If Love Is Folly…
“If love is folly, I’m your fool. Give him
your pity, not your hate,”
he said upon the Junebug’s shell.
The ring of fire rounds the house.
Prevarication’s not your vice: you speak
black truth to summer’s eye.
You are not always loved for this. The
wanton greensward pecks the grass.
Perhaps a throw of rug would toss the air
with whiskers, spiders, mice.
A dodehexahedron stands immaculate on
green fields of ice.
I cannot say. I cannot know. For I am
mad for you, you know.
I break to justice, loss, and fate.
I litter pillows with my tears,
am lost in the forest of the years,
and no birds listen to my name.
And yet I have of wisdom won these few
aspersions to its rule.
Have you a right to happiness in this
one life you only know?
There is no other where but here;
the trick is catching fireflies before
they cinder to the skies.
Be kind to the thing that you call “me,”
you will be kind to humanity.
We are lost in the labyrinth
of time and space; infinity
is eternity’s other face.
Power, wealth and fame are phantoms,
and love is a beautiful illusion.
The distant battles end in war,
and there is the mouth of the cave. I feel
the thread that will save me from
the Minotaur.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.
Still from Gira, by Grupo Corpo. Photo: Jose Luiz Pederneiras
21 and Gira
Grupo Corpo
Zellerbach Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Gyres of Eshu
A review by Christopher Bernard
Cal Performances (the Bay Area’s most adventurous promoter of dance, music and live performance) delivered once again one late weekend in April, as part of its Illuminations: “Fractured History” series: Brazil’s formidably gifted dance company, Grupo Corpo.
Based in Brazil’s legendary Minas Gerais, and founded in Belo Horizonte in 1975, the company is driven by the synergistic talents of two brothers, Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras, house choreographer, and director and set and lighting designer, respectively, who have created, with their collaborators, an aesthetic that blends classical ballet and the complex heritage of Brazilian culture, religious and ritual traditions, the whole leavened by a musical culture that is wholly unique.
The company brought two ambitious dances to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The first was their breakout dance, from 1992, which put the company securely on the international dancing “map”: 21, a number that retains an enticing mystery to it. It also introduced one of the company’s musical signatures: the music and instruments of Marco Antonio Guimarães and the artists of the Uakti Instrumental Workshop. These last not only have a unique armamentarium of instruments, but even use their own microtonal scales, unless my ears were fooling me—essential elements of what makes the company’s work uniquely engaging.
21 was groundbreaking: a slow burn that used the entire company in a processus of simple chthonic motives, closely gripping the floor like the movements of wary but defiant jungle animals, on dancers at first dressed entirely in yellow bodysuits against a pitch-black background, appearing at first behind a misty transparent screen that creates a ghost-like effect, and rising midway through the work as the dance moved to illumination from mystery.
The dance began with a hypnotic monotony of group motions with slight variations against a polyphony of percussion and string and blown instruments entirely new to this listener’s ear, and gradually morphed into a succession of solos and increasingly elaborate duos, trios, and corps, by turns haunting, raunchy, and carnivalesque, until its energies, long simmering, boiled over and broke out into a joyously orgiastic conclusion that brought the Brazilian gods to the stage and the local audience to their feet.
The imaginative use of lighting and color, as well as the costume designs (which transmogrified from the monotone to the wildly polychrome) of Freusa Zechmeister, were as vital to the overall effect as motion and music.
The second dance, Gira (“Spin”), from 2017, takes the elements of spiritualist rite suggested in 21 and brings them unapologetically to the fore. The dance is based on the rituals of Umbanda (a merging of West and Central African religions such as Yoruba with Catholicism and spiritism) to the music of the jazz band Metá Metá and vocals from Nuno Ramos and Eliza Soares. The dance is based on rituals calling forth the spirit of Eshu, a deity who acts as a bridge between humanity and the world of the orixás of Ubamba, Condomblé, and the spiritualities they have in common. Eshu commands and drives the rite of the giras, or spinning, whose motions, like those of the dervishes of Islam, open the dancers to the gods and the gods to the dancers.
