Love vs. Fnord: A Personal Credo

“Blessed be and blessed are

The movers and the shakers

Blessed be and blessed are

The dreamers and the dream.” – Paula Wolowitz

Since it seems to be more relevant in recent years, here’s the “fnord” story.  It comes from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy, a spoof of conspiracy theories, not to be read by anyone with paranoid tendencies.  The story goes that we were taught as children to experience anxiety anytime we saw the word “fnord”, and we were also taught to forget that we had ever learned this.  The media would therefore insert the word into newspaper and magazine articles (and by extension, subliminally into news broadcasts) to manipulate us emotionally without our knowledge.

Particularly in the last four years, it seems we have been living daily with heightened anxiety levels.  The climate crisis and all it entails, super viruses, provincial and national politics, the depredations of the mad child-king south of our borders.  And immediately after the Inauguration, the Resistance arose and grew louder.  “Fnord” is (metaphorically) incorporated into the software of word processors and social media platforms, so between the news and our reactions to it, the word is shouting at us more and more until it is becoming visible.

As Edmund Burke wrote, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing”.  But... there are various kinds of “something”.

As I began, blessings to the movers and the shakers who keep the Resistance alive.  Yet for this old burned-out hermit in his forgotten tower, “fnords” hurt.  I mute or scroll past articles and posts containing them, as my personal tolerance for "fnords" is so low.  My own resistance to the triumph of evil is to follow the words of Martin Luther King Jr., and to “keep hope alive”.  To see the good in people, wherever possible.  All of us are fucked up.  Life fucks us up.  Some of us fuck each other up.  Some of us manage better than those who lose themselves and let their own personal evil triumph, and become beyond redemption.

The Resistance rises us to anger and action, which is good as far as it goes.  But anger only begets more anger, and leads to the triumph of anger.  I am one with “the dreamers and the dream”; I believe in love.  I know love is ineffectual and naive in a climate of anger.  One of the ostensible reasons the Democrats in the U.S. fail and fail again (unless they’re entirely corrupt, which seems likely), is that they naively try to mollify their opposition, who are indeed totally corrupt.  It’s easier, and perhaps more gratifying, to try to shout louder.  But for some of us, it only brings out the “fnords”, to our detriment.

This is why community is so important, at least to me.  I’ve been, at least marginally, part of various communities most of my life.  When our own families fail due to estrangement, toxic parenting, prejudice, addiction, divorce, or other reasons, communities provide us with family-by-choice.  We still need to strive to be part of the larger society, but at the core, we all need family.  Sure, we are fucked up, but if we’re fucked up together, maybe we can heal each other.

Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  He believed in non-violent resistance, something picked up by the hippies in the Sixties.  As James A. Michener quoted in The Drifters, “When they conk you on the head with their billysticks, zap them right back with superlove.”  For me, that change begins with love; by starting with our own family-by-choice, we can be that change.  There is a place for anger, but I believe in the triumph of love.  Only through love can the “fnords” be revealed, and can we surpass the (imagined) programming of our childhood.