In a Barbie World

 

Kate McKinnon presents the symbols of the polar choice Barbie faces

Barbie turns the plight of women in a patriarchal world into the universality of the quest for enlightenment

by Wil Guilfoyle

July 21, 2023 

Birkenstocks or high-heels? Acknowledge death or live in denial? Seek out who I am or rely on my lover to complete me? These were the questions on my mind before I went to see Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie.

Let me start off by saying that FOX News warned me not to go see this film. But I didn’t listen. Now I’m gay and think all kids should transition. Not that I didn’t like the film, but see it at your own risk. 

What stuck out to me about Greta Gerwig’s new creation is the existential theme at the heart of the film. 

Sure, the film is stylish, often times hilarious, has some deep heart, clearly illustrates and defines patriarchy and how it harms both women and men. But it also directly deals with death and the ever-present reality of this looming destiny we all get to enjoy. 

Cultural Anthropologist and intellectual giant, Dr. Ernest Becker, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death. This was two months after he died of cancer at the age of 49. 

In the book, Dr. Becker paints a very convincing picture of the world as we know it— inhabited by cultures around the world that deny the existence of death in varying ways, particularly by never really acknowledging it. He posits that all of our wars, fights, battles, fears, suffering, anxiety, and disharmony can be boiled down to our denial of death. 

On the other hand, those who have embraced the reality of the inevitability of their own demise seem to live a life much fuller, much deeper, much realer than the majority. 

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In my Death and Dying psychology class, my professor said, “The unexamined death is not worth dying.” 

I tend to agree. 

I try not to give spoilers in these film-talk reviews and discussions unless the film’s been out awhile, so I won’t give any details. But I will say that at the heart of Barbie the film is Barbie the heroine awakening to the temporary nature of existence, or, as the Buddhists say, “Change is the only constant.” She’s confronted with death and the reality of growing old and forming cellulite and feeling depressed and existential dread. 

In the mythological story of the Buddha’s birth, the background was that he was born Prince Siddhartha, the son of a great king. Before his birth, his father was told by the oracle that his son would either become a great King or a great spiritual leader. 

Wishing his son to take the throne, he devised a plan to insulate the prince from anything that would steer him toward the spiritual path. So he hid all of the suffering from the palace and the surrounding area. He pushed out the diseased, the aging, and those experiencing any physical pain, so his son wouldn’t see such things and wander into spiritual contemplation. 

As the story goes, one day the Prince strayed a bit far beyond the palace walls and came into contact with an old and dying man. He witnessed this man die, and the reality of death suddenly became real to the Prince. 

The Prince couldn’t stop thinking about the man who died nor the reality of his own coming inevitable demise. Finally, he swore off his birth right and left the palace to go out into the world with one goal in mind: to find the cause of suffering and to be rid of it forever.

 

We all know how the story ends: The Buddha joined a frat, objectified women, and spent the rest of his days playing video games. 

But what the myth illustrates is that the spiritual path, or the contemplative path, is inspired by reality: that we are destined for death and change is the only constant. 

In the film, Barbie has spent her entire life enjoying a perfect and unchanging world reminiscent of the blissful world of a child who has yet to develop the conscious awareness of the difficult realities of life: non-acceptance, growing old, depression, looming death, etc. 

However, once thoughts of these matters arise, she decided to leave her perfect life in Barbie-land and is inspired to go on her own quest. 

Barbie is totally the Buddha in this one. She goes on the journey of her own awakening, and finds her own enlightenment (another word for ‘enlightenment’ can also be ‘insight’). 

I’m being a bit unnecessarily longwinded and pompous, trying to explain to a very hip audience of readers what we all already know about the Mattel™ created toy called Barbie™—that she was always meant to represent a woman on a quest for, and then achieving, complete, unexcelled Enlightenment™. 

We can all take the leap that the brave Barbie has taken and face reality head on and quest for the Truth of our very own true nature. We can ask, “Who am I?” And we can listen to our own heart for the answer. 

Or we can do as Cypher did in The Matrix and enjoy a fake steak right before getting shot to death with a lightening rifle on the Nebuchadnezzar. 

The choice is ours. 

