Herman Melville's famous naysayer, Bartleby, the Scrivener, had it right all along: I would prefer not to.

Walk away. Abstain. Refuse to participate. Don’t. Buy. In.

Prefer not to—it’s the one strategy for which governments, corporations, ad agencies, televangelists, and nosy neighbors have no recourse.

Western culture is an endless gauntlet of commercial solicitation enforced and abetted by the threat of violence: economic violence—tariffs, embargoes, taxes, price gouging, the inequality of generational wealth—and good old physical violence, the kind doled out by law-abiding goons with jackboots, truncheons, tear gas, bullets (rubber and lead), and now face masks.

Automobile manufacturers burn through budgets with which to run medium-sized nations, all in expectation of you buying their cars; they’re sure you’ll choose one brand over another. What they don’t expect is for you to decide not to buy a car at all.

As Terence McKenna so astutely observed: “Culture is not your friend.” The world is an octopus and it wants to wrap six tentacles around you in order to suck the attention right out of your head while it picks your pocket with the other two. You must deny the world your attention! And your money. Attend to yourself. Pay attention to your attention.

Forget what Billy Joel sings; no matter what your state of mind, don’t read The New York Times or The Daily News. Don’t watch CNN or FOX News. And don’t give a rat’s ass about the Dow or the NASDAQ. You’re not missing out on a damned thing except an ulcer. Walk away. Prefer not to.

Governments are bankrupt. Enlightened constitutions? Think again. Our much-vaunted governmental blueprint has the Three-fifths Compromise written into its very text! In case your American history is rusty, that was the agreement between the northern anti-slavery states and the southern pro-slavery states: for the purpose of totting up seats in the House of Representatives—a tally based on population—each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person. 

That obscene “compromise” isn’t an amendment or some deal struck in a smoke-filled room, it’s encoded into our nation’s DNA. The Civil War hardly fixed it; another compromise, this one in 1877, pulled the federal army of occupation from the South, allowing those knuckle-dragging troglodytes to revert to their racist ways. As the saying goes, the North won the war but the South won the peace.

Know what else is obscene? America has sent generations of 18, 19, and 20 year-olds to far-flung places where they’ve had their limbs blown off and their lives stolen in order to topple puppets we installed decades earlier or safeguard shareholders’ dividends in Exxon-Mobil, but when those combat veterans return to the “Land of the Free” they can’t order a cold beer at their local tavern. Our utterly deranged values are out in the open; no one notices.

Sure, some governments are better than others. I’ll take Switzerland with its brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and its resultant cuckoo clocks over Stalin’s Russia every time. But has there ever been a country—or a religion—that waited until you were thoroughly grown up and educated before you decided whether or not to join it? Methinks there wouldn’t be many countries or religions left.

National affiliations and religious beliefs are as arbitrary as the sports teams for which people root. If you’re born in Boston then you’re a Red Sox fan and you know that the Sox are the one true baseball team and all others are pretenders, infidels, heretics, pagans, or damn Yankees.

Government does not have your back. Our state governments advertise their malfeasance on the radio, television, in online ads, and on billboards: the lottery. The State should be in the business of looking out for its constituents, not fleecing them, right? Yet state-run lotteries are glaringly a tax on the poor since the majority of suckers who play the lottery are indigent. Hardly anyone notices, let alone questions, this con’s cruelty.

Clearly, our federal government is no better: tax breaks for the wealthy, “revenue enhancers” (as Ronald Reagan cleverly doublespoke all his new taxes) for the hoi polloi.

Henry David Thoreau’s declaration at the start of Civil Disobedience still obtains: “‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” But don’t hold your breath. And don’t be duped into putting your faith in the “common man.” However slim a margin, a majority of Americans re-elected Donald Trump. Think about that.

Our best minds have always told us to prefer not to:

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution.
Have no faith in constitution,
There is no bloody revolution.

Hear, hear, Gordon Sumner!

