02. The tyranny of other people's voices
Do you have a moment to talk about justice? Also, poisoning the brain with podcasts, and self-help by way of Sartre and Spider-Man.
A man came by the other day, ignored my “no solicitation” sign, and proceeded to ring the doorbell 3 goddamn times.
I was frustrated, I opened it, I asked what the hell does he want.
“I was wondering if you’d like to talk about justice.”
Oh boy.
“Well sir,” I could have said, “it’s a Sunday morning, and this kind of topic requires some thinking,” and these days, my position on thinking most closely resembles this thumbnail from YouTube:
But I didn’t have my phone to show him this thumbnail, and I don’t think he would have taken the joke.
After all, he was here to talk serious business. Justice. What could be more important?
“Well sir,” I could have said, “whose justice exactly? Are you here to tell me about the eternal justice of the Lord Jesus Christ? The economic justice of Karl Marx? The revolutionary justice of Franz Fanon? Are you here to tell me about the justice of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, or AOC’s Green New Deal? Are you here to tell me about the vague justice of the people, the vox populi, protesting this and that, wherever they may be? Or are you just going to skip to the end and tell me how everything is the fault of those nasty Jews, err… Frankists! Frankists is what we’re supposed to call them. Sir?”
But once again, Sunday morning, thinking, see above thumbnail.
No, I shooed him away.
But first, he asked if I was disillusioned.
“With people like you,” I replied.
Maybe that was unfair. I didn’t really let him speak long enough to know what he was about.
But I am disillusioned.
In 2025, words like “justice” simply don’t mean anything to me.
For the last 10 years, countless serious business people have used words like “justice” and others as shiny objects to attract idealists (like a former Renton Hawkey).
You get baked into whatever movement, and too late find out that the words don’t mean what you thought they meant. They’re just words serious business people use to get what they want.
In hindsight, this kind of ending should be obvious. Because all along, the serious business people would add that the only thing that matters in this world is power. This was the rare confession of their true beliefs and worldview, and upon hearing it, I should have GTFO.
Because that worldview, whether the serious business people know it or not, leaves no room for idealism. It leaves room for power, and power alone. Idealism is a silly game with a particular language that the serious business people use to manipulate the idealists.
I am not a fan of the power worldview. I do think that power exists and is an important lever in human societies. But to boil every interaction, every relationship, every molecule, down to power is too cynical and nihilistic for me.
If I thought that love, and family, and honor, and responsibility, and art, were all just elaborate power games, well?
Reader, I’d blow my brains out.
And I don’t know how the serious business people don’t. After all, whether a Christian Nationalist or an antiracist intersectional Democratic Socialist, they are, by nature, cynical and nihilistic.
Unless they’re idealists who haven’t yet figured out what I’ve figured out.
They will.
It is this: You have to be cynical and nihilistic to abuse words like “justice” when what you really mean is “I should get what I want, at any cost.”
I’m not wrong about this.
I saw a post a while back, and I wish I had saved it.
It said something about how creatives have their best ideas when they’re bored. They come up with new ideas and work out complex story beats while they’re doing the dishes, mowing the lawns, pretending to listen to their wives and kids (kidding guys, I listen to you, but just repeat that last thing real quick).
The post also explained that people are increasingly depriving themselves of this time with various distractions (social media, et al).
This is not a new idea, but sometimes you have to hear an idea 100 times before you see yourself in it, because it catches you at the right moment in life for it to make sense.
I realized that I, too, used to come up with new ideas and work out complex story beats while doing my mundane chores.
Now, I listen to podcasts.
And not only during chores. When I draw, when I’m at the range, when I’m playing video games, when I exercise, when I have to take a 5-minute trip to Home Depot. Every passive thinking moment, filled with the voices of other people.
What were they saying?
I haven’t had a new creative thought in a while.
I lost my boundaries. Frightening, how easy that was.
I’ve retreated from online life over the past couple of years. I’ve curbed most (not all, most) of my impulses to bitch about the politics of the day.
There’s no need to listen to me on those topics. I’m like the rest of them. A hammer looking for nails. Trying to win the snarky tweet game that solves precisely fuck-all.
I have my principles. But the game has dulled my convictions on some fronts. There’s this old saying about a man who sees his reflection and forgets his face the moment he turns away. That’s what the dulling is looking like, for me.