The End

Oh yeah I forgot….Fuck the patriarchy!

The Mischaracterization of Rich vs Poor in Douglas Rushkoff’s Survivial of the Richest

 

An Everyone is Going Conscious drawing by my friend Forest

Not easy reading for an empathic person, but I decided to have a gander at Rushkoff’s book, Survivial of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. 

Firstly, the title makes it out to be fantasies of all tech billionaires, which it is not. Secondly, the title makes it look like apocalyptic prepping is a tech billionaire niche, even though his own interviews are with politicians and hedge fund investors. 

Also, the book does not recognize that the prepping is happening within individual families all around the world and in the US. This idea that there can be a self-created Shangri-La where one can escape the turmoil and collapse of global and local systems is not particular to the super rich. 

I mention this because his premise is that the tech billionaires are the ones destroying the world, leading to the destabilization of the ecosystem, etc. 

This is a notion held by the majority of folks who espouse the idea of eating or killing or beheading the rich. 

What we are dealing with is not an us vs them scenario. And we are not facing an innately human flaw of greed that perpetuates generation after generation and culture after culture. 

What we are dealing with is an economic system and human nature, and what the environment of the system in place allows and inspires humans to become. 

There is absolutely no difference between the billionaire prepping for apocalypse and building a bunker isolated from the world’s woes, and a person in the poor south of the United States building their own underground shelter, stocked with guns and ammo and lots of dried beans. 

In fact, there are far more of these non-billionaires doing this type of prepping than there are billionaires in existence, by far. 

What should be focused on is not the rich, or the people, or the prepping. The focus should be on sustainability and ensuring local access to locally grown agriculture, which should include a culture that is moving steadily toward home gardens and community grown agriculture on plots of land within cities and towns and surrounding cities and towns. 

What bothers me about seeing the constant calls for killing rich people as a means of coping with the rich and poor divide, is that I’m acutely aware that environments create people. If any person were born into privilege or found themselves in opportunity where thriving was possible, they would thrive and rise to the top economically. 

This means that each of us is susceptible to taking advantage of economic advantage. 

So the answer isn’t to kill those of us who find themselves born into this position, but to create a world where that position doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we just simply repeat this same chapter again and again, from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, to whatever revolution is next. 

It will always be a world of rich and poor divide until we create a world that does not allow for rich and poor divides. And the answer to this is not communism or socialism or any of the isms already created. 

There are many fore-thinkers bringing up new ideas of ways to create an equal and equitable world, where poverty simply does not exist, and everyone thrives. Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, by Erik Olin and Robin Hahnel is a book that explores these ideas. 

It’s far more beneficial to explore ideas and potential systems that benefit everyone rather than blaming and threatening the lives of the few who are rich because they’ve followed the dictates of the system they were born into. 

Everyone is guided by the need to survive. And we can all survive and thrive together in an evolved world with evolved and novel systems that relinquish the age old and repeated us vs them, rich vs poor ideologies. 

Could it be possible to be rid of rich people and poor people without falling into the traps of dystopian society? I think so. And so do many others. 

Perhaps a good place to start is to look into these matters with a simple Google search and see what you find. Or you can simply ponder what a perfect world would look like, and see if you can imagine and envision how such a world would operate, sustain, and be. 

The Mischaracterization of Reality Killing the World

 March 19th, 2022

What people forget is that they do not have to look at things the way “the world” agrees to look at things. Consensus reality is simply an amalgam of a cultural subjectivity (a particular and relative way one culture sees and perceives and interprets things) and is therefore not “True” in the ultimate sense. 

I preface this writing with the former paragraph in order to illustrate that the shaping of our individual view on society and humanity and life and existence is not truly our own, so long as we haven’t stepped back to see the mechanisms that amplify any particular viewpoint on a large scale of influence, that influence being relatively large in so far as it influences us particularly, which therefore includes our parents, our church, our school teachers and friends, and the media. 

The media particularly is almost 100% comprised of articles and information that focus primarily on dramatic content that will keep asses in the seats in order to captivate audiences so that viewership numbers remain as high as possible in order for these companies to charge as high a price as possible for the advertisements companies will pay in order to reach these large audiences. 

