Hello, world. This is Gwareiga speaking.
I want to introduce myself, to send out a greeting to a world from which I have actively hidden for too long.
Why have I been hiding?
That is a fair question. Well, there have been some painful experiences in my past which have made it feel much safer to remain unseen and unnoticed in the background where there was less chance of external interference. I told myself that was freedom, but over time it became all too clear that that was never true – it was avoidance.
Hmmm. I’m sure we’ve brushed shoulders many times, perhaps out on the street waiting for a crossing signal to turn green, while standing in line at a shop, or while browsing the shelves of a local bookstore. Who knows – maybe we’ve even made eye contact a few times before, or shared a smile or two?
We’re humans living in a vast social construct spanning a worldwide civilization that is both dizzyingly complex and surprisingly simple all at once. I am nowhere near the only person who has learned to withdraw into solitude to find some approximation of freedom; there are many like me and most of us do our best to conceal that fact when we are out among you. Things are not always as they seem, and neither are people.
Maybe I’ve been feeling alone and wondering why no one else seems to notice or care about the things that I do, walking through this world wrapped in a protective cocoon of isolation while passing by hundreds of other people thinking and feeling the exact same things. And yet each of us, feeling so alone.
It seems that one of the saddest results of the triad of capitalism, patriarchy, and class warfare is how they often act together to force so many people to mask their truth just to survive.
Why is that?
Well, let’s talk a little bit about what it’s like to live under a capitalist system today. The three pillars of our modern world are deeply enmeshed and it’s not always very easy to talk about them in isolation. But it’s a bit too overwhelming to attempt to talk about all three at once, so let’s at least try to keep this to one reasonable bite at a time, shall we?
A’ight. So, why has masking become such an instinctual reaction for so many people? Let’s not waste time gilding the lily here – perhaps because capitalism is, at its core, a psychopathic economic model that only recognizes fellow psychopaths as valid members of the club. So if you’re not among their faction, you learn to conceal that fact as a matter of survival.
What do I mean by that? Capitalism requires people to act against their own best interests on a continuing basis. It requires a certain threshold of psychopathic tendencies in society to function and to propagate, and so it has a vested interest in protecting the psychopaths that exist in our nation as well as creating systems to ensure the production of a steady stream of new psychopaths who will become its most staunch supporters and protectors. Much like a cancerous cell that acts instinctively to protect itself and spread its disease.
But what is psychopathy?
There are many different ways to approach and describe it that focus on different aspects. But in simplified, non-clinical terms, it’s a personality construct formed of maladaptive traits. It’s often considered to be defined by such characteristics as a lack or impairment of empathy, a lack or impairment of remorse, audacious behaviors that are detached from the real world environment, and a core of egocentrism with a sleek coating of superficial charisma to create the passing illusion of normalcy.
Well, damn – talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I mean, that certainly sounds familiar. I can easily think of many, many people that fit that broad description fairly well, sadly. It sounds like plenty of politicians, CEOs, 1%ers, hedgefund managers, pyramid scheme operators, rapists, pedophiles, abusers, celebrities, manosphere influencers, corporate shill talking heads, etc. If we’re being honest (and we really need to be at this point), the list just goes on and on.
But even in a place like America where psychopathy has run rampant and unchecked for far too long, it is still a minority condition. Because it is a fundamentally maladaptive condition. It isn’t naturally conducive to its own survival or propagation...because it fucking sucks and generally speaking, it gets stamped out as soon as it’s recognized, like a horse stomping on a snake as it slithers through the hay in its stall.
So capitalism cheats.
It creates artificial infrastructural systems and mechanisms that are designed to suppress and/or punish the natural human condition, which is more aligned with concepts and ideals such as compassion, altruism, and community. But because these capitalist systems of control are unnatural and would collapse without active reinforcement and policing...it creates yet more bloated and corrupt support systems in a desperate bid to prop itself up while maintaining a state of perpetual numb distraction for everyone trapped inside the maze.
Without this constant, brutal suppression...capitalism cannot exist; it cannot thrive. It is an inherently unstable construct; it’s not a self-sustaining system. It requires exhaustive and continuous external inputs to function. This means that, by its very nature, every capitalist system has an inevitable expiration date carved into its cheap plastic crown from the moment of its establishment. Capitalism is uniquely destined to fail, to destroy itself in long, slow, agonizing death throes.
And so those of us who have not fallen prey to the psychopathy of capitalism, to the ruthless drive toward infinite growth on a planet of finite resources...have often learned to mask the signs of our living, feeling souls in our eyes and our facial expressions to survive. Those of us who weren’t born into privileged positions that offered shelter and insulation from the creeping reach of capitalism, at least. This is one of many areas where the overlap with class warfare can be fairly easily detected...the class into which one is born is a powerful factor in determining one’s privilege or lack thereof, which in turn dictates one’s level of exposure to the horrors of capitalism.