Unfortunately, “we are led by the least among us,” as Terence McKenna also said. And no time better proves his insight’s accuracy than right now. On the one hand, we have the fairy tales we tell ourselves about the virtues of our society and our way of life; on the other we have the record of our deeds. It’s called history and it ain’t a pretty read.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses. So awaken! Let’s admit it: we’ve thoroughly fucked up the world. All we hear about are “solutions,” but despite the specious boasts of hucksters trying to sell us something or politicians denying the obvious, we’ve royally fucked up the planet—stripped it and strip-mined it, trampled it, exploited it, raped it. We’ve polluted the oceans, poisoned the atmosphere, covered the living earth with asphalt and concrete, and all because we must have 8-lane highways and gas stations in order to drive to malls and park there. The profiteers call it “progress.”

Thoreau, a like-minded contemporary of Bartleby the Scrivener, had the right take on the derangement of ideology and its effect on “The People” when he offered the definitive assessment of one of the so-called Wonders of the World:

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spending their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Hear, hear, Henry!

Fine then, we clearly see that history is a long pageant of pogroms fueled by ignorance and greed. So what? It’s cold consolation to be on the right side of history when you’re on the wrong side of a firing squad. The best way to block a punch or dodge a bullet is by not being there in the first place. What’s that, they’re conscripting victims to make the world safe for democracy? You go fight “over there,” Mr. Wilson, I would prefer not to.

Bring on the apocalypse. We’re the only culture in history that doesn’t see a problem with exhausting the precious resources rightly earmarked for future generations. The West happily gorges itself on its grandchildren’s birthright. We’re essentially devouring our young; we call it “economic growth” and GDP. As for “sustainable growth,” it’s an oxymoron coined by fat cats for morons: there is no such animal.

Exxon, Shell, and BP craft infomercials (i.e. propaganda shorts) to make you feel good about how they’re re-cycling the coffee cups at corporate HQ. Meanwhile they pump ethylene glycol, methanol, formic acid, benzene, toluene, propargyl alcohol, and over a thousand other chemicals most of which are carcinogenic or straight up lethal into the ground so they can wring the last drops of oil out of a poisoned earth. Who needs drinking water when you’ve got fracking? Think plastics, my boy!

So what can you do? Question. Everything. 

Don’t swallow the assumptions of our culture or any culture. Want to root for the Red Sox? Go ahead, but have a better reason than “I grew up in Southie.” There’s nothing any politician or preacher knows about life that you don’t already know or couldn’t find out if you took the time and made the effort. Hell, I may be full of shit too, but I know that I’ve arrived at my perhaps excremental conclusions by finding out for myself, by cross-examining my conscience, and scrutinizing everything anyone has ever told me to believe.

What else can you do? Trust yourself!

Stop believing in ghosts and the boogeyman. Find your own answers. No one is coming to save us. The aliens aren’t going to intervene. The cavalry isn’t just over the hill. If our own intelligence has led us astray, do you really think AI will somehow rescue us? This “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan so poetically and poignantly described our Earth, is all the home we have; it’s ours to further fuck up or—just possibly—save.

Turn off your TV! Stop scrolling through time-wasting bullshit: put your cellphone away and walk upright (it took us millions of years to evolve this way so don’t flush it down the toilet!)  Don’t put your trust in the State; the State can only grant you your liberty, but you’ve always had your freedom. Remember that when your beloved State whose flag you liked to wave imprisons you.

Anything else? Create!

Entertain and enrich yourself. Don’t be passive: read, listen attentively, write, challenge your assumptions, think! Daydreaming is an activity. You don’t need a subscription to a streaming platform, you need to sit on a platform by a stream. You can either consume what our dubious culture wants you to consume—the safe, mass-produced schlock which re-affirms our society’s neoroses and psychoses—or you can make your own art.

And you can walk away. Abstain. Refuse to participate.
Prefer not to.