Gira evolved as a series of variations on the motions of the ritual, increasingly fugal, danced by the performers as if in the trance that the ritual aims, paradoxically, both to create and to emerge from. Both male and female dancers wore long white skirts and were bare breasted in a show of a curious mixture of vulnerability, beseeching, and seduction to bring forth the divine.
It’s a beautiful and evocative work, if overstaying just a little.
Not to be forgotten is the technical brilliance of the dancers themselves: masters of their gifts, and sharpened by the equal mastery of the company’s leadership.
____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Killing the Bear
Born into fury,
starved and angry,
inhabiting the mountains
shiftless around Shasta,
he seemed when you met him
that summer day . . .
You had come there, alone,
from your home city
to escape its troubles,
the mad-making politics
that poisoned most
of the galling country:
a presidential oaf,
half cunning fox,
half demented bear,
and the rest of the barbarians
not only you loathed
with a lucid hatred,
and few ways to disgorge it.
So you went to the mountains.
Brought sleeping sack, tent,
bare necessities, fire needs,
a week’s worth of food,
a lamp, a knife;
hiked an hour and a half
into the Sierra
through oak and pine woods,
manzanita, brush land,
meadows of yellow grass,
by creeks of runoff
from the winter’s snowfall,
until you found a place
near a rock pile, flat,
at once cozy and open,
near a stream and a view
of a majesty of mountains
and no sign of humanity
for miles …
You stopped, took a deep
long breath—the first
you’d taken, it seemed,
for months. Your nerves,
tense so long, slackened.
You felt you were home
at last. You whistled
while setting up your tent,
felt the squirrels watching you,
sat for hours by the fire
as the long, high, deep
sky of summer evening
almost imperceptibly
faded into night
and stars you had not seen
since childhood…
It was a rude awakening
when sun pried your eyes open
to the sight of an old grizzly
staring blankly at you:
huge, mangy, hungry,
unsure on his legs, or the courage
of terror (despite
a distracting irrelevancy,
“Are there even grizzlies
in the Sierras?” almost tripped
your reflexes)
never would have driven
you to your first thrust.
The knife was near your sack:
a butcher knife it was,
just sharpened before you left;
hard, new, shining.
You grabbed it as the bear
trundled awkwardly at you,
and, yanking out of the sack,
you screamed like a banshee,
and, foolishly enough,
ran at it. The beast stopped,
puzzled by the naked
monkey waving a bit of
glitter with a pathetic
shriek. At full height,
he roared as you plunged
the blade into what
felt soft as a pillow.
A paw swatted you with contempt.
and you fell over the dead campfire,
smearing you with a warpaint
of ashes;
yet still holding the knife.
He came at you, claws out.
Leaping up with a new shout,
you swung the knife in wide arcs,
the beast baffling a moment,
then slipped behind a sycamore
as he clawed away its bark,
then pulled it down. Slipped
your foot at the edge
of the stream; you cried
in anguish and anger,
sure it was over
as the bear bore down
finally upon you,
his teeth bright, his breath
in your face, his eyes
as cold, shining as stones.
Terrified, hysterical, you shouted out
your last cry
and thrust the knife
at the throat.
It sunk to the haft; blood
spurted over your hand. The bear’s
roar choked to a gurgling,
the mouth froze, startled, the eyes,
blank, black, stunned,
as the light vanished from them;
they looked almost sad.
You felt almost sorry
as he sank over your legs,
groaning a sigh
as you pulled out the knife,
and fell back into the stream.
You hauled your legs slowly
from under the dead hulk.
Then pulled yourself from the flowing
cold water, and stood
on the stream bank,
gazing down at the beast,
the overthrown king
of the woods.
Then something curious happened:
you heard a voice. Strangely,
it was as if the grizzly
spoke from the dead body.
“Human:
between you and triumph
is no more than between
you and your destruction:
the difference is the act.
