"Small, Stupid Humans. It's Like Our Whole Deal"

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I finished watching Everything Everywhere All at Once this week. I think its sorta funny how delayed my absorption of cultural touchstones are. This movie is one of the most decorated films of all time and came out in early 2022. It’s nearly 2024, and I am just watching it now. It sorta shows how far I am from that kid from the rust belt USA who used to seek out movies like this at family video and pour myself into them to see realities outside of the limited world I inhabited growing up. Yes, this is the interesting thing about film when you plot your own course and get involved with magic. You are less reliant on other people’s storytelling, because you are trying to tell your own story. My favorite thing about being a writer and artist is telling my own stories and building my own worlds that include the things I see excluded from our contemporary culture, like dissent and magic.

The tendency to be caught up in your own storytelling, however, can be a double-edged sword. One has to be very careful to not totally close themselves off to music, books, and film that can open one mind to different possibilities. It’s easy to get lost in nostalgia-core for the culture that made you the person you are today. This is where I try to stay very vigilant to my own tendency to hole myself up watching X-Files while listening to Thursday records in my basement. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. I just try to avoid trading in my own ability to tell new stories about my own life for re-runs of the past stories I told myself about the world.

This is precisely where death work figures into my own art and writing. I am consistently trying to assess what stories about the world that were handed to me in my 37 years on the planet that I can let die. Most notably, I decided at an early age raised by a single mom in relative poverty that I was going to let all negative stories people told about other people based on their race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion die. This is my mom’s legacy, because glob knows that no one else in white America was telling me of the basic commonality that I have with everyone else on the planet. Only in sociology did I hear that basic folk wisdom I was raised into handed back to me in a practical toolkit. This is why I have devoted nearly two decades of my life to sociology, because it offers me the ability to kill off any racist, classist, xenophobic, homophobic, patriarchal ideas that I was handed as a kid. I can dissect them, identify their origin, and subject those ideas to criticism before laying them to rest to decompose and fertilize my future actions toward collective liberation.

Yes, sociology is death work, sociology is death work, sociology is death work. Say it again, again, and again. We all know it. You know it. I know it. There aren’t many better toolkits that we can use to fight back. And, it’s tools we need now more than ever, because:

“There’s a war going on for your mind,”

and one side of that war will be endlessly televised,

in the hopes that:

You will believe a genocide is good business

and practical political strategy,

not a senseless, pointless bloodbath.

“There’s a war going on for your mind,”

and one side of that war will be endlessly televised,

in the hopes that:

You will give up your power to tell your own stories,

and accept the stories you were handed.

“There is a war going on for you mind,”

and you have the power to push back,

not just unfollow folx on social media

sharing inconvenient truths

that harsh your brunch mellow.

That’s all very dramatic millennial of me. Let me shift it back to something a little closer nostalgia-core I indulge myself in to illustrate how one can lose control of their own storytelling. When I was growing up, my mom and I often indulged in discussions about UFOs and government conspiracies and ceaselessly watched Sightings, X-Files, Unsolved Mysteries, and the Si-Fi channel. However, it wasn’t until later in my life that I learned that conspiracies theories of that sort serve as a way for poor folx to vent about feeling powerlessness before a corrupt government without having to really challenge the distribution of resources. Yeah, much to my tinfoil-hat-wearing chagrin, it is far more likely that UFOs and aliens are much more useful as a cultural sleight of hand technique that can shift the general populations concern off something much more concrete that the government is doing, like the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the Gazan Genocide.

This opinion piece from the Guardian from Wednesday is a great example of how complicit the mass media is in this sort of story telling. One day after a general strike of folx across the world calling for a permanent ceasefire came up this past week, the guardian decided to air this hilariously timely article amplifying Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s UFO Transparency bill. Yes, amidst widespread electronic, street, and traditional phone, email, and fax dissent calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, its important for trevor to say we need the truth about UFOs. LIKE WHAT? Give me a break, Hoss. Get outta here with that garbage. Yes, let me tell you, dear reader, that the truth about UFOs and aliens doesn’t matter if we are still bombing or supporting far right nations bombing people into oblivion. It’s much more important for us to understand that there is a war going on for our attention and where we direct our attention. Don’t let folx direct your attention elsewhere. That’s how you lose control of your own story telling.

Yet, then you get slapped upside the head with a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once (“EEAAO”) and realize how important it is to not wall yourself off from new bits of culture. Aside from the numerous allusions to the Matrix (1999), EEAAO has this one scene that still has left me gobsmacked with wonder. In that scene, the mother and daughter, Evelyn and Joy, who have the ability to traverse across instances in the multiverse converse as two rocks in a universe where the conditions for life did not develop on earth. They have the following conversation:

YES! We really are small and stupid. Now, if this offends you, remember not to take yourself too seriously. This world doesn’t need any more white saviors or folx that are looking to change the world on their own. No, we need to imagine a world where we understand that we are all really quite insignificant and pretty stupid. This is the world where radical social change is possible.

Respecting the utter truth of individual humans as small and stupid opens up so much possibility for growth. When I say I am small and stupid, I am respecting the truth that despite having a PhD in sociology I will never stop learning about the ways in which I can be a better ally to folx in other communities that are being oppressed. I am respecting that given I am a white man that I will need to work everyday to bare witness to domination, cede the privilege that enables that domination, and weave dissent into the rhythm of my day. I respect that I will be wrong, show up in ways I did not intend, and will have to commit to do the reparative work to do better. At the end of the day, believing we are stupid is really just saying we are fallible and will never know it all. We will always be amateurs and striving to listen and learn from folx around us. Imagine if we approached each other as fallible and didn’t expect people to show up to every social issue and interaction as if they are an expert in inequality or geopolitics. Likewise, imagine if we let people come back from being wrong and gave space for folx to learn. That sounds to me like the sort of society I want to be part of, a world where we are all just a bunch of animate meat sacks trying to grow into better people in alignment with our values.

Holding on to the truth that humans are small and stupid is vital for solidarity as well. One of the biggest challenges I have faced as someone involved in movements for nearly 20 years is wanting to be recognized for the work. Yes, one of the biggest challenges of the individualist strain in our culture is the difficulty in giving up a bit of our own ego to be part of something bigger. As Geoff Rickly of Thursday noted in the closing track to their debut album Waiting, “So often we don't struggle to improve conditions, we struggle for the right to say "we improved conditions." Believing that we are small and stupid is a great curative for this tendency we have in the West. Imagine if we were less interested in being recognized for the work or for that little pat on the head that denotes you are a “good person.” Imagine if we were just trying to do our little part each day in collectively saving one another from the forms of mass immiseration we all experience. Yes, I believe that its only when all those small, stupid people work toward a collective end together that the mountain can be moved. That sounds to me like the sort of movement I want to be a part of where “many hands make light work” of what needs to be done for our collective liberation.

Anyways, that’s all I got for you today, dear reader. I hope you can find some joy amidst the ruins of our lives. I am always sending you the best energy I can muster. May we alays find each other amid the difficulties of our times.

Best,

James