“Why is it that when I see a limping man I feel sorry for him, but if I talk to a limping mind, I get irritated beyond words?...Because the limping man knows that he is limping. The limping mind accuses me of limping.” - Blaise Pascal
Sanitation derives from the Latin root word of ‘Sanus’ that translates to healthy or sane. The irony is that in trying to remain ‘sane’ we are on a clear pathway to destruction - but to say such a thing would un-sanitize the environment so everyone just pretends like it is all going to be just fine.
Before I get deeper into my expose, I should probably start by defining some terms up front. When I refer to the age of sanitation I am loosely referring to the pervading yet rapidly decaying analytic-utilitarian paradigm resting on the pillars of the federal reserve banking system, pseudo-liberal egalitarian social structures, corporate run science and R&D, and a general lack of history pervading most fields of study. The age of sanitation is an atmosphere and if you live inside of it I am sure that you are acquainted with it (even if not directly aware). As the last dying gasp of breath from modernity, the age of sanitation is characterized by dulling and distancing all things down to the point that they are not able to affect us as they usually should:
You are told that to be opinionated is not socially acceptable, or put more technically, there is an immediate “rejection or neutralization of any kind of public justification” (B. Pattyn). To protect the truth, the liberal-egalitarian will simply ensure you cannot bring it up or question it.
You are encouraged to scrub your body of all bacteria and germs, wash your hands many times daily - same goes for your hair. You live in a fully sanitized and artificial environment where air flow is done through ventilation. Food must be refrigerated!
Learning and decision making is outsourced to the ‘Experts’ because they have the ‘qualification’ to be trusted. But does the qualification in-fact, guarantee adequacy and competence? Even if the system bestowing the qualification has altered its standards and structure? And as a result of this few people read, fewer people study, and even fewer people think. It was George Steiner (Errata), who said that if you want to understand something you must commit it to memory. Note the theme of the ‘Trust-in-expert’ paradigm: Distancing responsibility, outsourcing independent thinking, and ensuring that I ‘feel’ o.k.
You are attacked with calls for mindfulness, relaxation, and consideration for ‘mental health’ and ‘headspace’ but you live in a system that wants you connected to the cloud 24/7. Requires you to have a cell phone to open up an email account, and barrages you with media at all hours of the day. Instagram for the personal, twitter for the social, reddit for the kooks, and facebook for the boomers.
You are told to be healthy you should eat healthy, but even the ‘experts’ scratch their heads about the impacts of seed oils, corn syrups, artificial sweeteners, and ultra-processed foods (like Sunny D and Hot Cheetos - which I love btw). Go to the doctor and tell him you eat ‘normally’ and he won’t raise an eyebrow, tell him you are on a Keto or Scavenger diet and he starts to question you with concern. The unspoken and undoubted presupposition is that the existing system works, and if you didn’t realize it, it works at making everyone fantastically obese, fatigued, and on their way to being WALLEfied.
You are told to think and care more for the climate and our environment, but you live in a concrete jungle removed from close bodies of freshwater, and natural thriving ecosystems. What’s more, you drink water with small fragments of microplastics, and chemicals. The children drink it as well. Because if you don’t look, and no expert ‘proves it’ then it’s not real. Meanwhile the larger systems at play obliterate natural forests, contaminate fresh water supplies, destroy active ecosystems, and turn them into plantations, mines, and all sorts of fancy industry that provide consumption materials for your life in the concrete jungle.
We look at incredible space science developments, completely unaware of the fundamental presuppositions inherent in our energy design systems. Pressurized, combustive energy. Propellers are shaped like ‘Helicopter seeds’ that are meant to brake the fall of the seed not accelerate it through the air or whatever medium it is moving through. It gets to a certain point of insanity, where you think about what an extra-terrestrial would say if they observed a recent SpaceX launch:
“Come in Mothership. Currently observing the launch of Starship. There is some kind of ceremony going on with what looks like a massive rocket wired to some massive explosives…. I think they are going to try to push their way through the atmosphere!... How long ago did we give these monkey’s brain chips?. Hold on now, they are clapping - it looks like they are going to put people on the top of these things. Roger that I am stating correctly: the human-monkeys are going to actively attempt to explode their way up into and through the atmosphere with people attached to the top of the ship. And they are cheering at their insanity. What could possibly go wrong? Requesting permission to stay and observe the launch.”
So the age of Sanitation means we deny what is evident, avoid what is uncomfortable, and outsource hard thinking and problems to ‘experts’ as a method of keeping our minds ‘stable’. With this nice foundation, I can introduce two other terms for how people react to this situation:
To COPE: It means to continue to hold onto this worldview and life structure, even when it is obviously false and rings hollow. You are ‘coping’ hard, when you continue to justify this system and defend it from outside attacks to its fundamental structures.
To LARP: It means, quite literally Live Action Role Playing. The LARPs are new, indicative of the signs of our changing times. LARPs are aware of the fact that the world is changing, and they want to give off the appearance of being on the cutting-edge of this change. But deep down, or quite evidently from the outside, they are just pretending. They will nod, and get excited, speak the jumbo and talk a big game, but not actually understand much of what is going on. They will join an industry because it is ‘cool’ but not understand how social structures change in the new environment. In short, they bring mainstream ways of living, to emerging paradigms of thinking.
