By Martin Anton Smith
Forgive me for starting this essay so negatively – but trust me the sunshine hiding from behind the storm clouds is coming soon.
So many on the streets of life doesn’t see the connective tissue between their disapproval of success in others & his own inability to succeed. It is a garden variety type of soulless-ness. And the ‘success’ he sees might not be money, it might simply just be a ‘sense of contentment’ he feels emanating from that ‘poor’ someone in his cross-hairs. His ardent banality has so completely enveloped him, that he even envies those who are not actively as miserable as himself.
I could be accused of ‘projecting’ here – but don’t we all know petty jealousy is – we’ve all seen how easily it seems to blooms as do weeds in the height of summer.
[Of course, to rebutt myself I must say “Martin come on now, you fool! What you are talking about is the famed & cliched ‘tall poppy syndrome’ – this is a bad affliction in the antipodes, where you live – but don’t say that this happens everywhere! What about the USA? Don’t they admire success? What about that Texan saying “If you’re going to fail – fail big”. Yes I must agree – I am being a little harsh writing off most of the world carte blanch. Please remember this edit & use it as an asterisk for the remainder M.S Edited on Oct 2024]
This aforementioned reality – which I don’t really want to call ‘the tall poppy syndrome’ becasue I think it runs deeper than that – & is perhaps a decline that has been happening for an least 150 years in the West. However this drift downwards in our general behaviour & mood against genuine success. Note I put the term ‘genuine success’ in italics so as the reader knows I am talking of true success & not some typical 21st Century rampant speculator or online seminar scammer – I’m talking of those whose works clearly build up society to be better.
The hatred of those who have ‘genuine success’ or symbolise it via their some-kind-of, for lack of a better term – ‘leadership persona’. It equates to a ‘pandemic of the spirit’ & sadly it is not a rare thing at all – in fact it is the norm outside those oasis areas such as Texas & the parts of USA that aren’t heavily politically left leaning.
Why write about this? Is it depressing? – yes. Does it make for good philosophy? – Yes!. Is it a problem we need to solve? – Yes! And so now that I am sure I am holding the license of the ‘interesting philosophical topic’- let me delve further. Also I want to underline the ultimate aim is to shine a light on the phenomenon, so that we might be able to help ourselves embrace others who are genuine builders of a better situation here on Earth, so life isn’t so materially & psychologically hard on us all.
Quantitatively speaking, my rough guess is there has to be at least Six Billion people that have this acute pathological ailment where they bash the builders. This out of the Eight Billion in the world today. I assume the 75: 25 ratio has on the whole always been this way, at least on planet Earth (more on that later). Perhaps I am wrong on the ratio, but surely I am in the ballpark, plus or minus a handful of percentage points.
It’s worth noting here, that big technological progress has not made Earth’s population less difficult to deal with on a personal level – if anything it fuels discontent – especially when a jaguar late model passes someone driving a old bomb, which fights to stay on the roads legally & which the owner can barely afford to run. The rise of technology namely computers, has at best been a double sided sword. The most obvious case is the smartphone zombification, which has essentially bred apparently healthy people to become essentially autistic & unable to function socially & in line with the needs of the workplace.
So just to make sure we are oriented properly on what I’m talking about here let me again interject myself. The two main questions about why Human life here on Earth doesn’t really work very well, despite so many generations trying are: firstly how come it got like this?; Secondly, how do we fix it?
Usually, it’s the creatives out there that stumble on the questions and answers before the scientists ever do. This is why the liberal arts are useful to us. This is why they say science fiction becomes science fact. But it doesn’t have to be about science per se, many of the very good non-science fiction novels, & indeed storys in general, end up ringing true. The most persuasive of these storys become myths & legends. Of course this is the domain of the anthropologist examining human cultures from pre-antiquity to today.
Of course myths & legends are intertwined with prophesy – to attempt to see how the future plays out. Writing of ‘Prophesy’ is a risky thing for the serious writer simply because it’s the loaded term ‘Prophesy’, which carries flakey Nostradamus-like connotations as well as a ‘religious zealot’ connotation.