What I’m saying is this: the media is not focused on bringing us the Truth. They are focused primarily on dramatic captivation by any means possible in order to sell ads at the highest price. And the means used are almost entirely fear-based, the opposite of love-based, if love were to have an opposite. 

Looking at the world through the eyes of the media is like looking at the night sky through a cardboard toilet-paper roll and saying the thirteen stars viewed through this device are the only stars that exist in all the cosmos—a serious mischaracterization of reality. Not only are there more than thirteen stars in the Universe, there are over 200 billion of them in just our galaxy alone, one of at least hundreds of billions of galaxies each composed of their own hundreds of billions of stars. 

        Allowing ourselves as individuals to operate in the world amongst each other and amongst our fellow life forms the world over from a position of illusion and incorrect understanding about the nature of things is dangerous and unnecessarily destructive. 

The truth about our species is that we are a glorious species. Our intelligence and capabilities are unmatched by any other species on the planet. We are the most intelligent and technologically advanced. We are able to think and speak symbolically and propose hypotheses and do the math or experimentation to prove the validity or falseness of these propositions. We are able to build intricate portable environments to travel to other massive bodies in the infinite space beyond our own atmosphere. We are able to collectively empathize with the plight of others thousands of miles away in completely different cultures and to send aid in order to feed millions of starving women, children and men in hardship. We are able to see the suffering of those facing diseases and spend our lives searching for the cure in labs where the creative leaps of imaginative insight open doors that logic alone could never have achieved. 

We are living in a time with far less wars happening in the world than any time in a thousand years, and this decline has been occurring for a very long time. More people of all genders getting an education than ever before in history. More people not dying of starvation than ever in history. How can all this be true when the news never mentions these truths at all? 

It’s time to turn off the televisions. Most already have. They call it cord-cutting. People are moving onto platforms that do not rely on advertising for their profits, and thus do not compete for attention via the lowest common cultural denominator, namely trashy drama and mischaracterization of the greatness of ourselves as a species. 

In my opinion, the very best thing that anyone can do for the world is to become a true individual. One who thinks and feels deeply and has one’s own opinions that do not simply parrot the views of others or groups of others. And the best way for this to occur, again, in my opinion, is to stop watching television, to pick up an art of some sort, and to focus on creation and reading and writing and to cut off all of the media altogether. To hang out with diverse and highly individualistic creative people who think in revolutionary and unique ways. This is a path toward becoming a better person, and thus creating a better world. 

The Paradigm Shift We’ve All Been Craving

#Bernie2016

#Bernie2016

Everyone Is Going Conscious

Just some morning thoughts at this coffee shop on this dreary Sunday:

It really would be a lie to say that when we die we become one with the universe. The phrase itself is misleading. We are already one with the universe. We are already God. That is all God is, is the entirety. Death is the relinquishment of all you thought you were completely. The body is gone. The mind is gone. The thought world has dispensed. All that remains is all that always was. Pure essential everythingness. Allness. Truth. Unification. 

I’m highly reluctant to call all of this “God” or “Love” because those are only words—words that have too many historical connotations that are diluted and mutated into subjective and highly relative ideas within each mind that speaks or thinks these terms. Reality is far beyond these subjective, and thus opposable, ideas. Reality is unopposable. How could reality oppose itself? How could the left hand grab itself? 




The existential bummer, of course, is that we fall deeply in love with the transient world and wish for this subjective experience of beauty, truth, goodness, joy, and bliss to last forever and ever. The bummer comes when we realize that none of it will last—none at all. Most people spend their entire lives avoiding facing this reality. It’s quite an easy reality to come face to face with in large doses of personal solitude. But most people never spend more than an hour or even a day alone. How many of us ever spend a week or month or even year alone? Many Buddhist monks and seekers do. Some people just fall in love with reality so much that despite the many discontenting bummers facing reality can bring, such as the fact of everything being destined for death, nothing can keep the lover of Truth from peering unhindered into the mystery of existence, no matter the inevitable pain, isolation, and waves of despair. My only advice, of course, is to just keep moving forward. The gift is the fact that none of it, not even the existential despair, is permanent. 

