“Die, Yuppie Scum”
What most moves me, then, is not the look of
this place but your own sorry appearance. I don’t
need a library with comfortable chairs, ivory gewgaws,
and big glass windows, but rather the workroom
of your mind, for it isn’t the books that are important
but the ideas in them, the opinions and
principles of times gone by, which is what gives the
books their value
- Philosophy, The Consolation of Philosophy
Talk about irony.
Sunday morning, we were laying lazily in bed watching something or other on tv. Each on our smaller screens.
Eventually, I found myself craving a cappuccino. We decided to walk around the neighborhood to a café. The first was full of yuppies, so we started walking towards the opposite side.
On the walk, there was some graffiti near a nice restaurant that made out “die, yuppie scum.”
My neighborhood is being gentrified and I’m a gentrifier. Locals want me dead.
And I agree with them.
Does this make me suicidal? Not necessarily. I want to live, I just don’t want to be a yuppie. I want to live where I live, but I don’t want the cost of that to be the lost of a previous community.
The rational solution is integration through self-awareness. A remolding of “me”, the same way the neighborhood’s identity is being remolded, that is not driven by biological age or ecological circumstances, but driven by a will towards a shared destination.
A destination is a powerful tool. The US’s “manifest destiny” and China’s “great leap forward” are example of how a nation’s authority can use conceptualizations of destiny to move as one body.
All we have to do is tie a conclusion to our general understanding of the world and use conclusions and understanding as a way to acts towards.
Acting towards eventually creates an actual conclusion that is not just irrational dreams by crazed autocrats.
The question that non-autocrats have is, “how can we use our own irrational dreams to works towards a better world?”
Without being aware of others’ suffering, my irrational dreams are callous and may be hurtful to others. The same way manifest destiny and great leap forward suffered many many casualties that were not part of the dream.
The question follows, how can we have irrational dreams and not have casualties of it?
We have to share the same conclusion and work towards it.
Me wanting to die as a yuppie doesn’t mean I’m hurt at all. It’s pretty nice and convenient being a yuppie. But losing that isn’t pain if it helps others to not be hurt. My actions can change, my intentions can change, I can evolve without needing to die. Quite the opposite of dying, if the community grows, life is made bigger.
What has to stop is my apprehension to a communal duty that involves sacrificing unneeded, superfluous comfort for a bigger struggle, with a better conclusion.
It terms of communal intelligence, as the community grows and changes, the community must wither and die where its functions are deemed no longer needed. A waste of energy.
Paradoxically, we come to an awareness being wary of our own presumptions. Our community ultimately ingrained us with these presumptions, thus the skepticism is towards the community. The powers that be have questions to answer to but only an an individual, the individual question their own self and departs from the self-analysis towards a better self off at a distance.
