Blobular Momentum

With the passage of time, the dynamic of a newly ascendant power congeals into a bureaucratic blob that is as opaque as it is impersonal, with a momentum unrelated to either reality or the world outside its viscous mass. Within this mass, leaders morph into supervisors sucked along by its unstoppable momentum. In the blind eyes of the blob, the citizen is dead, replaced by the disinterested bystander.

Cut off one part of the blob and it reappears elsewhere on the blob. Cancel one program, and another slides in to replace it. The blob neither thinks nor feels, but moves with a nihilistic impetus powered by ego, greed and stupidity. The complexity of its rules and regulations increase in direct portion to the number of people available for their implementation and the speed with which printing presses can spit out pages for its multiple manuals.

Its growth has been exponential since the firewall separating private and public bureaucracies fell. There is no longer any distinction between a private bureaucrat and a public one because the blob has absorbed both.

Those who would reform ithe blob are helpless before it, for it responds only to infusions of liquidity. What was once corruptions is now funding; what was once freedom is now policies of control and stability; what was once democracy is now statutes; debate became marketing; the stimulations of reading is replced by the numbing down of dancing images on multiple screens.

Those who rise to the top of this blob are the socially maladjusted who mistake their crippled egos for the public will, or, even worst, the blob’s destiny.

Brutality and oppression come easily to the blob. In its eyes, nothing is living because numbers and labels have sucked the life out of existence. If nothing lives, nothing can die, and the corpses that pile up become so much clutter to dispose of so the land their blood soaked can be developed. They are names to be crossed off a register or a list, numbers to be placed in a dead file.

Those who stand atop the blob cling to the delusive belief that they control it. Ahead of them, they see a lighthouse firmly grounded on an immovable rock, guiding them towards the utopian world that is their birthright. What they fail to understand is that the lighthouse is a chimera that moves as the blob shifts directions under its own momentum giving them the illusion that utopia is still within their reach.

Life in the land of the blob is one of ennui and diversion, feeble attempts to find passing stimuli is the grey twilight that is neither darkness nor light. Bright lights, toys and noise divert and direct attention away from the world that is dying around them.

The blob makes possible our leaders’ madness because it does not car how insane they are, for they are but a passing speck on its surface, a mild irritant that will soon shrivel and fall off, only to be replaced by another irritant.

But while our leaders ride the blob, they are convinced of their exceptionalism as they keep their eyes firmly fixed on the lighthouse before them and continue to believe that it is fixed and unmovable.