Shall the way of your life
be like the ice on a lake
or like the arc of an arrow?
“Be cunning and patient,
and when the time comes
to strike—and it always comes –
be swift, and be certain.
Most of all, remember:
keep your knife always
sharp. And close.”
Then you heard the singing
of many birds. Your eyes
opened to the flickering
of shadows above your head,
and you looked, surprised, around you.
You lay in your sack,
the tent undisturbed.
A zephyr shook it. You crawled
out to the cool morning.
What a dream! you thought.
Yet you were not sure.
You looked carefully about you,
half expecting the grizzly.
Nothing appeared but a few
squirrels; a robin
landed on a grass patch and flew off.
There are dreams so vivid
they seem more real than waking,
the reality of waking
could you but see the real.
But when you wake, you sleep,
and when you sleep, you waken:
the lessons of that other world
are ones that you fail
to learn at your peril.
Who can be sure? No one.
Yet the hungry bear
that now is coming toward you
is vulnerable to one
(you know, now you have woke),
to one, single, lucky,
well-timed, well-delivered,
coolly administered,
unfearing stroke.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist living in San Francisco. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. In 2025, his first novel, A Spy in the Ruins, is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its original publication.
Cal Performances presented the Bay Area premiere of William Kentridge’s new collaboration, The Great Yes, The Great No, on a recent chilly, rain-sprinkled March evening, to a standing ovation in a warm, dry, and packed Zellerbach Hall in the “People’s Republic of” Berkeley.
Truly, it was manna to the baffled left these days of a monstrous politics. And a stimulus and wonder even to skeptics of both progressives and reactionaries; echoes of Cavafy, Dante, and Carlyle were clearly not unintended. Even of Coleridge and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; even of the Narrenschiff – the “ship of fools” of the Middle Ages and Katherine Anne Porter’s bleak, modern fable.
The work, co-commissioned by the ever-questing Cal Performances for its Illuminations series (the theme this year is “Fractured History” – a timely phrase, as we threaten to crumble into a humblingly fractured present), is the latest in the South African artist’s theatrical undertakings, culminating most recently in Berkeley with the amalgam of fantasy and prophecy Sybil two years ago.
In Kentridge’s new work, we are introduced to a cargo ship repurposed for refugees, ploughing the seas of midcentury on a voyage to escape a Nazified Europe for temporary asylum in the New World. In March 1941, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle left Marseilles for the Caribbean French colony of Martinique, bearing several hundred refugees, including luminaries such as “the pope of Surrealism” André Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, novelists Victor Serge and Anna Seghers, and the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss: a ship of geniuses, culture avatars, and anti-imperialists fleeing a continent of psychopaths for the utopia of the irrational, of “revolution,” of “freedom.”
A curious but relevant fact about Martinique: it was the one island Napoleon allowed slavery (according to the libretto) when he abolished it throughout the Empire – and why? Because of Europeans’ insatiable desire for the sugar Martinique was known for and could not produce “economically” without its slaves.
Kentridge haunts his ship with figures from multiple eras binding the imperial center to the tiny Antillean island: the Martinican poet, and father of anti-colonialist theories of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and his wife Suzanne; the fellow Martinican sisters Nardal, whose Parisian salon incubated negritude with the Césaires and African writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas; and other relevant phantoms: Napoleon’s beloved Martiquinaise Joséphine Bonaparte and the Martiniquais, and future revolutionary theorist, Frantz Fanon.
We were treated with Kentridge’s characteristically virtuosic blend of spoken word, dance, dream scene and song, surreal cartoon and reversed film sequence, liberated signifiers, extravagant costumes and portrait masks for each of the avatars, dancing tools and animated utensils (including one of his signature mottos, a twitchy, goofily animated typewriter), in this modern version of classic singspiel.
