Belief to Revolution

Belief to Revolution

               There is an emptiness in the culture today.  The missing food in the stomach, the unfilled glass, the unfulfilled life of the working man.  There is no art, there are no paintings recognized as modern forms of greatness.  Every mural seen on a social media feed someone captured with a smart phone is forgotten and discarded within seconds, even if your cousin created it, even if it actually is great.  There is no good music anymore.  There is culture of some sort, but there might as well not be.  It’s empty and shallow and bland and bitter.
               The kids are on to something though, and everyone knows it.  The radio talk show broadcasters, the news anchors, the politicians, the college drop outs, the electrical engineers.  And they know this because the one thing the kids have that the older generations don’t is a real desire, a yearning to fix whatever this problem is.  The yearning for a better world hasn’t been beaten out of them.  The kids haven’t yet caved to the abuse the way the older generations of today caved, and what’s more, they’re actually putting up a fight.  There is a disgrace in what the older generations didn’t accomplish, but the greater disgrace is in the fact that they didn’t even fucking try.  They didn’t go out marching in the streets in the way this young generation does.

               The conservatives – they vocalize their terror of their feeling that the protests and marching and chanting and looting goes too far.  They fear that this yearning will actually transmute into discovery.  Self-discovery and then self-actualization and then revolution.  Their terror is real and it is delightful.

               The liberals, too, shake with an unspoken trembling fear.  They know the status quo holds them up as the middle managers, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucrats, the overpaid stooges and toadies who are compensated quite well for doing a job that has been long done throughout history by those just like them – the cowardly, sniveling, horrible priests, scribes and academics who have always sucked the teat of government and religious authority for a miserable middle class lifestyle and a miserable middle class paycheck.  They were bought off and they took a deal.  And the reality of their hypocrisy and their treason upon all which they claim to stand for is now out in the open for everyone to see, from the conservative, ignorant, racist dingbats to the hungry children who actually have the guts to point to Marx – whether he was right or wrong – as at least a legitimate sociological critic of the status quo.

               My dread, as an alcoholic loser with nothing to lose and no dog in the fight – no wife, no kids or pets or really any close friends (all my millennial counterparts disgust me; I can’t stand them) – is that this emptiness will not lead to self-discovery, self-actualization and revolution.  That the yearning will be co-opted and its momentum will be swung in a direction that leads straight for a cliff.  That the desire for a better world will fall straight off that cliff and onto the jagged rocks in an endless ocean of death, that same ocean in which all the rest of humanity and its past generations have drowned in their own ineptitude, cowardice, apathy and submission.

               Part of what’s missing is belief.  Not of the religious kind.  Although the rightful destruction of religion is what has led to the absence of an understanding of the importance of belief, the meaning of belief as a word and its value as a concept linguistically, in the abstract, and in its relation to ethics.

               Belief is not the same as knowledge.  The kids out in the street are chanting, “black lives matter,” and this is a concept they have knowledge of.  It’s not their belief.  It’s what has been taught to us by the moral leaders we used to have like King and by the generations who followed him.  Anti-racism is not a belief.  It is knowledge.

               A belief can be of less value or of more value than knowledge.  Back in King’s day, or in John Brown, the abolitionists’ day, anti-racism was a belief, from a sociological perspective.  It wasn’t the mainstream opinion.  It’s abhorrently annoying that I would have to explain that a mainstream opinion, a majority opinion, might not be universally accepted and that its equal and opposite challenging minority opinion would still represent a threat to society, but someone has to say it.  A belief of less value than knowledge might be something as trivial as believing it will be sunny tomorrow.  A belief of higher value than knowledge would be an anti-racist belief one hundred and fifty years ago compared to the knowledge that racism is evil today.  The word “belief” and the word “knowledge” have different contexts throughout time and are related to the society in which those concepts are used, spoken of and understood, as I assume I’ve made clear by now.  Yes, this is a linguistic issue.

               And this is why it’s painfully obvious that nobody believes in anything today.  It’s been accepted that belief is trivial, stupid, juvenile and often times used for evil, but this analysis is short-sighted and wrong.  Belief is all of these things, in its linguistic form as a value lower than knowledge, but it misses the other meaning “belief” has linguistically, and that is of something with more value than knowledge.  And that kind of belief, and an understanding of its necessity is sorely missing in such a devastating way.

               In all, there is feeling, there is thought, belief, knowledge, and truth.  These five words sometimes equal each other, but it is most important to note when these things differ.  It is most important to know how these words are distinguished from one another.  Knowledge isn’t the most important thing we can have.  A belief can be much more important.  Sometimes a feeling can be more critical.  Sometimes, a thought can be more profound.  The truth always holds a very high form of relevance.  Thus the importance of the word as it is used linguistically in our society, in what’s left of our culture, and in our court systems which claim to be a system representing an understanding of ethics and a proper arbiter of justice (“I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…”)

               These kids have the feeling, they have thought, they have some low forms of belief and they have knowledge.  They also have the truth.  But a large part of what’s missing from our society is the highest form of belief.

               We know what happened to George Floyd shouldn’t have happened.  We know that racism is wrong.  We know that police brutality is wrong.  But where do we go from there?  The conservatives don’t want us to go any further, the liberals are scared of the consequences of venturing to go any further, and the kids know that going further is necessary.  But we are sorely lacking in belief, in a belief system, in a direction.  And because of that lack of direction which can only be achieved by a belief system which can only exist because of legitimate beliefs, we can’t expand upon our knowledge and achieve self-discovery, self-actualization, and collective revolution.
               Our society, our country, and our world is ready for a revolution, but that revolution depends upon the discovery and articulation of belief, which then may create a belief system, and then a direction.
               The revolution will follow out of this process.