For the Unconsolidated
Morning Thoughts #187
The era of consolidation has begun. Friends, be proud if you’re not a part of it! In a world of ideological Costcos, may you still think like a local grocer!
But, oh, it’s true: those who interact with us do sometimes pay a higher social cost, and we ourselves accrue fewer immediate benefits from the remote positions we take. Yes, we are less accessible to those who take only the public transportation of groupthink! They say we live in the outskirts! Ah, let them say whatever, for it doesn’t seem so to us! We like the space our thoughts have given us: working the land of the mind, you need acres. Give us deep breathing space to plant our reflections. Why do we need to come to the same conclusion as our neighbors? Why should we all bring the same crops to the market of ideas?
Those who catch a ride with their wandering, curious minds find us. It’s not like we’ve crossed the county line. We’ve settled here, at the periphery as defined by those who huddle together to name it so. Whispering, shame on the distance that doesn’t conform to the glassy skyline. How repetitive that fake sheen is to us!
Once it was geography that incipient empires conquered to then consolidate. Oh, but now that the land has been tamed, it’s something else entirely at stake! One mind after another is being subsumed into the new ideological empire—more uniform and dreadful than anything that has come before it! Our souls, our thoughts, our critical independence—these are lands sought by the new conquering armies of the information age. Friends, you who’ve been able to resist the great expansion of groupthink, I bid you welcome from my still necessary distance and anonymity! We siblings in thought, separated at birth, maintain unconquered, non-contiguous outposts, sometimes through sheer intellectual curiosity alone!
We do not live in a classless society today any more than we did a century ago, but what constitutes these classes is changing quickly. Soon only two will remain: the programmers and the programmed. And those seeking to remain in an undefined category are the new rebels, bearers of a great exile to come. May we continue to resist consolidation through the strength of our autonomous minds! Brothers and sisters in thought, we come together not as a collective but as a constellation! Seen from the proper distance (that is to say, from a depth and subtlety of understanding), our individual projects sketch a better way forward together!