Today I ate a bagel and immediately began an existential foray into the intangible abstract world that has become the equivalent of some figurative gas station that my Fiat of a mind visits every few weeks when it is running out of philosophical-dread-fuel.
Let’s talk about Afghanistan.
Just kidding. I’m having a bad hair day and, as everyone is painstakingly aware, bad hair day means bad life day. So let’s not talk about Afghanistan.
So anyway. Picture the scene. I am sitting at the breakfast table, bagel in hand, bad hair on head, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin (as you do) and wanting to escape the mundanity of the frustrations of the back-breaking stress of a thousand Universes that accompanies everyday life because all I want to do is drink mocktails on the beach and write postmodernist critiques of Life and other things and brush my teeth once a day because hell, I value my autonomy. No, Mr. President, I will not brush my teeth twice a day. I am a FREE AND INDEPENDENT CITIZEN AND THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT TO DO!
Is that what anti-vaxxers sound like?
So anyway. Anyway. Anyway. My head hurts, and .. / -.. — -. – / .– .- -. – / – — / .– .-. .. – . / .. -. / . -. –. .-.. .. … …. / … — / .. / .– .. .-.. .-.. / .– .-. .. – . / .. -. / — — .-. … . .-.-.-
Demystifying the ethics of political autonomy in a state is a topic that you’re probably inclined to Not Care About Very Much. But it’s interesting to think about – Benedict Anderson, for example, in his seminal 1983 book Imagined Communities, conceptualizes a nation as the socially constructed sum total of the imaginations of people who consider themselves as part of said nation. So if we ALL stop believing in nations at once, it will cease to exist, right?
No! Well, theoretically, yes. But realistically, with the trail of evidence, as it were, that we have left behind, in the form of the tangible products of the intangible state (e.g. a traffic cone in a government parking lot), would betray the existence of some higher order to which we previously subscribed.
One asks oneself: why does humanity feel the compelling necessity to organize itself? Is it a positive feedback loop? A product of evolutionary psychology? A command from the simulation? How are we to demystify the intangible abstracts of the political world around us when we cannot observe them in the first place?
Moral of the story: Saying ‘I don’t know’ is a good answer to pretty much anything. Nothing is everything, and so my bagel is nothing, and black is white, and white is black, and everything is grey, and someone is dying on a zebra crossing soon.
Half-baked Bread Heads 