I honestly can’t remember if I ever posted this comic before. As I’ve written before, I have so many comics that I’ve done and then just sat on, I can’t always keep track of what’s been put where.

Luckily, greed and evil are evergreen content!

During this time of terror and uncertainty in the face of rising fascism in the United States and their Genocide Colony, Israel, so many people are hurting and in need of help. And yet, the priority of the US government this week has been to cut healthcare not just to over 150,000 transgender Americans explicitly, but also to countless others on Medicare and Medicaid, all in service of further cutting taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations on Earth. This is just one further step towards their goal of creating a society based entirely around the power of the wealthy (truly, we’ve been there for a long time, but now they’re just dabbing on us).

Any time you protest or complain or ask for help in the face of any of our society’s cruel policies, you are admonished for failing to live up to their standard of how a human being should live:

“How could you be so irresponsible?“

“Why don’t you work harder?“

“You should have gotten an education.“

or better yet

“You shouldn’t have wasted money on that education!“

Their answer to how people should live their lives, how society should be structured, and what should be valued within a person’s accomplishments, always just so happens to align with what benefits them. Money always ends up being of prime importance, as well as “personal responsibility” and “work ethic” – always in service to those who just so happen to have the money to pay you.

As if they are so good with money! Donald Trump himself has gone bankrupt, like, five times, and let’s not forget the 2008 market crash that resulted in the biggest banks on Earth getting bailed out by the Obama government.

I frequently think of the Kurosawa film, Rashomon, and the short story it was based on, In a Bamboo Grove, which details the investigation of a murder and the questioning of all of those involved. The main takeaway of the story: Everyone lies. From the suspect, to the witnesses, to even the victim (as channeled by a spiritual medium). Everybody tells a version of events, whether they mean to or not, that just so happens to align with their interests. When we’re talking about an individual in their day to day life, this really doesn’t matter too much, most of the time. But if you have a disproportionate amount of wealth and power and your decisions and actions have profound, sweeping consequences for millions of people, yeah, it kinda matters if you are being truthful with yourself and others and whether your guiding beliefs are rooted in something resembling reality.

These Silicon Valley psychos take mushrooms or go on a yoga retreat and then become zealots for “Longtermerism” or “Effective Altruism” or whatever anti-human philosophy they latch onto to justify why they deserve their position in society and why they don’t have to feel bad about anything they do. Spiritual experiences, whether pharmacologically facilitated or not, can be quite profound, but it is vitally important to not just allow yourself to be swept away by whatever it is you want to hear. To be of any value, any kind of spiritual or philosophical pursuit requires a practice of honest and emotionally mature inquiry into one’s own thoughts and behaviors. It requires self-reflection and a willingness toward self-critique. If all you’ve ever done is solve your problems with money, if all you have to do is pay people and they will do whatever you ask of them, if everybody around you will always tell you what you want to hear because you hold the power of life and death over them, then how likely do you think it is that such a person would be in the habit of genuine self-reflection?

Because, no, the people in charge of all of our lives don’t care about honesty or truth or what is actually good for anybody. They just want to keep on being rich, and keep feeling good about being rich, even as the world burns around them.

The same goes for any oppressor authority.

Cis people would believe in the validity of cis genders, but not trans ones, wouldn’t they?

Straight people would believe in the validity of heterosexuality over homosexuality.

Men would believe in the primacy of “males” over “females”.

White people would believe in the supremacy of their race over all others.

This, of course, is not to say that every member of any such group believes such things. But any time a member of such a group believes such a thing and demands that you do, too, well…

How. Convenient. For. You.

The good news is we can nakedly see the invalidity of their values. The society they’ve built and demand we toil and die for serves virtually nobody. The wicked deeds they do become increasingly obvious and demented.

One of the values of growing up trans is having a sense from my earliest memories that there was something wrong with how everything was organized – no matter what lies they told me to justify things being how they are, I had an intrinsic sense within myself that this was all bullshit. Seeing events fairly early on, like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then later the 2008 market crash, only solidified the sense that this order was built on evil.

I imagine the kids growing up today seeing the likes of Donald Trump and all his evil friends stripping the USA for copper wire, and the ghouls in Israel hiding behind the Holocaust to get away with doing a Holocaust of their own (all with the support of the politicians of the west) really only undermines their faith in the societal order even further. But with the rise of Right Wing Zoomers and the embrace of a kind of ruthless, cynical grifter culture based in generative AI and online dropshipping, I fear that the cultural undermining has gone too far and in an unhelpful direction. If people lose too much hope and belief in society, then they become truly just for themselves. They might not believe in the fairy tales of work ethic and toiling for a rich old man, but they also don’t believe in helping anybody besides themselves. This, too, is a kind of self-serving lie. One perhaps built out of fear, and a need to survive in an increasingly non-functional and contradictory system.

It frankly seems all too inevitable, sadly.

I’m reminded of being a kid in highschool, seeing the cracks in the authority of the flawed human beings in charge of my life for six hours a day, the dysfunction of the class room, the pointlessness of activities that were demanded we take seriously, and the kids who were getting away with bullying and misbehaving while others were arbitrarily singled out for punishment for far lesser offenses, and I remember just… checking out. Not caring about any of it anymore and just doing whatever I wanted to. None of it seemed to matter, so why waste a single bit of energy following the rules? Why be invested in the validity of this institution that claimed total control over years and years of my life?

A certain amount of this is very healthy and necessary. Don’t waste your life being trapped in some horrible person’s self-serving fiction of how the world works, toiling in a system that benefits them, but not you! But don’t replace that fiction with another selfish fiction that just so happens to tell you whatever you want to hear.

Left Wing ideas about socialist programs are depicted as lazy people who want free hand outs, but the truth is, it’s not about getting free stuff, it’s about getting the stuff that you have already earned, but currently goes to others who did absolutely nothing to earn it. Creating a truly equitable society would require that we as a society take a painful look at many of the things we value and whether or not they actually serve human flourishing – like, say, the right to own as many homes as you can afford to buy or the right to reap the benefits from other people’s labor because you own the business they need to work at in order to survive. We’ll have to let go of comforting myths of personal exceptionalism and accept the fact that nobody accomplishes anything truly on their own. If you have any aspirations of being above others, or if you are invested in yourself as being exceptional and deserving of more than other people, well, you’re going to have to let go of that if you want to make a better world. Many people online who fancy themselves as Left Wing activists are sadly still invested in a self-serving lie of personal branding and celebrity. Their activism is really about them and their own personal success rather than whatever cause they claim to champion. If you want to make real change, you’re gonna have to let go of that soothing lie you tell about yourself. That you are better than others, that you deserve to have more than them.

I am somebody who is never not working hard in my life, and I have accomplished a great many things in my close to 38 years on this planet. But I constantly fight against any impulse that I deserve anything more than others, or that the things I have are entirely because of my own efforts. Everything I have is because of the kindness of others. Whether it’s my supporters on Patreon, or the love and support of my wife, or the publicly funded healthcare system that saved me from cancer, or my parents who read to me from a young age and opened up my imagination, any opportunity I have had to work hard and have my hard work pay off is an immense privilege that has been gifted to me by the hard work and generosity of others.

It would be nice if others in our society who have benefited even more greatly from the work of others would be willing to take a look in the mirror and recognize that.

So next time some authority demands that you adhere to their values and their view of how the world works, just think: How convenient for you.

I NEED YOUR HELP!

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