It took off on a wildly surrealist ride across time and geography, with a collage libretto combining quotations from the figures named and such notable subversives as Bertolt Brecht. Narrative is not Kentridge’s strong suit, and his attempts in that direction usually run aground on pancake-flat characters and prosaic plots (he has yet to quite realize that a story without logic (his explicit pet peeve, in this work, being reason and all its affiliates) is like a decalcified hippo: somewhere between a glob and a blot. He is at his best when indulging his imagination and letting poetry suggest where prose merely deafens.
At the head of the ship stood its captain, an African version of the classic Greek Charon, boatman of the underworld ferrying souls to their final ends. The captain (a brilliantly insouciant Hamilton Dhlamini) dropped many of the evening’s most provocative lines. Another performance especially shone; Nancy Nkusi as Suzanne Césaire, whose recital of the verses of her spouse Aimé, from his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, provided much memorable imagery. Not least was her haunting appearance in a black-and-white film scene, crawling across a banquet table surrounded by tuxedoed gentlemen with the heads of coffeepots and the cannibalistic appetites of all empires.
A constellation of quotations were projected or spoken or sung, or all three, across the magic lantern–like astrolabe that backed the stage: “The Dead Report for Duty,” “The Boats Flee, But to Where?” “The World Is Leaking.” “These Are My Old Tears.” “The Women Are Picking Up the Pieces.”
And a Chorus of Seven Women sing, dance and comment on the mystico-political voyage throughout, translated into the native languages of the singers: Sepedi, Setswana, siSwati, isiZulu, in the music of Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
A small, tight musical ensemble accompanied the proceedings throughout, led by the percussionist and composer Tlale Makhene.
For all the cornucopia of imagery, word wonder and music, my feelings about the evening were obstinately mixed. What I loved were the endlessly inventive visuals Kentridge can always be counted to magic out of the bricolage of his imagination, the 360-degree projections of the ship, the gimcrack costuming, the slants of film and dashes of music, the rich, sly humorous poetry, both visual and verbal, that illuminates, in flash after flash, as much as it entertains.
But there was also an element of agitprop, of heavy-handed prose hectoring and editorializing as it blundered into the show – the poetry, singing, told us endlessly more than the political prosing, shouting, which performed the bizarre act of shipwrecking itself. And when there are positive references to such monstres sacrés as Trotsky and Stalin, I, for one, am out. An artwork makes a poor editorial: when it trades poetry for slogans, it thrills only a few converts.
There is, unhappily, an even more serious point to make. Something about the enterprise rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Late winter 2025 on planet Earth hardly seems the best time and place to be celebrating “the irrational.” Whatever we are facing, politically, historically, it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a “tyranny of reason” or the authoritarianism of the bourgeoisie. In the current moment, I, and I suspect many others, feel trapped inside a global surreal nightmare from which we may not be able to escape. A surrealist fantasy celebrating unreason seems perhaps not the most appropriate message for a world on the verge of shipwrecking on the reef of insanity.
Those of us cursed with a reflexive skepticism may not care much to embark (without security guarantees) on so dubious a journey. For every “Great Yes,” there is sometimes a small but potent “no.”
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fires, L.A.
Ashes is bright Malibu,
Altadena’s palms,
black, naked, gravel
of bitter alms.
Roses devour
the monarch wood,
blown from Santa Ana
to a cold tide;
rags left
from brocades of towns,
tapestries of cities
burning down.
Katy’s house,
white against ash,
drops tears into
her outstretched hand.
Great dragons of fire
snake the night hills,
seeking their reflections
in abandoned swimming pools.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and essayist living in San Francisco.
The launch event will take place at 2 Waverly Place, on Saturday, January 25, at 1:00 pm. Readers: Christopher Bernard, Steven Hill, Ho Lin and Jonah Raskin.
Admission: Donation (Suggested: $5.00). All proceeds will go to victims of the LA fires.
