Back to the Future

A few years ago I was visiting my father. He had become debilitated by anxiety-induced dementia, a byproduct of severe PTSD. I sometimes searched for holiday movies or 1980s comedies, something fluffy, uncomplicated, familiar, that might help him relax in the evenings. One night we watched

Back to the Future. We wound up watching the trilogy over the next couple of nights. They were perfect movies for mind-numbing relaxation, just interesting enough to keep my attention, but not so interesting that they could create a more complex emotional experience for my Dad.

I kept thinking how wrong the creators were about the future, the hover boards and all that. A few elements stuck out as true, like the visual loudness growing within the urban aesthetic of unending consumerism. Nothing terribly insightful about a future of social or moral decay, though.

What intrigued me was the fuel for the DeLorean. Trash. Beer cans, banana peels, candy wrappers, waste of all kinds. Just open a hatch on the back of the car, dump some trash inside, and you’re ready to fly a hundred miles per hour or more up in the sky in any direction you’d like to go. But with traffic laws, unfortunately.

It was way too optimistic for the year 2015, but the concept was pretty early in the scheme of things. A popular late-eighties comedy that suggests that cars will run on garbage in the future? The specifics were dreamy, but the idea was inspired.

A future of waste and sewage regeneration plants, a future where what you excrete is worth as much as what you eat? Imagine going to a restaurant and when they ask you to pay your bill you simply go to the restroom to deposit your offering. Money? Why bother? Money won’t grow on trees in the future, but it may be delivered by your asshole on a pretty regular basis.

One of the first cultural trends would be an upsurge in the popularity of Ex-Lax. Gluttony is no longer a vice but a sound financial strategy. Welfare? Why would we need welfare? Everyone poops. If we can figure out a way to harness energy from sweat, spit, and earwax then we’ll all be able to fuel our own rocket ship to Mars. Humans, suddenly, would become financially viable from birth to death, infants and the terminally ill alike both able to pay their own way in shits, pisses, and vomit. An economics that perfectly complements human nature.

What exists, for human beings, is the body. I breathe, I sleep, I drink, I eat, I shit, I piss, I fuck, I suck, I run, I jump, I sit, I bitch, I laugh, I love. What is valued most within our economic system right now, though, is currency and credit. They are the abstract, fungible forms creating the guise that an equality exists between the food you buy at a store and the money you were given in exchange for the hours of work you did for an employer--or were paid by a customer at your business or earned through returns on your investments or ... whatever.

It’s weird. It’s a weird thing to believe. In this day and age where no one trusts anyone else, when faith in humanity has faltered, when everything that was once sacred is questioned, where evidence is all that matters, few are questioning whether it seems silly to keep using this antiquated value/exchange system given that our values and exchanges have changed so dramatically because of population growth, infrastructure development, technological advancement, environmental and energy concerns, land use issues, the political and legal statuses of human beings, and the inherent economic disadvantage of having needs and desires.

I mean, that’s how the system is designed. A system of restraint, control, limiting what a given individual can access by creating a byzantine set of rules that favor some and disfavor most others. In an age without such radical technological capabilities it might be acceptable to demand so much labor in exchange for so little. I want use of the structures of the system, not the end products! I want distribution resources. I want communications resources. I want transportation resources. I want accommodations. Food. Water.

I want much more than that. I want parties. I want celebrations and festivals. I want sex. I want everyone to have the sex they most want to have. See, that’s really not considered quite as often or as seriously as it should be. Imagine sexual satisfaction as a legitimate human rights issue. Sure, there’s the need for food, water, sleep, shelter, clothing, and the like, but sex is never included in that list.

Let’s just think about our biology for a second. We eat. We drink. We shit. We piss. We sweat. We breathe. We sleep. We talk. We move. We think. We feel. We fuck.

Those are all things human beings did prior to the advent of civilization. As such, I’d say they are “natural.” In a way, then, can’t I say that those are “natural rights”? Privacy? That’s where things get weird. It’s security-related, I understand, but it stems from a fundamental lack of trust, an inherent lack of trust, an understandable lack of trust, given history and current events.

Equality? Yes and no. Equal in the sense that one body equals one human being but in what other ways? Gets dicey pretty quick. The problem is that there are spatiotemporal relations between self and other. To say “I am equal to you” dismisses the fact that I occupy this body at this location at this time within the universe and you occupy your body at your location at this time within the universe. That is more important than it may seem at first glance. There’s no sameness. I cannot sit on the toilet and do my business at exactly the same time as you. Only one of us can wear that shirt at any given time.

And, yet, space that is neither “you” nor “me” can be controlled by “you” or “me” through property ownership, a concept that has become a reality in the world even though there are no measurable physics to detect the existence of a connection between a human being in St. Louis and a building in Delaware. I often wonder why more atheists don’t denounce property rights along with religion as a bunch of hocus pocus nonsense, no more real than God or Santa Claus. Makes me think atheism is en vogue only because it is economically viable and socially acceptable at the moment. You’re an atheist because of reason? Ha! Hahahahahahaha! Please.

I like the idea that the future might include roving bands of women and men who travel about the world looking only to sexually please other men and women. No, not a caravan of prostitutes, I mean adventurous men and women who travel in groups like gunslingers roaming the Wild West looking for trouble. Except these women and men are roaming the globe looking to fulfill the fantasies of lonely, alienated, and defeated men and women.

The purpose of humanity is sex. We live to reproduce and so we’ve been programmed, biologically, to fuck. To us, in terms of intent, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether we reproduce or not. What we are trying to satiate, biologically, is the drive to have an orgasm. To have many orgasms. To have endless orgasms. To live life as one long and ever-more-intense orgasm.

Shouldn't we be channeling research to discover how to make orgasms accessible at the push of a button? Hell, I want an app that will give me an orgasm whenever I want. Can you imagine how low the crime rate would be? I'm thinking terrorism and war would be eradicated within a few months after the technology is made available to everyone around the world. It'd be common to hear statements such as "I used to be a radical, hate-filled terrorist but then I got the Orgasm app and now I just want to take a nap" or "I used to be a sexually frustrated Washington lobbyist working ceaselessly to screw U.S. citizens out of their tax dollars for my corporate clients but now I just wander around the Capitol hugging people."

Change is possible. It's just a matter of changing the things that matter.

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