I’m distinctly uncomfortable right now. Not physically and not emotionally – but mentally and possibly even spiritually. I’m unsettled.
It’s November 14th here in Japan where I’ve just returned from an eight day trip to northern Vietnam. What I’m experiencing isn’t culture shock, it’s not that experience of being in a new place and and having to adjust to new ways of doing things – I mean it is that but not in the travel way that I usually think of it. I’m so muddled I can hardly explain. I’m a wordsmith and I’m usually pretty good at this stuff, but right now I am having a very hard time getting to the root of all of this.
There is a definite political aspect to this, but it’s not quite that either. The closest I can really come to where I am right now is to think back to the time around September 11th, 2001. I’d returned to Portland, Oregon after an extended backpacking trip through China and Southeast Asia. I was trying to settle back into life. I was almost thirty and felt ready to create the life I’d always imagined. Work hard, save money, build a business, write books, fall in love, create a family, retire and then fade away. I’d gone down a fairly radical path and was ready to get serious. I was pretty sure I understood the world.
Then the terrorist attacks. The entire world changed. More importantly, the character of the people and country that I thought I had understood changed completely. Maybe I’d misunderstood who Americans were and what America was all along. Travel in Asia has shown me a lot of things that I’d never understood. I’d seen the ugly American tourist up close and personal. I had started to understand what American privilege was just as I had started to understand what white privilege and male privelige were when I’d gone down my radical leftist path in my twenties. I thought I understood the framework of America and Americans that I lived within. What September 11th, 2001 revealed was that there was an uglier, more violent, more hate filled soul to America and most Americans than I had ever imagined. The calls for revenge. The xenophobia. The racism. The pure hate for anyone and everyone who had more than they had. The pure hate for anyone and everyone who dared to stand in the way of their American dream. Nuclear bombs dropped on cities. Agent Orange sprayed on villages. Nothing was off limits. It was hidden by the horror and shock of tragedy, but it was clear to me. My people and my country were monsters.
Blanket statements like that are never accurate. There have and always will be and have been incredible people in America, but the character of the American people as a whole is black and for lack of a better word -evil. I look in myself and I see it. Every American that is self aware and ‘good’ can see the same. There is something in Americans that proclaims from within them “This is all for me and I can do what I want with it. All of it.” It, in this case being the entire world, the people of the world, the things that belong to the people of the world. This is what made slavery acceptable to Americans. This is what made Manifest Destiny, the genocide and theft of the entire continent of North America – acceptable to Americans. This is why there are more people in prison in America than in any country in the world. This is why there are more billionaires in America. This is why there are homeless encampments that stretch for miles under freeways in nearly every major American city. This is why. Inside every indoctrinated American is a little dictator who believes that he or she is blessed with the divine right of kings to rape and pillage and plunder the entire world. There are many justifications. Save the world. Protect Democracy. The list goes on. Lies. The only truth that rings true in the American soul is “It is mine. All mine. They are mine.”
There are many of us who see it and reject it but as one of them please let me confess – it never goes away. The price of living an aware life is eternal vigilance. I’m sure that much of what I’m trying to say here is uncomfortable or might provoke anger or outrage. I left the mainland US after 911. I didn’t have much and couldn’t go far. I went to Hawaii and I found a different mentality. The absence of gun culture. The absence of that clutching, sucking need to take take take. It existed in Hawaii but not on the same level. Things were good. Somehow though, the Great Recession allowed it to grow. Maybe it was that those who didn’t have much lost most of what they had to those who were willing and able to take take take during that period. The loss and the accumulation by those who had the darkest souls. I left America with no intention to return.
A curious thing happened though. I started seeing hope. The sharing economy. The gig economy. There were suddenly opportunities for little guys to win in a way that didn’t destroy. AirBNB and Uber looked like a change in mentality. Obama looked like a change in paradigm. It was all a lie. The dark hearted vultures soon stopped the easy money once the new slaves had been hooked and the old freedoms had been discarded. Like streaming television – cut your cable, be free. Now pay more. Now pay more for less of what you had for free with an antenna before. An analogy and like all analogies, an imperfect one. The brief era of hope was fueled by the blood of Iraqi children and the cash grab had never stopped, it had only taken a break – “Move back, it’s better now, see?”
I fell for it. The first election of Trump was a revelation that nothing had changed. The racists from the 1960s who wanted to bring back slavery were still there, they’d just been hiding. Those who felt justified in taking the world for their own benefit by any means possible were still there. They’d just been hiding. They began to emerge from their caves waving their clubs and tiki-torches, demanding blood and money and looking in every direction for those they could blame and massacre to steal their gold and land. I fled with my family back to Hawaii, a repeat performance but one that failed. Hawaii had changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. AirBNB conglomerates had driven rents and housing so high that the only people who weren’t homeless were those who were already wealthy or those who were willing to work like slaves.