Author’s Note: I wrote this essay originally in the fall of 2020 and publish it here with a few cosmetic changes and updates. It seems even more relevant today, after the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare—a figure who was an example of a vicious healthcare system where it has finally been proven that when healthcare is driven by whatever “the market will bear” and the desire to increase “shareholder value” at whatever cost, the purveyors of that system will, at some point, irresistibly, ask the following question of their customers:
“How much is your health, your spouse’s health, or your children’s health, worth to you”?
And who will be surprised to hear the answer: “My health? My spouse’s health? My children’s health? Why, they are worth everything to me.”
And few will be shocked by the response from the boardrooms of the healthcare “industry”:
“Oh it is, is it? It’s worth everything to you? Really? Well then, good people—in that case, we’ll takeeverything from you! And thank you very, very much!”
It does not take long for the logic of this statement to become fully apparent when it leads to the next equally candid exchange, heard in the confines of many a winterized boardroom:
“We who are in the healthcare industry are in the business of making money—are we not?”
“Indeed we are.”
“And our job is to make even more money in every quarter than we did in the quarter before it, is it not?”
“Our shareholders will certainly let us know it if we do not!”
“And we have two ways, and only two ways, of making more money—we sell more of our product, or we decrease our expenses. Is this not so?”
“Never a truer word was spoken!”
“We can decrease our expenses by, for example, laying off workers.”
“And a good thing too!”
“Now, protecting the health of our customers costs money.”
“Indeed it does!”
“So—what, gentlemen, if we did not? After all, we can’t save everybody all the time even with every procedure under the sun, from aspirin to brain surgery. And we never pretended we could do so. Just read over our contracts!”
“You’re right there! And we’d save a lot of money!”
“We’d make a lot of money, you mean. But to ask the question is to answer it. Is it our problem if our customers, those innocent boobies, forgot to read the fine print in the policies they bought from us—the fine print that tells them we do not guarantee payment for all or indeed for any medical procedure we do not, in our infallible judgment, thoroughly and completely approve of? No! So, if we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they suffer, is it our fault?”
“Of course not!”
“If we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they go bankrupt, is it our fault?”
“Never!”
“If we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they die, is it our fault!”
“What a perfectly ridiculous idea! (And anybody who claims otherwise we’ll sue to the ground for endangering our good name, our reputation, and, above all, our profits!)!”
“Exactly! They should have read their contract—and if they didn’t like it, they were FREE to go elsewhere—even though every healthcare insurance contract contains, by an extraordinary coincidence, exactly the same stipulations as ours does!”
(The board roars with laughter.)
One sentence below begins as follows: “We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers to social media….” I would now make a substantive change: “We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers, to social media, to our crippled, and crippling, healthcare system….”
*
A friend and I took a walk across downtown San Francisco that autumn day. We were wearing masks and keeping (at least most of the time) a medically correct six feet apart. After weeks of unbreathable air, stultifying heat, and an eerie day of pink burnt-orange skies, we could, finally, breathe cool, deep lungfuls of a briny marine breeze off the Pacific under a clear, almost tangibly blue sky.
The city was cautiously reopening: cafes and restaurants were allowed to serve at sidewalk tables or cheerful pavilions built on the streets and fenced about like little biergartens, stores could let in customers, masked and a handful at a time, and in a few weeks, museums would be allowed to reopen with safety precautions greenlighted by the city.
We had been spared the fates of many of our fellow Californians and others living in the Pacific northwest: the millions of acres of wildland burning, the conflagrations reducing towns to ashes, the thousand fleeing for their lives. It was only far south of us that the bodies of dead birds trying to migrate south for the winter were falling from the skies, littering the land by the hundreds, even thousands. The birds here, though sometimes confused by the long darkness of smoke-clogged skies and dawns that only end at sunset, were still flying, the crows that had begun to dominate neighborhoods like North Beach and Hayes Valley strutted cockily down the sidewalks.
Yet it was difficult to maintain one’s calm, even on a good day like this, when the world, even nature itself, seemed in the midst of a murderous rampage—despite the fact many of us saw it coming for decades, since humanity was its primary cause. So my friend and I both knew that our lovely walk through the perfect afternoon was only a pause in the terrifying year of 2020.