But there’s nothing wrong with ‘Prophesy’ if it was thought up with good philosophical & rational foundations – in fact it is called ‘forecasting’ in the often dry quantitative fields of economics, accounting & statistics. Much of the great fiction, namely but not exclusively the sci-fi genre, has ‘good prophesy’ as the reason in resonates with it’s consumers. Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ with the Machiavellian Hal is an example of this regarding early fears of artificial intelligence gone wrong.
Another film related example, is when Writer-Director George A. Romero got things pretty much correct when he wrote & directed ‘The Dawn of the Dead’ – but as is standard in those movies, unlike real life, he had to make the walking dead more visually obvious. Contrastingly & frustratingly in real life you never can be quite sure if someone’s an, shall we say, an ‘ first class officer of the undead zombie battalian – until you’ve mistakenly befriended them a day, a week, a month ago. Or, you might just have the next cubicle to them in your office. That, I think you’ll agree is un-mistakenly just how this kind of phenomena works itself out – sometimes the person you thought was nice turned out to want walk around the city at midnight murdering people & eating their brains.
One things certain here: You can’t avoid the real-life demons of this world all your life, even if you cloister yourself with aplomb. I have noticed that the upper middle classes & newly monied types are great at trying to avoid & deny & escape the bad things in this world – even to the point of even lobbying Governments to criminalise real reports from the real world. Until these types slap an AI to Govt mainframe interface on every baby’s eyes at the instance of birth – which they will surely try to do – this is a exercise in futility.
Regarding ‘how to deal with Zombies once they out themselves’ – from that point you only have three choices: Lance the boil quickly; Become a prisoner of your own life; Or pigheadedly pretend your new walking undead friend is actually ‘perfectly ok’ or a ‘rough diamond’. I’m guessing those that walk with an air of contentment about them are also the ones that somehow knew all these things intuitively or via what the long-term wealthy call ‘good breeding’. Unlike the perhaps Six Billion that are the ‘walking dead’, they actually know the game they’re playing. In short, they’re using a good anti-zombie repellant. They’re using a good Zombie deamplifier.
But the rephrased version of the first over-arching question of “how did people become so Zombified?” is ‘how did he light became so mixed in with the darkness in the first place’?
In theory it should be ‘awesome’ living here on Earth as a human. We are atop of the food chain & can now easily sculp our environments with massive powerful diggers, lasers, engines & mainframes. Why would such a potential feast be sullied by always serving it on such a dirty plate? If you figure it out conclusively, please let me know. In fact, I’ll even settle for haphazard conjecture or two on the matter.
Conjecture: One thing’s for sure: whatever got us to that starting point of general zombie-ism was surely punishment for something else that happened, of which we have no memory remaining. Our sister planet of Mars is involved
This is the part of the essay where I become more conjectorial. Let’s talk not only of Zombies, but lets now talk of Mars. Mars of course since the robotic landers & Elon Musk is becoming more of a conservative real-world topic, vs say the 1950s comic books or even Jack Nicholson’s “Mars Attacks!” from 1996.
I mean Occams Razor suggests such the long standing punishment here on Earth is a system, not at all just a random bit of bad luck. I’ll have a crack at an answer, you might of heard similar here & there as it’s been said before – I think it has some merit. It involves Mars.
Perhaps originally we came from Mars first, not Earth. Perhaps a highly technologically accomplished generation of ours destroyed our original home planet of Mars in a nuclear war. Then a tiny remnant of that Martian population escaped via a spaceship to the other habitable planet: Earth. We escaped to that was one step closer to the sun – that we could also survive on, perhaps with some simple genetic manipulation by hybridisation with Earth’s pre-existing apes.
This brings me to conjecture two.
Conjecture two: Perhaps that remnant Martian population, now on Earth as ‘Humans’ for perhaps at least half a million years, has never been able to shake off the PTSD of the whole matter running through its veins. The sudden Mars escape has fueled a multi-generational PTSD curse that we can’t shake no matter what we do. This is why Human’s are so unsettled: As original Martians – we are not properly configured for Earth & never can be.
