Utopia is poor writing but dystopia is world renowned fiction. Everything good is fake and to be speculated on. There is no charm in the good, and you’re only smart the more you see wrong. Children are deemed intelligent by how much they understand the world and understanding the world is defined as only how much you hate the world.
There are happy people in the world. According to the internet, you are a happy ignorant. “You don’t understand. The world is collapsing. Check r/collapse.” Japanese manga and music is seen as thought provoking because it is skeptical of the world. Or because it's depressing. Depression is more interesting. Highs are only entertaining if there was a low.
The world is full of ignorants and pseudo intellectuals. Pseudo intellectuals– the mention of a pseudo implies there is a true. “The Evil American empire has fallen” – 40s,50s,60s,70s,80s,90s,00s,10s,20s kids.
“Why is how intelligent you are equated to how much you hate america?” The more tiktoks and instagram reels I have scrolled is the more information I have. It’s equivalent to educating myself! All you need to do is listen to the nth number of alt/goth/punk girl/guy/they with socialist/communist/anarcho views on twitter/tiktok/instagram/youtube to teach you surface level wikipedia information then you’ll finally be an intellectual.
No, I understand, the world IS collapsing, and the root of all evil is obvious, it’s monarchy religion atheism patrichary capitalism! Because I solved the worlds equation, I understand, I know, meanwhile when I walk outside and look at the people near I grin because they don’t know. They don’t know about evil they are lower than me. They are happy, they are stupid. They are happy, they are not intellectuals. Everything is bad. If there is good, it must be secretly bad. I have solved the equation to reality, to the system, to the country, to the institution, to the Earth.
Intelligence is knowing the problem but not the solution. Scratch “is knowing” from that sentence.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”
-Ursula K LeGuin
One day or one month or one year this will be archived maybe in the wayback machine and someone will read this and they’ll call me pretentious. But they’re wrong, I’m not pretentious, I’m a pseudo intellectual. I could’ve spent 10 minutes writing all of this because I already knew what I wanted to write but instead I spent 30 minutes because I wanted to choose the words that portrayed the most brevity while using the thesaurus because I want to sound smart. I quoted Omelas not because it inspired me to write this “higher than thou” satire but because it’ll make me look more intelligent, since I’m in the minority: you haven’t read it, but I have.
“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Listening to: Phony - Kafu