We talked about it—because what else was there to talk about? Disasters around us and a looming electoral catastrophe before us: Trump and the Republican Party had given ominous signals they were prepared to burn American democracy to the ground if they couldn’t claim victory in November. The climate crisis had been staring us in the face after two generations of denial by the powerful and their deluded followers. The economy was in a coma while billionaires became even more absurdly, obscenely, wealthy, and shareholders aspired to their condition of insouciant arrogance. There was a seemingly unstoppable run of racist police killings and, in response, increasingly violent eruptions of righteous fury. Social media were completely out of control, causing a tempest of despair in the young: loneliness, depression, bullying, suicides, at least one of these, goaded by some monster, live streamed to a shocked audience.
We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers to social media, and one of us suddenly came up with a truly horrifying thought: an entire layer of society is making money, deliberately, knowingly, purposely doing serious injury to people. Worse than that: they are making money from killing people . . .
There is a descriptive phrase for this that may seem on the surface sensationalist and hyperbolic. The phrase is “mass murder capitalism.” The Romans of the empire entertained the populace through, among other things, cheering on gladiators as they killed each other in the arena and applauding as Christians and other misfits were torched and crucified en masse. The modern world has learned how to kill people, when necessary to increase profits and drive up their share price. And people are killing themselves so that titans of social media can increase their stock price by a few points.
It is not altogether intentional (though one can make the argument that, in some cases, it is; how else describe the worst offenses of health insurance; of the fossil-fuel industry, which has been aware of the dangers of carbon-induced climate change since as long ago as the 1950s; or the tobacco industry, which has been murdering people for profit since the ’60s? If this is not “Auschwitz for profit,” what else might such a horrendous beast “look like”?
Yet the people who run the capitalist Juggernaut are hardly Nazis deliberately planning on murdering most of the human race so they alone can rule the earth. This catastrophic eventuality is merely part of a nefarious effect, an “unintended consequence,” of extractive capitalism. There is in fact a legal term one might use to describe it: manslaughter.
Voluntary manslaughter involves the intentional killing of another person in the heat of passion and response to provocation, whereas involuntary manslaughter is the negligent causing of the death of another person. Perhaps one might call the passionate pursuit of profits an instance of “heat of passion,” and the “provocation” leading to this crime passionel being the irritating habit of ordinary people not to get out of the way quite fast enough of the pursuit of the highest return on investment.
Then there is involuntary manslaughter: killing people without realizing it, though one might, and indeed should, have known what you were doing could very well have such lethal effect.
But what do you call it when an “unintended consequence” has been revealed for all to see; when the fact that you are murdering people for the sake of ever-increasing returns is blatant, is even flaunted—and you keep on doing it anyway?
You would then be called a murderer. A first-degree murderer. And in America we have an array of specific punishments for that, from life in prison to the death penalty.
It may have been the tobacco industry that taught modern American capitalism that, as long as what an industry manufactures makes someone a great deal of money, it can get away with harming, even killing, in the long run, many, and even most, of its customers. The fossil-fuel industry was not far behind. Big pharma has been doing it more discreetly for years, to say nothing about what is sometimes suspected of for-profit hospitals. The arms industry has always done it for a living. The gun industry, with its front organization the NRA, is almost embarrassing in a hypocrisy that even its supporters don’t pretend to believe.
My friend and I dug around a little more. We were playing a mind experiment—what had we to lose? We might even develop one or two insights worth sharing with others more qualified and knowledgeable than ourselves, who might use them to have deeper, keener, and more valuable perceptions, genuine discoveries – something the rest of us can act on, even fight for.
There seemed to be something driving both the obsession with accumulating ever greater piles of cash that has no other purpose than acquiring more cash (money is useless for anything else, being inedible, ugly, and a hopelessly poor building material)—something called “hoarding” in other circumstances, and considered a medical condition requiring discreet but firm intervention, not celebration, social power, or political control by the syndrome’s victim—and, for example, the same thing that was driving some young girls to harm themselves, even kill themselves, as a result of the amoralism and cruelty found in social media.
