I had a moment of strange serendipity the other day while reading The Passenger. I had had the following thought that very day: we are under constant constant surveillance and yet we think everything is fine. I had been served one too many perfectly pitched social media ads. It made me think that we are essentially an inverse paranoid schizophrenic. And then I read the following bit of a dialogue from the Kline character:
‘You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none. The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.’
And Western responds:
‘I’m sure you know what this conversation sounds like.’
Yes, he sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic. Traditionally a schizo never actually has a dark conspiracy or shady characters after them. Their fears are unfounded. Unfortunately, we’ve all been pacified by the trope of the schizo. How many movies and TV shows have shown an out of whack character spouting conspiracies that weren’t factual? Even if it does turn out to be all true, they end up looking silly (I’m thinking of They Live; do you really want to put on the dorky glasses?). Yet when we should fear the mass surveillance state and the transfer of wealth to digital imprint, we carry on as if all is well in the world. We get targeted adverts about our deepest insecurities, caught in bare whispers by an algorithm, a machine goddess who tries to soothe us by compelling us to consume. You always leave a trail and ‘they’ huff it up like a fat girl’s farts.
Is identity politics another means of pacifying us? If we think we’re a two-spirit queer chameleon, maybe we won’t realize that we’ve already been assimilated. Another character in The Passenger, John Sheddan, says:
‘What I found that surprised me was that the unbalanced enjoy a certain largess of personal freedom increasingly abridged in the workaday world.’
Well, if all the world’s a mental institution then maybe we’re the crazy ones? What if things like schizophrenia are merely the next step in evolution and we’re the ones missing out? What if language really is a parasitic virus that’s replaced our ability to think? I mean, identity politics relies on esoteric and subjective patterns of speech and that is often why ‘conservatives’ are left in the dust of the woke.
All I can say for sure is that most of us aren’t adapted to what is coming down the pipeline.