If Buddha was anything, he was a stubborn son of a bitch. He was like, “Fuck it! I’m going to sit here and have a good look at reality, and I’m not going to turn away no matter what the fuck happens, no matter how much pain and suffering arises from facing these truths.” And apparently he came out the other side quite contented and accepting of it all. 


We all bitch and complain about the world. But all we bitch and complain about is the suffering, greed, and selfishness that is the result of people not facing reality and going after the existential Truths of life. So as long as we ourselves are avoiding going into the deep, dark, mysterious unknown of it all, we can bitch all we want, but there is nothing going on here but the pot calling the kettle black. I don’t even know what that phrase means.

Edit: In the interest in sharing, I’ll be posting the current Wikipedia info on the phrase “The pot calling the kettle black.”:

The pot calling the kettle black

Proverbial idiom referring to an example of hypocrisy

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"The pot calling the kettle black" is a proverbial idiom that may be of Spanishorigin, of which English versions began to appear in the first half of the 17th century. It means a situation in which somebody accuses someone else of a fault which the accuser shares, and therefore is an example of psychological projection, or hypocrisy.Use of the expression to discredit or deflect a claim of wrongdoing by attacking the originator of the claim for their own similar behaviour (rather than acknowledging the guilt of both) is the tu quoque logical fallacy.

A pot and kettle both blackened by the same fire

Origin

The earliest appearance of the idiom is in Thomas Shelton's 1620 translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote. The protagonist is growing increasingly restive under the criticisms of his servant Sancho Panza, one of which is that "You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle, 'Avant, black-browes'." The Spanish text at this point reads: Dijo el sartén a la caldera, Quítate allá ojinegra (Said the pan to the pot, get out of there black-eyes). It is identified as a proverb (refrán) in the text, functioning as a retort to the person who criticises another of the same defect that he plainly has. Among several variations, the one where the pan addresses the pot as culinegra (black-arse) makes clear that they are dirtied in common by contact with the cooking fire.

This translation was also recorded in England soon afterwards as "The pot calls the pan burnt-arse" in John Clarke's collection of proverbs, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639).A nearer approach to the present wording is provided by William Penn in his collection Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims (1682):

"If thou hast not conquer'd thy self in that which is thy own particular Weakness, thou hast no Title to Virtue, tho' thou art free of other Men's. For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality, an Atheist against Idolatry, a Tyrant against Rebellion, or a Lyer against Forgery, and a Drunkard against Intemperance, is for the Pot to call the Kettle black."

But, apart from the final example in this passage, there is no strict accord between the behaviour of the critic and the person censured.

An alternative modern interpretation, far removed from the original intention, argues that while the pot is sooty (from being placed on a fire), the kettle is polished and shiny; hence, when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pot's own sooty reflection that it sees: the pot accuses the kettle of a fault that only the pot has, rather than one that they share. The point is illustrated by a poem that appeared anonymously in an early issue of St. Nicholas Magazine from 1876:

"Oho!" said the pot to the kettle;
"You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you're given a crack."

"Not so! not so!" kettle said to the pot;
"'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean – without blemish or blot – 
That your blackness is mirrored in me."

• In ancient Greece, mention of 'the Snake and the Crab' signified much the same, where the critic censures its own behaviour in another. The first instance of this is in a drinking song (skolion) dating from the late 6th or early 5th century BCE. The fable ascribed to Aesop concerns a mother crab and its young, where the mother tells the child to walk straight and is asked in return to demonstrate how that is done.
• The same theme differently expressed occurs in the Aramaic version of the story of Ahiqar, dating from about 500 BCE. 'The bramble sent to the pomegranate tree saying, "Wherefore the multitude of thy thorns to him that toucheth thy fruit?" The pomegranate tree answered and said to the bramble, "Thou art all thorns to him that toucheth thee".
• Talmud: "Do not ascribe to your fellow your own blemish" (BM 59b).... "a person stigmatizes another with his own blemish" (Kid. 70b).
• The Mote and the Beam - In Matthew 7:3-5, it is criticism of a less significant failing by those who are worse that is the target of the Sermon on the Mount: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"