They all share something we decided to call “the infinity complex” or infinity trap, depending on whether the internal compulsion or the outer effect is being emphasized – in either case, it is shorthand for a perverse fact about human psychology.
It is a well-known fact that we human beings feel less pleasure acquiring something we want than pain at losing something we have. There is also an addictive pattern to acquisition: the more we get, the less pleasure we often get from each equivalent addition, though this does not keep us from obsessively seeking the old thrill we remember from the good old days of our possessing minority.
Applied to the accumulation of money, cash, or “capital,” this translates into the wealthy becoming addicted to acquiring money without ever being able to attain satisfaction: they never have “enough”; they are always trying to add one more zero to the end of their financial balances, and to feel that little thrill that still comes with it. And avoid the pain of the loss of one, no matter how many zeros there already are in that quagmire of a financial account. And it is always possible, no matter how many zeros are already there, to add one more zero. Desire for money is infinite because the number series is infinite; thus, the infinity complex. And a wealthy man can never have enough once he is caught in the infinity trap.
Social media addictions have the same psychological source: a young girl (for example), who is naturally insecure and needs reinforcement from her peers to be reassured of her own value, gets a “like” on Facebook. All well and good. She gets more likes. Even better. She really likes getting likes, soon she becomes practically addicted to them—so much so that, at a certain point, when one of her posts, for some reason or for no reason, doesn’t get any likes at all, or even gets fewer than before, she feels a moment of panic . . .
Yet, no matter how many likes she gets, she becomes increasingly frightened she will not get as many of them next time. And what if she reaches the point of getting no likes at all? (Believe me, I know this can happen; more and more of my Facebook posts these days get no likes, and even I feel vaguely hurt and unsettled by this.)
Since most of this young girl’s social interactions happen online and not face to face, as a result her feelings about her own worth, which are insecure at best during these years, hang on the very thing that is making her miserable. She may easily spiral into feelings of despair, which she tries to cure by getting more likes on all her social media. But this makes her even more desperate. The addictive cycle has been secured; she too has fallen into the infinity trap.
For evidence of this, we learned that suicide rates of older teenage girls have doubled, and for younger teenage girls have tripled, since the first successful social media platform, Facebook, was introduced.
We have created an economy, a culture, and a society that exploit this weakness in human psychology to the hilt, all because it makes a small number of people a vast amount of money. It has reached the point where it is wreaking havoc on the young; it is destroying impoverished communities across the U.S. through opioid addiction; it has affected the health of several generations of people across the globe through tobacco addiction, and now is having a similar effect through vaping; it is ruining political and cultural discourse through a perpetual tsunami of misinformation inundating the internet—and most criminally and ultimately catastrophically, it is destroying the planetary ecosystem through global heating, destruction of natural habitats, and ripping to shreds the ecological network that makes human life on earth possible.
It is painful to admit this, and many will deny it or accuse me of exaggeration, but I believe the evidence has become too clear to remain silent. The core of world capitalism, which includes the fossil-fuel industry and all other industries connected to it, many internet companies, and big pharma, has become a global criminal syndicate, a Murder Inc. beyond the most violent and brutal dreams of any organized criminal network. And we have become addicted to an entire array of triggers that feed an insatiable human capacity: the drive never to be satisfied.
We must begin by ending the neoliberal project of global capitalism now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Not in the next decade.
Or many more will die like the flocks of birds falling from the sky in their thousands over the southwestern states, like our fellow human beings, most of them innocent of creating this catastrophe, who are perishing from the heatwaves blanketing the world every summer and crushed beneath new forms of authoritarianism driven by a toxic blend of neoliberal ideology and information technology we have lost control of, to a conclusion in social psychosis and suicidal destruction.
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Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, critic, and essayist. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021.
