numerical-borne cure.
Popular misconceptions abound when it comes the history of the impoverished in the world. Starvation, disease, dehydration, and unthinkable urban suffering and decay as know it today did not exist on this planet until roughly four hundred years ago. Exceptions can be made to the romantic view of primitive cultures: yes, they fought wars, yes, their environmental practices were not always perfectly in balance with the land. But overall – as a massive generalization – tribes, rural communities, nomadic nations, were without the ‘benefits’ of scientific progress, and therefore, they were without all the unspeakable numerical horrors which accompanied European expansion.
Simple, rural, tribal societies all over the world were plunged into these horrors in the wake of the success of numbers as they were forced to live unnatural lives suddenly based on capitalistic, materialistic ambition instead of personal happiness and survival. Massive metropolises began to form. Resources were not available to provide for everyone. In these unnatural conditions, squished together by colonials impressing upon them a new way of life, their populations skyrocketed. The system of capitalism relies upon the suffering of many for the success of the rest. In what became known as the third world – places not wealthy enough to successfully implement this numerical plan – justice and happiness slipped away together, back to the mountain, to the plain, to the river from which they were borne.
It is hard for most to imagine a life without technology and luxurious creature comforts at every turn. Repulsive, even, to those who have been bred to be lazy. Yet the benefits of a simple life are of a far deeper value. To live as we were meant to live, communities driven by face to face contact, nourishment provided by a brotherhood and sisterhood of trusting labor, capitalistic ambition replaced by the thrill of being alive, of tearing through the wild jungle in search of red meat, of feeling the satisfaction of physically providing for your friends and family, of using your life energies to truly help a society thrive.
Numbers cause our lives to be wasted on nonsense. The universe has given us one chance at existence, and yet people see fit to spend those precious seconds quibbling about the size of their cars and debating accounting technique while living vicariously through reality television and slowly oozing away their precious life-fluids to the sands of time. And now, today, heartfelt efforts are made by this numbers world to ‘save’ the poor. Imperialists, colonists, may not have as significant of a role to play – but missionaries and ‘volunteers’ are still dogooding their way across the globe, in a largely genuine (to their credit) effort to help those who have been afflicted by four hundred years of scientific progress. “It is time for us to consider that our way of life is not alive enough to be shared,” Ivan Illich famously said in his speech ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’, in which he controversially lambasted America’s volunteer corps.
What it comes down to is a shifting paradigm, a changing of what we see as ‘development.’ We can complain all we want about ‘greening’ society, about painting our Earthships with ‘sustainable’ paint and toting around copies of An Inconvenient Truth everywhere we go – but that is not going to really change anything. To truly solve the problems our world faces we need to think outside of accepted paradigm. A market based society (world, even) seeks market based solutions for its issues. Money is carelessly thrown at third world countries. Grieving ‘first world’ Christians satisfy the slight ache in their heart by donating a few hundred dollars a year. Yet these are problems which can only be resolved by the freeing of minds. Dollars are part of the problem, thus they cannot heal the problem – they serve as a band-aid at best, and as a comforting thought to capitalist consciences worldwide, at worst.
And we are left with numbers, figures, which are truly horrifying, which we are largely ignorant of, and which most of us will see, shake our heads sadly at, and turn the other way, because we feel powerless. But we have looked away for too long. How can you in good conscience go on living without considering the massive ethical problems which these numbers pose? It is not just time for the world to wake up to these problems – awareness is but the first step in what must be a two-part process. It is time to radically change the way we live, or die trying, and I need no further proof:
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are under-fed according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are starving according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of annual deaths – roughly 18,000,000 people a year and 50,000 per day – due to poverty related causes, according to the World Health Organization)
19,500 – ~400,000 (present number of civilian deaths in Sudan’s Darfur region incurred by the Chinese-sponsored Janjaweed militia, according to various international estimations)
1,000,000 (number of Rwandans murdered under the Hutu Power Ideology – an inflammatory, prejudicial, fear-mongering policy first sponsored by the Belgian government during occupation - during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, according to various international projections)
270,000,000 (number of deaths as a result of poverty since 1990 – mostly women and children – according to the World Health Organization)
500,000,000 (number of people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries living today in what the World Bank calls “absolute poverty”).
I write this last sentence, only so that numbers do not have the final word.
Song of the Day: Only fair to give credit to Rilo Kiley for the title.
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