During all of this and the pandemic, there was still an element of shame in the unbridled greed and larceny. People still tried to outwardly demonstrate that they were good just in case the other side came to power. Being a landlord had become the new secret desire of all Americans. Passive income. That was the ultimate in passive income – to be a rentier. To make money and claim ownership from someone else’s work. To suck the resources and lives of those who didn’t have and in the process increase the amount of their own holdings. The sharing economy turned quickly into the exploitation economy. Pay as little as possible for as much as possible and use any mean s necessary to do so.
I made the mistake of believing that crypto was a way out. It might have been created as such. The cypherpunks who did the initial work in making digital money a reality wanted to eliminate the bloodsuckers, the middle men, the rentiers. The problem is that the blood suckers saw the potential and they used every means at their disposal to block the widespread adoption of crypto until they could create the means of making it exploitive. They succeeded. I was dismayed around 2018 to realize that the Bitcoiners I thought were libertarian anarchists like me were actually more like right wing nationalists. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I had entrenched myself in an industry that was filled with nazis.
There’s an old joke that goes – if you sit at a table with three nazis, there are four nazis. I began to distance myself from all of it. Things kept popping up that seemed like they would be different – sustainable tourism, Ethereum smart contracts, non-fungible tokens – it’s laughable how naive I was thinking that this time it could be different. The projects that stayed true to the ideals I wanted to embrace never had a chance. They’ve all failed. Some of them still exist, but greed of the money managers and the corporate acquisition people. The grey suits used every took money could buy to control the industry, to control the money, to own the world.
And they won.
They found their leader, they’ve taken control of the most powerful government and military in the world, and there is likely no stopping them now – at least not in my lifetime. If I am lucky, I will live another fifty years and be productive and aware for forty of them. I fully expect to see untold horrors during that time. There will be camps, there will be enslavement, there will be genocide, there will be theft and exploitation on a scale that the world has never seen. There will be hatred unleashed and greed released upon the soil of the world.
It will all be washed in a way that makes it palatable or at the very least makes it seem necessary or inevitable. Hands will be wrung. Thoughts and prayers will be given. Profits will be made. Huge profits. The richest people in the history of the world are about to become far richer.
So here I am, in the modest house I bought in Japan with the profits I made from Bitcoin. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining. Birds are singing. I’ve just returned from eight days in Vietnam, which I intentionally booked during what I thought would be a chaotic American election. It wasn’t chaotic. It was a mandate. It was a powerful victory. It was the first chance that the American people have ever had to let their dark nature burst forth with no illusion of pretending to be good and no worry about what their neighbors might think. America finally has the leader that they have always wanted. He is going to do exactly what they want him to do.
Get ready for the most prosperity that any people in the history of the world have ever known. The prison industry is going to explode. The military industrial complex is going to make such huge profits that people will celebrate each bomb that is dropped by ringing the bell on Wall Street. The mind control / social media industry is going to be unleashed without constraints – profits will rise. All those investments in tech are going to earn the rentiers huge returns. All that prosperity is coming and the only costs are freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and blood. Actually, there will be other costs – so many costs but they will all be paid by the other -the immigrants, the poor, the Arabs, the Russians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Mexicans. It will always be the other and when the other are no longer there, then the social media complex will create a new other.
So here I am, in my house, a bit dismayed to have been to Vietnam, one of the last four communist nations on earth and to have seen that serving wealthy French, Chinese, and American tourists is the most lucrative way to earn a living for the average Vietnamese man or woman. The three nationalities that the Vietnamese defeated and kicked out of their country. There are also Indians, Brits, Japanese, and others, but the majority seemed do be the invaders and colonial powers. It is a beautiful country and the people of Vietnam are a beautiful people. There is a light in their souls.As an American, I have a hard time understanding it, but I’d like to.
I haven’t built my life here in Japan yet. I bought the house and spent three months getting it ready for winter. I’ve made a few friends and explored a little bit of Hokkaido and a little bit of what my career path might look like here. I don’t think that there will be any going to back to America for me in the future. I don’t think America will ever be a place where a person like me can comfortably live again. I’m a little terrified of what will happen moving forward from 2025.
I’m in cultural shock. My birth culture just took what looks to me like a non-reversible hard right turn. I’m still trying to figure out how I can fit into my adopted culture here in Japan. I have so much to learn and so much to do. The legalities alone are more than a little daunting for me. The break in Vietnam was a good chance to be outside of m y brain for a while, to be challenged and pushed by new language, new culture, new sights, new weather, new everything. There is really nowhere like Vietnam. I’ll write about it more. I’ll almost certainly go back.
I just had this huge block of text living inside me and I had to get it out.
God help us all. The world has just changed more than it did after 911 or the pandemic. There has never been a shift like this in the history of the world. I realize most people don’t see it, but it’s as clear to me as the blue sky out my window.