Those of us born into classes which deposited us more or less directly onto the conveyor belt of workers and producers had to learn these lessons quite young due to our levels of exposure. We learned early that if we allowed people to see us, that we would be punished.
If we allowed people to really see us...we would not be greeted with open arms or open doors. We would not get the scholarship, the admissions letter, or the golden ticket. We wouldn’t get the sponsorship or the callback after the job interview. We wouldn’t get the promotion or the raise. We wouldn’t be believed in disputes or welcomed into alliances. We wouldn’t be respected or treated as equal human beings.
Unless we masked the truths in our eyes every time we stepped foot outside the refuge of our own homes, we wouldn’t be safe.
As a neurodivergent and a graduate of the local school of hard knocks, masking has been a critical survival skill for me. Those similar to me tend to be among the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. We are often members of groups that are hit first and hardest by the class injustices of our society, our capitalist bullshit.
It’s only been in the last few years or so that I’ve begun to see how completely and totally that I’d lost faith and trust in my fellow humans. How completely and totally I didn’t trust anyone enough to show even the faintest glimmer of myself. I guarded the truth of my authentic self like a dragon’s most precious treasure, like a secret that had the power to destroy me if it got out, if it – I – was revealed.
Once I realized this, it took my breath away (and not in a good way) – how completely and totally I had to strap and buckle on heavy armor and a shield every morning if I had to leave my house and interact with even one single other human being.
It was an earth-shattering revelation for me, seeing these things not as signs of strength, which I think is what I’d been telling myself...again, just to survive...but as signs of despair. Bone-deep despair that had settled into me so profoundly that it didn’t even feel like something separate from myself anymore. After long enough, it felt like just another protective organ layered over me, like my own skin.
But that isn’t what I want for myself, nor for any other human.
I want to be strong enough to stand before my fellow humans without a shred of armor, without an ounce of shielding. That is the strength which I seek to cultivate, and let me tell ya – this shit is fucking scary and it is fucking difficult. And it will be a lifelong task. But it’s also been an immeasurable relief just to name it and begin working on it. I’d become so accustomed to the weight of all that armor and my trusty, beat-up shield...that I’d forgotten what it felt like to stand unencumbered. Just me, vulnerable and exposed. And strong.
Capitalist psychopathy is utterly fear-driven. It keeps the human brain drenched in a simmering bath of fear and terror non-stop, around the clock, cradle to the grave.
And sustained fear is known to alter the human psyche. Fear, pain, and trauma alter our perceptions and our reactions. They can alter our literal body and brain chemistry. This is something that I unfortunately know on a visceral level.
But such internal changes are not permanent; or at least, they don’t have to be. They can indeed be rendered permanent either through perverse embrace, apathy, or direct refusal to work through them. But they can be faced, named, and dispelled. This is also something that I know to be true.
Now, if you were fortunate enough to have been either born into or to have somehow acquired over time certain levels of privilege, then you can most likely provide a given amount of foundational security for yourself which can really help to assuage many of these woes. The luckiest among us can even afford luxury services such as therapy or counseling of some sort.
But even without a shred of privilege, these things can still be identified, acknowledged, and worked through all on our own without any external support whatsoever. It will generally take much longer, yes, and will overall be a great deal more onerous and difficult...but it nevertheless can be done.
It took a long time for me to get to a place where I was ready and receptive for that kind of inward self-analysis, but over time I’ve begun to see the telltale signs of the harmful and counterproductive mechanisms at work within myself, the lasting physiological damage left behind by the darker times in life. Without any help or encouragement or validation, without any guidance or leadership or mentorship...I’ve begun the long work of dismantling the toxic shit inside my brain, my body. It’s most certainly not over yet – I still have quite a ways to go. But sometimes the lion’s share of the battle is in that first step, that first skirmish.
If you happen to be a gamer, you can think of these kinds of psychological and physiological mechanisms embedded in human beings by fear, pain, and trauma like dots. Damage Over Time (DOT) – many games have spells, skills, debuffs etc that produce a ‘damage over time’ effect on the target. Something that causes some fundamental stat like health, mana, stamina, whatever to slowly tick down with continuous damage over a predefined period of time.
Capitalism and its infrastructural systems really should be infamous for their subversive, and largely unacknowledged, dot mechanisms. And now I guess we’re going to need to talk a bit more about the class warfare elements of capitalism.
