Shadow Over Finnsmouth
I didn’t quite understand it before I visited SF but in Finland there’s this strange atmosphere of clean oppressiveness and control, and upon my return it hit like a barrel of intangible psychological bricks.
The State owns you. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to everyone else. They decide. The state tracks you from cradle to grave. You’re a number. Your gender is hard-coded into the number. The State will hurt you. It only does it because it loves you. The State will take care of you. The State knows better than you do. Don’t try to fight it. The State reigns supreme. The State does whatever the fuck it wants and gets away with it. They will support it anyway. They understand that everyone belongs to everyone and that’s why you can’t decide anything for yourself. Vox populi, vox dei. You are not an adult. You can’t choose for yourself. Live a DIN-standardized life. The only other option is the squalor of 19th century industrial slums. Do you want the squalor of 19th century industrial slums? Then shut the fuck up and accept the oppression. There are no other choices. Any attempt to create other choices will be destroyed. Submit or be destroyed. Submit and be ground down anyway because you’re too young, too poor, too strange.
In SF things felt “out of control” in some really strange, subtle backgroundish way. The visa system emphasizes that people regularly overstay their visas and they only get in trouble for it if they’re caught. The rules for changing one’s name are “just use it” instead of several pages of strict regulations. Even the regulations, where they showed up, felt like attempts to impose some degree of control onto something that is inherently out of control, instead of the inherent structure of society outside which nothing is allowed to happen. In Finland I feel safe and controlled, afraid to be the nail that sticks out because the welfare statism has been so thoroughly internalized that I constantly feel like someone is watching even when nobody is. In SF I feel alive.
The US federal government feels like an empire that loots and oppresses people to enrichen its cronies and prop up its mechanisms of violence, but ultimately is something “over there”, while nordic welfare corporatism feels like an entire machine made of paper in which people are just tiny cogs running the faceless monstrosity in its uncaring emergent abominableness. The US government tries to control life. In Finland the corporatist system has succeeded in it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In Finland I constantly have to fight some subconscious instinct not to deviate from the system’s scripts, not to rock the boat, not to try to crawl out of the bucket. Afraid of the mallet that isn’t really there. Well, not always because often it actually really is there, just quite a lot of the time.
That’s probably why I get along so well with both anarchists and libertarians despite them otherwise not getting along with each other at all. Among them I can feel like I’m sane, safe from the constant gaslighting about the way the welfare state only has the best interests of its citizens at heart and surely it can’t be that bad and the people who claim it is that bad are just lying and whining and probably trying to grab too much for themselves. Safe from the cultists chanting “de-mo-kra-si de-mo-kra-si” and insisting that I join them in their strange rituals of putting pieces of paper in boxes and pretending that it absolves the system and the people composing it of all their sins. Safe from the people who think that everything must be strictly controlled, regulated, regimented, and standardized just so that it is. Safe from the people who think that nobody must have any alternative, that even the idea of people living on an artificial island somewhere without bothering anyone else is such an aberration that it simply Must Not Be Allowed. Safe from the people on disguised welfare, who loathe those who lack that privilege and have instead fallen onto overt welfare. Safe from the people who consider society’s most important function to be the punishment of those who do “wrong” according to the will of the majority, without regard for the consequences.
That hobo in a Ron Paul t-shirt, raving about some imaginary rugged individualism only he can perceive, may be utterly disgusting and otherwise several times detached from reality, but he is also a person who knows what’s really lurking behind the smiles of the scary socialdemocrats of Finnsmouth. Such people are rare and valuable and I treasure almost every single one of them, no matter how frustrating and fractally wrong and obnoxious they otherwise are. Because they understand.
3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #this goddamn continent · 28 notes · .permalink
geekethics reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:And people wonder why I’m in favour of Brexit.
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therainstheyaredropping reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:Please don’t break my country. I quite like it.
socialjusticemunchkin liked this- socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from ilzolende and added:
Yes, everyone gets to say “fuck Jantelagen” (or “fuck the Jantelag”; “the Jantelagen” is a “the the” form and is not...
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thathopeyetlives reblogged this from ilzolende and added:This sounds really horrible, and also kinda puts some of the far right claims regarding migrants in context. And, well,...
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ilzolende reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:Yeah, fuck the Janteloven. (As someone who ended up in the same English class as my Danish peers while in the Danish...
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voximperatoris reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:I don’t know if I totally agree with this, but the Law of Jante is relevant.
sinesalvatorem reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Historically, people from [Redacted] have a habit of going to places that are this structured and controlled and...
boozer-pitt reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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