Here’s an example: I’m against political violence. Also, I think that comedian Dave Smith has absolutely nothing interesting or valuable to offer public life. I would love to see someone slap his headphones off his dumb, illiterate fucking face.
And therefore, I’m not sure I can say that I’m against political violence anymore. That bothers me.
The thinking on these topics is better left to others. Economics? Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. History? Sharon McMahon. Domestic Policy? Purple America. Foreign Policy? Garry Kasparov or John Spencer. Free speech? FIRE. “Our government and political parties are dysfunctional, here are the receipts.”? Ken Klippenstein (though I find his commenters as obnoxious as those at The Free Press, which I no longer recommend). Conservative culture? Stella Tsantekidou. Progressive culture? Jeff Mauer, or Helen Lewis. Generic centristy culture? Josh Szeps, Comics Hate Her, or Noam Dworman. General “Everyone is wrong and I fucking hate them” complaining? The Fifth Column.
They got it down. What do I have to offer? Snarky tweets?
I’ve been focused on producing. And it’s working. Ronin Digital Express is booming. I committed to 50 new pages a year. I’m already there, halfway through 2025.
And I’d already written about 150 pages of it over a year ago, as well as three scripts for some spy one-shots I’ll be working on soon.
So I haven’t had to be a writer for a while. Only an artist. And art takes a long time to produce. Many long, quiet hours. Hours perfectly shaped to catch up on some podcasts.
Did you see that?
That’s a boundary, dissolved. Just like that.
Going into art hibernation makes it easy to shut the other cerebral departments down. To fill them with noise while I work with the other side of my brain for a while.
The problem is, I’ve struggled to be creative with the art. Struggled to keep my thoughts organized and my vision compelling. Why?
Could it be that every passive thinking moment is filled with the voices of other people?
What could I be doing with this space, besides fantasizing about someone slapping the shit out of Dave Smith?
I could do what I used to do. Let the mind wander while drying dishes and inhaling fresh cut allergens in the backyard.
I can also write, and that’s why I’m doing “Some Thoughts.”
It’s messy, weird, and incoherent.
Good.
I think artists should write about fucking everything.
The music they just rediscovered, the book they think sucks, the stuff they’re working on, the 90s comics they’re reading, the domestic boredoms of their weekends, their last really good meal, the midnight movie director whose crappy films they can’t stop watching, shit that gives them anxiety, shit that makes their dicks hard, stuff they think is beautiful, stuff they think is ugly, and of course the public figure whose face needs slapping.
These notes are just my brain doing reps. Staying strong. Don’t have to commit to anything. Doesn’t have to be anything else.
So don’t focus your energy, Rent. Don’t find a beat.
Your beat is your weird fucking brain.
Let it do its work.
I am reading La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre.
It’s about a dude who feels increasingly alienated by his fellow man, confused by their behavior, and bored by his interactions with them.
It’s Sartre’s first novel, and, according to Wikipedia, a key work in the existentialist philosophy canon.
I’ve been thinking about reading this book for a while, because I thought about working up a Spider-Man pitch about Peter feeling disconnected from his “with great power…” mission.
That tension between “I have to do this” and “I don’t really want to do this anymore” is pretty universal in the human experience, and Spider-Man is the Everyman of the superhero canon, so, I think I could do something interesting there.
I think my “nausea” lately is a kind of “engagement drunkenness”.
The keyboard warriors will tell you that tuning out is giving up, and that constant engagement is the only way to hold vigil against authoritarianism.
But what is turning your attention to other shit, if not the basest, punk rock act of defiance, and rebellion?
It’s so easy not to care about Jeff Bezos’ wedding. Or the Snow White remake. Or Sabrina Carpenter doing hot girl stuff.
It’s so easy to mute the guy who’s annoying you on Substack. To not read that comic that’s trying too hard to please and getting too much of the wrong kinds of attention. To cancel your ad-tier subscription of Paramount+, because your “list” is growing out of control with shows you will never watch yet endlessly scroll and curate.
How about that, huh? You curate these shows into a list, you browse this list the same way you doomscroll your phone, you add new stuff, you delete stuff… But you never watch anything.
You can just cancel it. Turn away. Be free.
Be the living incarnation of the Don Draper meme. When asked, in pure and blissful ignorance, say, “I’ve never heard of that.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“That’s not really interesting to me.”
What a cool fucking move.
What if you just didn’t give your energy to shit?