People who are born into privilege rarely, if ever, experience these dots. On the contrary, their experience is more like a pay-to-unlock character that receives multiple stacking buffs, an immediate level boost upon reaching adulthood (connections allow you to just whizz right past the job market while telling the knee-slapping joke of ‘merit,’ as we’ve all tragically witnessed countless times before). The privileged often have at least one highly geared tanky escort to carry them through any dungeon or raid, no matter the difficulty setting. And of course, all the loot drops automatically, rightfully belong to them.
Of course.
Those of us who are not born into privilege however, often have several stacks of brutal dots on us by the time we reach adulthood, and it usually only gets worse from there as the damage and the weight continue to compound like capitalizing interest. We’re so consumed with maintaining hypervigilance focused on dodging the constant barrage of incoming necrotizing debuffs that we don’t have a second to spare in pursuit of any beneficial buffs that we’ll probably never have a real chance at securing anyway. We can just forget about fairytale nonsense like a level boost; those kinds of elite features aren’t intended for the masses, after all.
Escorts to carry us through dungeons and raids? Now that’s a genuinely hilarious joke. Nope, we’re on our own for those, figuratively doing our best to grab hold of our gravity-defying bootstraps every damn day, soloing everything on our own whether we’re built to be tanks or not. And somehow, even when we’re soloing every trash mob and piece of shit miniboss, we still have to roll for even a slim chance at craptastic gear and loot drops that are usually so low quality that we end up spending more coin repairing it all every few months than we’d have spent if we’d just had the resources available to purchase something high quality that would last from the get-go. Because being poor is fucking expensive, though the great Sir Terry Pratchett put it far more succinctly in his Sam Vimes Boots Theory.
The privileged watch us struggle to accomplish ‘basic life tasks and common milestones’ and can’t help but think that it just has to be our own fault, right? None of this shit is that hard; are we really even trying? But they have no fucking idea; they literally live in a different world than we do – a completely separate layer of the capitalist system granted to them by right of the specific criteria of their class. The gap is ever widening, and that’s how the capitalist system is designed. The system is not broken. It was meant to be this way; it’s functioning exactly as intended. Capitalism is like a centrifuge designed to separate the classes as extremely as possible.
But I digress. The point is that there is no such thing as someone who is too far gone into any of this shit to salvage themselves from the wreckage. Whether the cruel and restrictive curse of dots or the soul-rotting curse of privilege, it can all be unraveled to reveal the authentic human beneath. No matter how many encrusted Gordian knot layers of sickening shit has been embedded into peoples’ minds...it can be untangled; it can be dismantled. It’s not quick and it’s not easy. It takes time, effort, persistence...and empathy.
Empathy is the path to the truest, deepest strength that exists in all the vastness of the universe.
Yes, the very thing that the most cowardly men of our times are loudly calling a sin and a weakness of civilization. Well, methinks the dumbasses doth protest too much. Only hit dogs holler, and liars tend to reveal the very things that they fear most with their loudest exhortations. The closer you get to the thing that can destroy them, the more dramatically they wail and the redder their faces get. Keep a weather eye out ya’ll; the teeth gnashing is a tell.
And so we finally circle around to radical empathy – the concept of empathy for all, empathy so wide and deep and comprehensive that it can wrap around this entire planet with more yet to spare.
An empathy that says simply, we shall leave none behind.
It’s an old philosophy, not a new fad in any way, shape, or form. It’s as old as time, as old as myth, as old and warm and familiar as our most beloved legends living, breathing, and walking among us.
Empathy is what allows us to reach out our open hands across the bullshit divisions fueled by those in power. To stand shoulder to shoulder as sisters and brothers, neithers and n’others, of every race, creed, class, sexuality, and identity: united, indivisible, fierce, and fucking powerful. Empathy is that which has the power to gather all the beautiful and wild diversity of labels under a single cohesive banner – human.
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
Empathy is hope, and is also something more than hope, for empathy is a tangible force of dynamic action in this world.
It is the key to the future, and it’s alive and roaring here in our hearts, our minds, the speech of our tongues, the tales of our acts, and the works of our hands.
Empathy is the antidote to the disease that’s ravaging our nation. And unlike most medicines in America, the pharmaceutical oligarchs hold no power over it. There is an endless spring, an undammable font of fresh, raw empathy welling up within each and every one of us from birth. It cannot be strip-mined or harvested or extracted from us; as long as we exist, so too does empathy. It cannot be bought, sold, stolen, co-opted, manufactured, copyrighted, or artificially synthesized; it cannot be externally controlled. It is our most vital and precious natural resource, and it is ours alone to nurture and to wield.
Empathy is diversity and unity. Empathy is strength and hope.
Most importantly, empathy is ours; it belongs to us. It cannot be taken from us.
For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me.
This is our world, and the time for the future is now.