A kid just died in our extended community, far from and unknown me, but still we grieve. I think of how one death affects us and then shudder at the thousands of deaths in Gaza. Yet all I see, in terms of grieving, is the BBC (at the gym) mourning on behalf of the killers. What a topsy-turvy world we live in. The slightest inconvenience at the top is labeled ‘trauma’ and the real trauma they inflict on the bottom is beneath mention. Such is the commodification of grief. That is how they capture loss and profit from it.

The Privatization Of Stress

The late Mark Fisher talked about the privatization of stress. He said,

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

This is the paradox of prosperity. If capitalism works, why are the people under it so miserable? Nobody can have kids, everybody has some mental condition, everybody has some physical problem, what's actually going on? People are actually allergic to the conditions of capitalism, but hopped up on drugs rather than changing the environmental problem which, not coincidentally, is a big environmental problem also. This goes back to the source. Not capitalism per se, but the entire body of Western psychology.

When I studied Western psychology, the first classes were just rat torture, rats separated from their families, their cultures, their land, and running through mazes. These rats would press a lever for cocaine whereas rats in healthy rat societies don't, even if it's on offer. Thus you can see the colonial condition, in conditioning studies. As the Smashing Pumpkins said, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage. The colonizers of America are the lab rats of Liberty™—separated from their families, whatever culture they had before Whiteness, their unstolen land, and running through mazes chasing money. Their environment even looks like cages: cubicles, identical houses, strip malls, and steel cages to trap them between it all. Is it any wonder that these people press the lever for fentanyl whenever possible? The massive environmental and social problems of colonial capitalism are dumped, psychologically and economically, on the individual. Like, here, everything is fucked, you sort it out. Bigger problems are dropped on the individual as mental health, when in fact it's a sick society, inside and out. As Aimé Césaire said,

What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

Such is the stumbling of the sick man of Europe, which killed millions in the Americas upon first contact, and still sickens millions with depression, despair, and degeneracy across the colonies and colonized. They make you think that feeling bad is your fault but people should feel bad, living amidst such evil. Depression is, in fact, a natural reaction to the artificial ruination of capital. That's why I left the White Empire (Canada, America, same thing) myself, and I felt better after I did. But don't fucking come here, bro, that shit is contagious.

When I talk to people from within White Empire, I'm struck by how much everything is discussed in terms of mental health. Everybody has ADHD, everybody has trauma, and everybody needs to be sensitive to this. But talking about policies, or policing, or power, that's politics a different conversation, entirely. This mental gap between artificial categories is the real mental health problem. Mental health is this thing over there, with these phrases, these products, and these priests, and never the twain shall meet. Social health is something over there, which reeks suspiciously of socialism. But we are social beings, and not meant to be isolated like this. The cause of this individual suffering is an insufferable society. Oppression and depression are two sides of the same coin, which they make you pay for twice. Both the privatization of stress, as Fisher said, and the commodification of grief, as I'm saying.

The Commodification Of Grief

Césaire said, no one colonizes innocently, but everyone colonizes greedily. Vietnam became about the killers feelings, Germans are now authorities on Genocide©, and Jews get a special category of racism called antisemitism. The colonizers don't just kill you, they want to speak at your funeral. See Dances With Wolves, Pochahontas, even James Cameron's Avatar. The commodification of grief makes certain peoples' mourning valid to the point of vapidity, and other people's mourning less than animals (and the animals real feelings less than zero). Grief is increasingly a luxury good, and White people parade it for dumb shit while entire colored families get wiped out.

It's a vicious cycle, this genociding and grieving. The White media incites genocide against Hind Rajab then whitewashes it out with a Hollywood movie. Rinse and repeat, over and over. Blood and bullshit make good fertilizer for colonial grief farms. They did this with Vietnam, they did this with the Holocaust, they did this with their own colonial conquests. Schindler's List excuses Germans (Nazis were secretly good) and the movie ends in 'Israel' as not-so-subtle propaganda to keep vicious cycle going. Genocide is apparently a die-in-one, get-one-free deal for White people. Everybody in these societies is fucking insane, but that's good for business, and the business is all that matters. There's no point looking for the heart of Whiteness, there is none. Just follow the money.

But what of the tears falling from poor people, from Palestinians, what of the tears of whales and rats and our furry kin, never mind the trees and rivers that used to have spirits, to mourn and be mourned? Those are all lost, as the cyborg said, like tears in rain. And in the process we lose something within. The privatization of stress divides us from our societies, making healing categorically impossible. We are social animals and mental health is distributed. The commodification of grief divides us from our kin, making grief performative and without the fundamental insight that gives grief meaning. As the Lord Buddha said, “There are those who do not realize that one day we all must die. But those who do realize this settle their quarrels.” Grief should unite, but it becomes a private gloom and doom.

In this way, I think of one dead child, I think of a hundred thousand dead children, I think of the million eyes that will judge me on judgment day as I kept all these feelings to myself, and called it ‘mental health’ and thought of myself above all. God help me, I don't believe in mental health. It's men telling us some nonsense that leads to hell. I believe in healthy societies, in animal spirits, in God for lack of a better word, and an afterlife because this life obviously doesn't make sense. So go with God my little children. I think of the grief of parents and share it because I'm old enough.

As James Baldwin said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” I can feel it as grief ripples over my little, disconnected community, and great grief reverberates over the globe itself like a flood. They try to make grief into a luxury good and stress the only public service, but anybody can manufacture tears and anyone can deliver comfort. They try to hide this from you, but who are they? Just some Corporate AI, hidden in account books that don't account for natural loss, and see it as only an avenue for further profit. But for humans with eyes, it should be clear enough. God knows the prophets told us. The children belong to all of us, and each one lost is an entire universe. So steal your grief wherever you can. It doesn't belong to anyone. It is precisely the feeling of shared loss.