Since Blobbo is going on again about how we need to move to a globalist society so he can have his "Superior Future," I figure a halfway decent way to start 2020 is to relate a book I read a little while ago,
All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. It's a perfect encapsulation of the problems with his overriding worldview, ones that I'm positive he's too dumb to realize.
To summarize the setting, the main character, Tom, lives in what we would consider "yesterday's future," the sci-fi dream world that writers and artists from decades past thought we would be living in today. Replicators, teleporters, space stations, the stuff that Bob jizzes himself thinking about, all powered by a revolutionary generator that provides unlimited clean energy. War is a thing of the past thanks to post-scarcity, and nations are nothing more than names. It's a world where scientific discovery is pursued relentlessly, primarily for entertainment purposes. In short, it's Bob's utopia, down to the finest detail.
Anyway, Tom's father develops a time machine (again, for entertainment purposes), which Tom sneaks into after certain traumatic events and recklessly travels back to the moment when the generator was activated for the first time. He accidentally changes the past when he's there, and when he returns to the present, it's not his world and his present, but our world and our present. To him, this is a horrifying dystopia, funnily enough.
I won't go into more details of the story because I don't want to spoil what happens next (this is all in the first third of the book; hell, it's on the jacket). It's an entertaining read that I'd recommend, and it has a good message in the end. The part I'd like to highlight is this segment from early in the novel:
Tom said:
It's not like everything in my world was perfect. People still got screwed up by anxiety and stress and off-kilter neural chemistry. Pharmaceutical use was rampant. So was status panic. Power still corrupted, infidelity still hurt, marriages still collapsed. Love went unrequited. Childhood could be a playground or a dungeon. Some people are just constitutionally bad in bed and no amount of interactive pornography can fix that.
[...]
Morality did not collapse into nihilism. People were kind, people were rude, people were generous, people were greedy, people were courageous and cowardly, insightful and dull-witted, self-sacrificing and self-destructive, willful and easygoing, happy and sad. You could still get into a fistfight if you said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong bar. Damaged people sometimes made bad decisions. Smart people sometimes did stupid things. But everyone who wanted it had a place in the world.
And that's the heart of it, really. Even if Blobbo were dropped into his "Superior Future," his glorious world-government techno-utopia where scientists run everything and every single one of his wants and needs were taken care of, he'd still be a fat, obnoxious, lazy, dumb sack of shit. He would still be miserable, just in a different context.
Bob doesn't understand that the reason he's not happy isn't because of the mayonnaise ghouls; the Trumplings; the residents of Sisterfuck County, Whitesylvania; or whatever other vile epithet he spews on a daily basis. He doesn't realize that the reason he's not happy isn't because society hasn't delivered him his jet pack, his moon base, or his teleporter. No, he's just too stupid to comprehend that the reason he's not happy is because he's just a terrible person. He has so many unresolved mental issues that he refuses to get treated, because he thinks that everyone else is the problem, not himself. Hell, he's been doing this his whole life; need we go to the section in Brick by Brick where he talks about sabotaging his therapy for anger management, smugly congratulating himself for being so smart for doing so?
In the end, it doesn't matter how good technology gets. People will still be people, we'll still have our problems, we'll all have good times and bad times. That's just part of the human experience. However, the one constant is that no matter what, Robert "MovieBob" Chipman will still be stupid, obnoxious, and just plain awful.
Happy new year, kiwis. May you have a better one than CinemaRoberto.
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