And so there you have it: You have two choices for living in this cracked world. Pretend everything is fine. Or pretend to be comfortable inhabiting your new paradigm while secretly knowing deep down that you feel completely differently. There is a third option of course - to exit. But before I get into that, I want to draw out some of the more uncomfortable facts from our little situation:
IF there is such a thing as LARPing - people very visibly attempting to break out of the existing paradigm - then it clearly suggests that some people are becoming aware of the issues with our sanitized world view. I think very much about Avi Loeb, who after a successful career climbing to the top echelon of Academia, decided to leave the mainstream in starting an extra-terrestrial research program by the name of the Galileo Project.
That is to say, that there is confirmation that those COPING are COPING against something - some atmosphere or system - and those LARPing are trying to LARP into something else. You follow?
But now the uncomfortable truth sets in, that if our inhabited atmosphere or worldview is severely damaged, it cannot just be one piece of the world view. Categories of life are joined at the hip and rooted in the same life-environment from which they spring. So what I am saying is that you cannot throw away modern economics and finance, without throwing away modern education. And that these systems are all tied together. Yes, all of them: Finance, Medicine, Education, Science, Architecture, Art, Engineering, Social Values, and so forth. And where you find one fraud - JP Morgan playing dirty with trading, you are likely to find fraud elsewhere - Twitter lying about active users, or Verra when it comes to carbon accreditation. This is interesting though, because if we continue to blaze this trail, we realize that the experts are not really experts in the sense that they hold a commanding understanding of the reality of their field of expertise. Like the bankers behind the CDO, MBS meltdown, they are disconnected and sanitized from the world. In the Ivory tower - or better yet, in one tiny analytic spiral of that tower. And without experts to turn to, what in the world will we do with things like Truth, Orientation, Science and Medicine? Queue the continued decision of COPEing or LARPing forward.
By extension, and from another perspective, the inauthenticity of people is why there is no originality. It is why we aspire to be like the old fantastic figures of history (Galileo, Tesla, Einstein, DaVinci), but don't know how to be. It’s because our systems are old and deprecated, and most of us live in a nice sanitized environment in our heads. There I said it. You are stuck in your head. And the social atmosphere does not want you to question or dream or challenge existing narratives.
Pause. Do these narratives need re-imagining?
Does our finance system work for everyone?
Is our energy system sustainable?
Are we taking good care of our climate and environment?
Are people healthy, fit, and active?
Do we have healthy relationship dynamics with one another?
If not, here is the real trigger, who is responsible for that? Let me give you a hint, those who have lived through the development of these systems, done nothing, and now are trying to tell you that they are the experts and they know better than you about how the world works.
Nothing can be taken at face value. Your work, your production, your repeated - day-to-day performance and personal behaviors towards others - is what should be considered going forward. Your ideas and capacity to think and predict on the level of reality is a return to the foundations. Little else holds merit as it connects to a larger system, because the larger system is fluffy, sanitized, and most likely teaching you how to either COPE or LARP.
Congratulations. The world is bullshit. You live in a false reality. Most of what you have been told is empty, visage. It is not in touch with reality. We have been misled, and you don’t need a rational argument from me to prove it - you need to only look at the state of the Western world. And if you want to continue to COPE, then think long and hard about betting on this future: Would you bet on climate preservation? Declining Obesity rates? Clean water and food? Financing for all, and less inequality between the mega-elites and the average joe - within the existing paradigm at play?
And at this point, I will refer to Colonel Boyd’s famous question: Do you want to do things with your time, or do you want to be someone? In short, What do I want to Do? Vs. What do I want to be? I mentioned above that the third option in the age of Sanitation was not to COPE or LARP. It was to EXIT.
Here is the Door to the Exit: DO THINGS and Get smacked by reality once more - and then you will actually be someone.
In the current state of affairs, the more you COPE and LARP the more irrelevant you are because the more you will end up getting completely digested by the failing system that is crashing down. Fact check it: Name someone from the 16th century high society France that people look back to and admire? In times of uncertainty - much like late 16th and 17th century France - improvement is made through Discord not accommodation to the system. As Montaigne would say (and as we remember Montaigne):
“We can only improve ourselves in times such as these by walking backwards, by discord not by having harmony, by being different not by being like. Having myself learned little from good examples I use the bad ones, the text of which is routine.” (The Art of Conversation).
Or, zealous Pascal, in not so different terms:
“It is just as much a crime, to disturb the peace when truth is reigning, as it is a crime to keep the peace when error is reigning. For there is a time for peace, and a time for war - and truth decides between the two.”
Exiting means getting your hands, head, and life dirty and broken in direct proximity with the real raw world. It starts with being honest with yourself: About what you want to do with your time, what ideas naturally appeal to you, and what makes sense or doesn't make sense. Then it gets layered with your will - your commitment - to actually study and learn, or to outsource your understanding to another expert. And ultimately, to do things: To question, test, converse, think, build, govern, create and repeat. The good news is that you are not so much looking for answers as you are looking for a home - a new state of being and a new way of life. Find yourself in things. In your circumstance.
Like most social dynamics, you must expect to be an eccentric outcast at first, because you are going against the grain. But if you produce results: If you live healthier, if you think deeper, if you discover more, invent more, and do more things, reality re-calibrates itself to catch up with you because you are at that point impacting the social body, as they are being ‘affected by things’ (Mr. Ortega).