Perhaps this ‘Mars Escape thesis’ is actually just what the ancient religious scholars have refered to the many legends told surrounding ‘a great flood’ that so many of the worlds religeons mention in their texts. (To consume some of these ideas easily online, Paul Wallis has showcased his & his guests various ideas around this talked of this his Youtube channel ‘The 5th kind’. But naturally, be sure take at the least few very large grains of salt with you when watching such popular content)
This ‘We Escaped Mars Thesis’ is just one conjecture & of course there are so many others good or at least entertaining conjectures. All this is great fun to discuss, but lets be honest – it’s the not knowing that in the end really gets to you as a thinker. Well, it gets to me anyway – and when I look at all the works of the liberal arts, I’m sure I am not alone.
It’s also worth mentioning in passing that those who are firmly religious, might take the ‘we came from Mars first’ as an affront. But it all depends on how you view sacred texts – for if you believe the religious sacred texts used fictionalised stories & parables to represent the truth to it’s followers rather than the less palatable & understandable actual truth – then there would be no need to be ‘religiously upset’ so to speak.
And what about the pragmatic big question of ‘how do we fix ourselves from our generalised Zombie-dom’? Well as a postscript I’d say this: If indeed it all started with Mars – perhaps this will also be how it all ends, or at the very least, transmogrifies. It’s a very simple idea – the long sought out solution of an intractable problem will lie close to the genesis of the problem.
An analogy of this would be the engine of a popular model of car has had a problem for many years – let’s say it misfires erratically. Lets say the ‘boffins’ decided it best to look at every part in isolation to see what the problem is. They do this & can’t find the problem. Then a someone suggests to go back to the particular original engineering shed where the first prototype was made – they go back & open an old drawer. They find that one on the men when designing the core engine fixings had accidentilly used an imperial measurement by mistake, & the erratic misfiring was simply that unwittingly the car was an attempt to marry two incompatible systems together.
The point is that the ‘misfiring car’ problem was only solved when one bright spark considered it worthwhile to go back to the start to look at the creation of the car, rather than at the immediate production line machines, as all the other problem solvers had, & failed to find the answer.
So similar to the car analogy, Humans going back to Mars could be the answer to our intractable unsettledness, in the same way as my car analogy. When we go back maybe we’ll see we too had been trying to marry two intractable systems together. The mist from our eyes may suddenly evaporate – perhaps along with our eon’s long PTSD.
In going back to Mars I am talking of a concept called transmogrification. And let me pause as It’s worth explicitly posting the dictionary definition of the word – here I have used the online merriam-webster dictionary. Transmogrification is the noun version of the root verb word Transmogrify
Transmogrify: to change or alter greatly and often with grotesque, bizzare or humorous effect
Yes going back to Mars certainly will be a transmogrification, and perhaps a more positive version from the dictionary definition. Perhaps it will be bizzarre, grotesque & humourous at first, but then settle into a a spiritual rebirth.
Of course I fear the propaganda world could ruin all this. Going back to Mars, our potential original home will not not a transition as the future marketers will probably paint it as. After obfuscatingly calling it it a transition, then they’ll call it a ‘holiday’. then they want to use it as Australia was for England not that long ago: a penal colony.
And you know as well as me that the travel agents of the future selling ‘affordable holidays to Mars won’t have our best interests at heart. In looking for our salvation in re-colonising Mars, we also need to guard against the corporate penal colony enslavers, looking to derail the quest & create another Van Dieman’s Land. This is somewhat analogous to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film ‘Total Recall’ where a Dictator rules Mars over an enslaved extractive mining based population. This fact is all covered up by the authorities via the front of ‘implanting holidays direct into the memory’.
I will leave you with this thought about what happens next once we can & indeed do go back to Mars, & allow the reader to think about it themselves. After all, a conjectorial, philosophy based essay like this shouldn’t drag on too much – it should be reasonable diggestable, if not fun.
If my ‘Lets go back to Mars on a mental & spiritual quest’ is indeed the right adventure & conjecture to get Humanity on the right track to solve our seemingly intractable problem of Human unsettledness, or Mars to Earth PTSD, then sure as Neil Finn of Crowded House once sung in his elegy infused song “Hole In The River”….there is no return.
In short in will indeed Transmogrify it ways we cannot predict…but perchance, just perchance – it will also cure our culture-wide PTSD.
The End
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Anton Martin Smith Writer 