dori midnight on capitalism, numbing, and endless scrolls of horror

13 Nov 2018

just started listening to dori midnight’s recent interview on herbal highway. i’m already floored. these aren’t new thoughts, maybe of them i’ve actually had recently, but i love the simple way she puts it.

she’s talking about apocalypse and what it means. and in the root sense of the word, apocalypse just means uncovering. the modern connotation is about destruction, but that’s more a symptom of the original meaning. which is interesting.

so then she goes on to talk about how how it means to times when things are getting uncovered. all the “news” about sexual violence in our society isn’t new. it’s always been here. but it is getting exposed. and the exposure is painful. sometimes too painful.

one reaction, a very very common one right now, is to avoid the pain, either avoid it completely or avoid it once it becomes too much. we numb out by doing all sorts of things (drinking, binge watching, eating, partying, etc.).

and then she lays into capitalism as a force that fosters and benefits from all this. paraphrasing here:

we all swim in endless scrolls of horrifying news: police killing brown children, women and all people being sexually assaulted, fires burning forests and towns, etc. so much information and so many stories… it causes all sorts of terrible feelings in us. we are constantly undone but because of the busyness of our lives we don’t let ourselves get affected by it. and then comes capitalism to provide us with all sorts of things to buy to help us feel more whole. but we know that those things don’t help us heal or be whole. feeling our feelings makes us feel whole. but capitalism does a great job at distracting us from doing that work.

i just… damn.

can’t wait (and i’m sort of steeling myself lol) for the rest of this episode.

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-herbal-highway-october-18-2018/

words / writing / post-processing
299w / 9min /