"Does Anything Even Happen Anymore?" by Alon Mizrahi

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Source: Alon Mizrahi's Newsletter

	Does Anything even Happen Anymore? The Democrats lost 'the most important election of our lifetime' a few days ago (or was it a year?). Already, it has been forgotten, like almost everything that happened more than 2 minutes ago Alon Mizrahi Nov 17   READ IN APP   Does it matter? Did it matter? Did it happen? What year is this, again? Let me shock you: the Democratic Party just lost an election, and Donald Trump, The Great Destroyer and Defiler of Scared Things, will soon be in the White House again. This loss is hardly even mentioned anymore, let alone rattles anybody: public attention moved elsewhere. We don’t talk about the genocide in Gaza either: it is inconvenient for the country and the party (we do talk about it just a little bit, just enough to demonstrate we are not the kind of people who would not not talk about a genocide). A great shibboleth of odorless, colorless nothing engulfs us, and attention can’t be focused for one second on anything. We need great fingers in the big offices to keep scrolling through subjects, themes, and events for us, to ensure we never know where we are, or what’s happening, and are unable to care. The big fingers are always happy to oblige, and they keep scrolling faster and faster, back and forth. They are so masterful at instilling disorientation by now: it is all scientific and AI, and the number of fatigued and beleaguered brains that can keep track of anything, so it seems, keeps dropping. It is just too much. Did a big storm destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people a few weeks ago? Who can remember? Was there an election? Was Biden ever aware? Is he now? Is he still president? Who knows? It doesn’t matter (‘Why do you ask? What is your secret motivation around asking so many needless and annoying questions?’). - In our private lives, and blogs, we try to pretend occurrences in time and reality maintain a reasonably decipherable relationship, but our memory keeps getting foggier, and we are driven into smaller and smaller mental cells, and have fewer and fewer connections with people and things outside are politically-assigned rubrics of existence. Our sense of humor is becoming flatter, our laughter drier, and AI will soon be able to create stand-up comedy materials for modern crowds (it will be about men vs women; white vs nonwhite people; the funny tribulations of immigrants; Trump talk, and some Tom Cruise). We live in a constant state of Déjà vu, but we can’t recollect what we’re seeing references anymore. It’s a daze, and we pretend that it was always so (it wasn’t). Emotional shallowness and tastelessness are becoming the most poignant components of our experience, and we know yet deny it. Absolute power, zero direction What’s happening to our consciousness, memory, and emotional state is not spontaneous, and it is not the result of the times either. Part of it is how saturated we are, in a sensory-psychological way: we are being bombarded with artificial sights and sounds almost 24/7. I am not sure we were made for this. But the other part of this, and I suspect the more strategic one, is that someone is working tirelessly to make us feel like we’re floating in space, and there’s nothing that can give us a sense of stability (are you feeling it too?). I have been experiencing this feeling with an alarming urgency in the past couple of weeks. I know this feeling. I felt very similar things in the weeks and months, or maybe even years, before October 7, in Tel Aviv. I remember thinking and writing, then ‘Things haven’t seemed to make sense for a long time, so why do things seem so incongruous, so nonsensical, to this degree, right now?‘ Back then I was taken to constantly observing how disconnected the discourse and the deeper reading of things were. My conclusion then was: it can’t be chance. Someone is doing it, and ‘things are about to get seriously fucked up‘. Not to sound overly paranoid or conspiratorial, my feeling relies on things we collectively know to be true. We collectively know that big actors in the consciousness arena, namely various government agencies and media and tech giants, work together to manipulate us (this way or another, it doesn’t matter). We know they have immense, almost absolute power over our attention and thoughts, and we know that they don’t hesitate to use it. But the disorientation element of it, the lack of direction or meaning, I suspect, is a reflection, or a sensation aroused in response to the same feeling among the leaders of the West. They simply don’t know what they’re doing or where they want to go. Combine this scary ruderlessness with so much power over the discourse, and you get a recipe for civilization-wide confusion and bewilderment: we cannot ascribe meaning to things, or any concrete value, because we are being led by people who have no idea what they’re doing, and through their unchecked powers they make us feel it, too. - This is part of why they fear our attachment to Gaza On an almost ontological level, here lies a serious part of why Western establishments object this fanatically to our connection with Gaza. In a psychopolitical era that feels like falling into swirling quicksands, Gaza functions as a major moral and cultural stabilizing and reorienting event. It makes things clear all of a sudden, in the most unexpected moment. It is simple, it grabs your heart and soul and tells you where you are, and what’s happening. It is the anti-delirium of our era. But they don’t want us awake: who knows what we’re going to say or do next? This puts all models and all projections at risk. It may endanger the stability of the whole structure. What we experience as insufferable brain fog, you see, is the concrete walls and floors of their fortresses. Their guaranteed incomes and powers. They don’t want us to feel anything real: no real pain or anger, only fake small tribal consumerist stuff, which operates as a valve that drains all excess energy and lets us safely go back to our zero-gravity hover. We need to hold onto Gaza like it was our umbilical cord. It is our lifeline, connecting us to meaning and truth in this time. - Just like I felt in Israel a few years ago, I feel now that they are working on something big, and are pulling and pushing the big mental noise and disorientation levers as a cover. If you listen through the cacophony, you’ll hear it too. If normalcy were planned, we would feel it, and we wouldn’t feel as disconnected. Sadly for us, normalcy is not even on anyone’s menu. We have nothing to keep us centered but our raw human emotions. Everything else is a lie.