The spectacle of his wife and her performative speech and filming herself touching his corpse... Crowder changing his podcast description to "#1" shortly after he was confirmed dead. Trump saying "yeah, I'm okay... Say, take a look at the amazing construction of my ball room!!". The vultures picked his skeleton clean before his body was cold.
After seeing this I realized, the people closest to him were all hollowed out shells of human beings, they don't understand love and they never loved him. He never knew real connection, conservatives never seem to be able to. It just struck me how broken they all are, it's so fucking sad and such a waste of life. I just wonder what these demons could have been if they didn't have their souls sucked out of them by... Idk, capitalism's inherent dehumanizing characteristics? It feels like it has it's own malevolent sentience now days and I'm not sure what to call it.
So yeah, he tried to spread the only thing he ever really knew - hatred. I guess that's how Nazis are made... He's in hell if there is one.
kirk and the grift gang are an extreme example, but i think the instructive lesson here is something like "be careful what you get good at" (Pizzolatto), "be careful who you pretend to be" (Vonnegut). if i could frame it more precisely, "take care on what you do to 'make it' in this world."
under capitalism, the bulk of the opportunities for security involve depriving others of it, or profiting from that deprivation, the enclosure of commons, the gatekeeping of fruits from the collective efforts of many. i would expect most of us here want to contribute in a positive way without becoming insecure ourselves, but that is not a path with signposts or well worn treads. we talk of "selling our souls", but i think the cost is more immediate and less poetic. the more of a sellout opportunistic role your work is connected to, the more you will be surrounded by people who are unbothered by it. they will have narratives and creative self-understandings to handwave these feelings away, but the lies we tell ourselves are a self-administered poison.
i'm sure we've all had jobs where we weren't actively selling out, but rather were working for some opportunistic asshole. we trauma bonded with our colleagues and undermined authority where it didn't threaten our own security, but this doesn't save us from be part of the problem either and while our immediate colleagues and friends are good, caring people, we have to watch them be ground up or conditioned into selling out so they can provide security for themselves and those dependent on them.
the realization that kirk was surrounded by assholes is an invitation for all of to consider the ways we might scout even better paths to survive securely which also draw us toward true friends, allies and comrades. the system and its institutions are stacked against us, but i believe finding and widening the cracks where we can do this are a form of structural, holistic resistance to labor that represents an existential threat to capital, if the cracks can be widened to accommodate everyone who wants to opt out of this shit deal.