Counting Angry Sheep

Dreaming is an odd phenomenon. The mind stitches together scenes and actions that come from an imagination difficult to recognize as our own. It feels, at times, like dreams are so foreign that they are information pumped directly into us from somewhere outside ourselves.

I experience two forms of dreaming. One is comprised of a strange collage of scenes and feelings stitched into a semi-cohesive story. In my most memorable dreams, I race across alien landscapes, pursued by shadowy forces while encountering strange creatures and people I will never forget, though I have never met them in my waking life. Some of these dreams have had profound and lasting effects on me. These dreams I experience in the first person as the lead character. I live them.

The other type is where the images, feelings, and thoughts pass me by. I am not part of the story but see glimpses of stories and images swirling around me. I am not a character but an observer.

This type of dream most reveals what dreaming must actually accomplish for the wet computer that is me. It is an information (sensory, thought, emotion, experience) download and sorting. We cannot take what we have experienced day in and day out and consciously sort it all into useful storage compartments. It is too much information and the process is so complicated that it defies our waking minds.

Dreams do for the individual what narratives do for the collective. They create a story with simplified information that us dummies can use and understand to represent larger truths about the world around us. Narrative is a distillation meant to carry complex truths in a simple form.

This thought process lends some insight into the people we encounter who live with bad narratives and cognitive dissonance. The person who screams “my body, my choice” when referring to a woman’s right to own her womb and the creature that grows within it, can then cheerlead a mandate that forces a needle into my arm, against my will. Neither my body nor my choice, apparently. A person that screams about Putin’s invasion and the sanctity of sovereign borders can yell racist when someone wants US borders to be sovereign as well.

The biggest thing people on both sides of the US political spectrum are taught to cheerlead is: Democracy! They do this as we violate the sanctity of other people’s elections. Assad was elected, Yanukovych was elected, Orban was elected. Those elections were bad, they don’t count. Okay. What about Trump? What about Biden? Or Brexit? Democracy is when they like the results of an ‘election’ but it immediately becomes tyranny or fascism or some other virulent form of “not democracy” when they do not like the results.

We could list hypocrisies from every group in our culture (or any for that matter) forever, and never reach the end. The hypocrisy exists despite the cognitive dissonance it should create because they have a narrative that they are following. They are reading from a story you cannot see but that they have accepted fully as part of their identity. This narrative is built through a lifetime’s accretion of anecdotes, stories, and beliefs. Much of this information is seeded from others: friends, families, co-workers, strangers, etc. And it cuts both to the positive and negative (i.e., you didn’t like your conservative father, then you are many times more likely to become his ideological antithesis but, ironically, often a synthesis of the flaws you most despised.)

Anything that fits a person’s narrative is slotted neatly into it, confirming their chosen story about the world. Things that do not conform are dismissed or ignored as they cannot be subsumed. Even if you point to fallacies or contradictions, they will say things like “that is different” or “you don’t understand”. But more often, they will get irrationally angry and insist that what you say is false or disproven while never providing their evidence. I know this both because of experiences of running into people’s narrative boundaries, but also because I have narratives I fight as well.

Recently, during a typical day at work, I had a brief interaction with the owner of a small tech company. I am not in tech but manage projects, buildings, contractors, and all manner of the improvement and workings of buildings and building systems.

To make conversation, I mentioned crypto. Ultimately, I was there for other reasons, but have always found easy conversation makes work more pleasant. Also, I was raised in a small southern venue and this is just our version of manners. He seemed a bit ignorant of crypto so I gave a poor man’s decentralization spiel. Ultimately that crypto is not fake internet money, but technology and the next version of the Web. Web 1 was static websites for nerds; Web 2 is integrated, interconnected, searchable, and ultimately where you became a product through mass data collection (largely in social media and shopping, but I repeat myself); web 3 is where the data is decentralized, public but private (anonymity), and where you own yourself and the data that defines you. Crypto and distributed ledgers is where this is happening and will likely continue to happen. At the least, this is how I understand it and what I currently think.

As an example, I mentioned projects like Filecoin, Arweave, Storj, and others who provide decentralized cloud storage and web hosting. These projects tap into unused storage space in a decentralized network to replace the massive centralized web servers and file storage like AWS and Google. The next part of the conversation went something like this:

Me: Then they wouldn’t be able to censor anyone. Like the time they shut that social media site down. What was it, Parler, I think? They just turned the switch off and no more company.

Him: Parler!? You mean after they tried to overthrow our Democracy!

His equation of logic was written on his face and in his tone of voice: Parler equals January 6th equals Trump equals coup equals the end of Democracy. I knew that I had hit upon one of the shrillest and most ignorant portions of the populace: the mainstream Leftist, who eat all the narratives they have been fed. Our mainstream Rightists have their version but, in my experience, they tend not to get shrill.

Me: Oookay. Well, I’m a free speech absolutist so, you know…

I said this as I was backing away from him to handle the problem I was actually there to resolve.

Our democracy that they tried to overthrow. Not much of a democracy this guy has in mind. Note that it is always democracy when they get their way. But let anything thwart their spoiled desire to win always and it is immediately labeled anti-democratic. It is like playing a game with a 4 yo. One of those games where they make up the rules and then change them constantly so they always win and you always lose. If not, they won’t play. To see that in a 50-ish year old man always leaves me a little deflated.

This guy, who runs what seems to be a successful business in the gaming/tech space, must be able to ignore the blaring echoes of cognitive dissonance better than me. Silence the speech of that group for our democracy. What I wanted to say was: You mean, your democracy. The regime flunkies, the sheep, and the shrill democracy moralists apparently don’t want those other people (i.e. anyone who wanted a Social Media source untainted by censorship, who were mainly conservatives as they generally were and are the censored) to have a voice or it would ruin their democracy.

It doesn’t occur to him that if you exclude the speech of a contingent of the population, then it is not the democracy you worship. Never mind the fact that we are supposed to live in a Constitutional Republic.

More importantly, has he never heard of the Twitter files? Or remember the common refrain that his ilk spat at conservatives? “If you don’t like Social Media as it exists, then use the Free Market you like so much to build your own?” Then they did build one called Parler, which was promptly crushed when Amazon, Google, and Apple shut Parler down in a coordinated attack spurred by leftist scolds. And almost overnight the business was dead to the glee of the entire neoliberal establishment.

I know, with relative certainty, that there was nothing I could have said that would have changed this guy’s mind or made him see. He was, is, and will always be a sheep. He will believe whatever NPR or the NYT or CNN or wherever he blithely consumes his propaganda tells him to believe. I am certain that he knows that Donald Trump is a Russian spy; the Ukraine war started out of the blue when Putin invaded; Covid was only mitigated through masking, societal shutdown, and wonder drug vaccines; and my truck and farts are going to lead to rising seas and death for the whole world very soon. There is nothing to say to change his mind. He is not curious enough to research nor interested enough to think a bit. The odds are in favor of him also thinking unkind thoughts about my own lack of perspicacity.

This guy is our voting populace and why democracy ain’t nothing but rule by the mindless mob. Monkeys with machine guns all the way down. So arm yourself (with knowledge…and guns), get a good tribe of monkeys around you, ignore the dummies, and make a life that you love. Otherwise, you might end up in a cafe in your 15-minute city, sipping your government gin, cheering the propaganda on the tv while trying to forget the world that you can no longer remember before going home to count angry sheep before you sleep.