Inspired by Bob Dylan.

There is a time for all of us when the world was kind.

When the world was soft.

The world inviting.

Love was blind.

The world was a song.

Possibilities.

Until it becomes – who are you?

That question sounds childish when stated plainly, almost embarrassing in its nakedness. Who are we? As though the answer might be waiting somewhere, folded neatly inside the clothing we have chosen, printed on a driver’s license, a diploma, a marriage certificate, a résumé. We prefer documents to mysteries. We prefer the evidence of a life to the life itself.

The judge bangs the gavel, having never known the person.

The courtroom has its own peculiar theater of knowledge. A man enters as a person and leaves as a case. His childhood is reduced to a date, his marriage to a status, his employment to an occupation, his mistakes to exhibits. The machinery of judgment requires compression. A human being must become sufficiently small to fit inside a proceeding.

Life is what the hearing process.

There is something almost comic in the grammatical inadequacy of the sentence, but perhaps the inadequacy belongs to the idea. A life cannot be contained by the grammar of a hearing. The hearing wants sequence: allegation, evidence, finding, judgment. Life refuses sequence. Things happen before we understand them. Consequences arrive after their causes have been forgotten. A person becomes someone he did not intend to become and then discovers that everyone else considers the result intentional.

The man is too often convicted not of crime but of shame.

Crime is at least measurable. Shame is atmospheric. It follows the accused beyond the courthouse, into restaurants, bedrooms, offices, grocery stores, family photographs. A criminal conviction may have a sentence. Shame has no expiration date. It does not need a judge because everyone becomes a judge.

The shame of a life that was inevitable.

This is one of the oldest tricks we play upon ourselves. After something happens, we make the road toward it seem obvious. Of course he became that. Of course she married him. Of course the business failed. Of course the child did not come. Of course the marriage ended. Of course the man drank. Of course the boy became his father.

The past, viewed from the present, has a terrible talent for pretending it knew the future.

When will we admit the waters have grown? 

We inherit the rules, then mistake them for the world.

The cruelty of Gilead is not merely that it imposes rules. It is that it makes the rules appear natural. A system becomes most powerful when its arrangements stop looking like arrangements. They become reality itself. The roles are already waiting: wife, husband, sinner, worker, mother, failure. A person enters the world and discovers that the world has prepared a category for him.

DUI.

Shame.

Career failure.

Shame.

Divorce.

Shame.

Infertility.

Shame.

A ransom to be paid.

A box, between the boxes to check. 

A choke hold. 

On life. 

The world tunes your dream to shame. 

How many years should shame exist,

Before people can be free?

The answer is unknown because modern life has become extraordinarily inventive in manufacturing occasions for self-condemnation. The man who loses his job is not merely unemployed. He has failed. The woman whose marriage dissolves is not merely divorced. She has chosen badly, loved badly, lived badly. The couple who cannot have a child encounters not only sorrow but the social implication that their sorrow represents some defect in them.

The vocabulary changes, but the judgment remains.

We tell ourselves that we have escaped the old hierarchies because we no longer inherit a fixed place in society. Instead, we have created a marketplace in which everyone is encouraged to construct a place and then blamed when the construction collapses.

Young’s meritocracy, the electoral college, Marshall v Madison, the idea that we know better.

The system does not need to announce itself. It only needs us to behave as though it were natural.

The examples appear unrelated until one notices the common appetite beneath them: the desire to locate legitimate authority somewhere above the individual. The philosopher, the institution, the court, the electorate, the expert, the algorithm, the committee. Someone must know. Someone must decide. Someone must possess the superior vantage from which the messy particulars of individual life can be converted into an orderly conclusion.

Our world seeks power – the power to act unilaterally. The power to decide.

Existence is not a foible. 

We admire decisive people because indecision feels like weakness. The executive who makes the call. The judge who settles the matter. The police officer who takes control of the scene. The parent who knows what is best. The employer who chooses the person for promotion. The politician who promises that complexity can be reduced to a command.

But beneath our admiration for decisiveness there may be a more disturbing fact: we have forgotten how frightening it is to decide.

What real person wants that power?

What person wants in 2 hours to decide a dispute? What person wants to pull a gun during a traffic stop? What person wants the promotion that they sell their life? What person lives in images?

The questions grow stranger because power itself has become strange. We talk about authority as though it were an object one would naturally desire, like money, health, or a larger house. But genuine authority means inheriting the consequences of other people’s lives. To decide is to close doors. To exercise power is to make one possibility real and a thousand others impossible.

Come gather round people,

Mad to the bone

And admit the rage in you has grown 

And soon you’ll be mad to the bone. 

Where’s that young man who’s unafraid? 

Perhaps the truly humane person hesitates.

The trouble is that modern institutions have little patience for the pause. The pause looks inefficient. It cannot be graphed. It cannot be monetized. It cannot be turned into a performance metric. A person who says, “I do not know,” appears less competent than the person who says, “I have decided.”

The order is rapidly changin’.

There are more systems now, more categories, more dashboards, more assessments, more credentials, more rankings, more ways of knowing what a person is supposed to be. The world has become increasingly legible while the individual has become increasingly obscure.

But shouldn’t it be fading?

Instead, shame has changed clothes.

The sinner once compared himself with God. Now we compare ourselves with everyone.

But who knows how to be human?

Not the algorithm. It knows what we click.

Not the institution. It knows what category we occupy.

Not the résumé. It knows what we have done.

Not the photograph. It knows what we looked like.

Not the judge. He knows what the hearing established.

Not even the person we have constructed for ourselves, that carefully maintained creature who speaks in accomplishments and preferences and explanations.

The human being is the remainder.

There is an irony here. We have accumulated extraordinary power over our circumstances and extraordinary ignorance about ourselves.

The hearing must end.

The gavel must fall.

But, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.

No human life is inevitable until it has already happened.

Words need to rattle the soul. 

The song should be exciting. 

And that needs changin.’

____

Cover presentation courtesy of Art Station.