Daily Reflections

12/10-11/2022

The Devil is In the Anxiety

There is a kind of twisted up beleaguered impatience in our culture. It’s been building for quite some time, this slow exchange of peace and dignity for convenience. It has many identities, respective to varying and particular demographic expressions of it.

We know the restaurant and boutique obnoxiousness as “Karen”

We know the youthful acceptance of pop ups but disdain for actual commercials as “Millennial”

We know the outright rejection of all things status quo as “Liberal”

We know the outright acceptance of anything status quo as “Conservative”

We know the aged cynicism of the type only privilege can grow as “Rich White Man”

We know the growing intolerance of statements and ideas that are just plain mean as “Cancel Culture”

And we know any of the myriad inconveniences interlaced with existence and society by many names; government, corporate greed, immigration, the media, indoctrination, immigration, education, freedom, socialism, capitalism, conspiracy theory and most often… we know it as everyone or everything else. It’s worth noting that people have a very convoluted, if not downright spastic way of determining what constitutes “else”.

And, finally, we know the emergent ubiquitous term to confine all the above collectively as Anxiety.

Perhaps the Devil has many names for the same reason. A catch-all construct to hold all of these bits in one place for ease of sorting. All the risks and uncertainties that are intrinsic to the development of cultural growth and exchange. Just as this Young Indiana Jones Boxcar of exotic snakes we know as “our anxieties” is filled with a thousand different hisses, so too does the figurehead for all our evils enjoy different titles, grouped by cultural context.

And if these jitter-swelled rising tides of angst and dread be the end of days, it will not be masses of humans getting 666 tattooed on their foreheads or a microchip forcibly embedded in their hands that will be our Mark of the Beast. Any devil that can claim such widespread influence and inherency, would never be so crass or obvious. It’s just in poor taste. The universe offers real immortality to the subtle, not the explosive. Why would the forever evil be any different in its grander manifestations?

A light is what you see in the bulb, but the influence and power are in the wires. If you think you see the Devil, you don’t. You are only seeing the evidence that it is here. I’d wager that the real cosmic expression that we think of as the Devil is scarcely bothered at the fact, we even call it evil. I’ve no idea how many air molecules cursed me for inhaling too sharply and jostling them violently into my lungs and then out again with similar, oblivious exhales. Thus, our microscopic anxieties probably don’t get much attention from the Eternal Entropy.

No, it will not be the commercialization of sin that reveals the mark, but in the spaces in between. Not Android or IOS. Not Pepsi or Coke. Not Ford or Chevy. Not Tupac or Biggie. The real anxiety. The real evil stamped its mark fathoms deeper than a logo or a manufactured rivalry. The ink is in the assumption that such rivalries are required at all. Being quietly forced to have an opinion about everything, and thereby opposed to roughly half of that everything. The whispering source of the above mentioned, “else”.

The irony here is that in such a place, the demand for opinion is inversely proportional to the need or concern for education. Ironic, but not surprising. The sheer number of current events that demand one take a stance in any given day is more than one could reasonably research, even if given all of sunup to sundown to do so. Never mind the fact that the last person who could have possibly read every book ever written, died somewhere in the late 17th century. Perhaps it is not ironic, (Remember Alanis and that whole public media argument about her song…just as a very congruent example. That would be me trading dignity for convenience).

Perhaps it is simply the tragic consequence when data outpaces processing power. Or what happens when an entire age group begins to take the reins, while simultaneously treating the entire internet like that ridiculous calculator they made everyone buy for Geometry and Trig. You push the right buttons, and it always gives you the right answer.

But again, this is the big and silent command of a society with ever increasing complexity. To have to comment. To have to be up on everything and, God willing, be right about it. The influx of a global whirl of information wherein reliability is dictated by relevancy rather than integrity. This is the marketplace of convenience and immediacy. One’s dignity and time are the only currency. What hairless ape wouldn’t be a little disquieted about all of it?

That is the Mark. And in some form or by some name, it has always been there. It can be seen when one begins to participate in that exchange with the idea that one has to spend their currency on such matters. The common confusion over how to best spend one’s currency, that is Anxiety.