Anti-Social Construction

Jun 27, 2025

I didn’t have allergies as a child. My allergic classmates annoyed me; they seemed unfit, inferior, weak; they frequently sneezed, they sniffled, they couldn’t go outside, they had to take medicine to breathe. The air assaulted them—they were crippled in a ruthless struggle for supremacy, security, happiness.

(Even in an ultra-comfortable, historically anomalous timeplace like the midwestern middle class 90’s, it was obvious that the world was ruled by competition, that strife was the enraged alcoholic father of all things, that each of us was born into a hierarchy with a limited ability to scrap for a higher spot, and that inherited traits and wealth rigged the deadly serious game, so that some were, from a young age, strong, healthy, attractive, smart, outgoing and charismatic, and others had brittle bones, bent spines, flaky scalps, horse teeth, enlarged gums, lizard skin, pigeon toes, hog bellies, leaky guts, ham hands, sausage fingers, awkward gaits, asthma, light sensitivity, underbites, lazy eyes, overactive bladders, body odor, bad breath, persistent spittle, dyslexia, ADHD, sluggish wits and uninteresting interests.)

My empathy was naturally selective with a slight reserve for tact; I didn’t openly ridicule the less fortunate, but in practice I gravitated to the smarter and funnier of my peers while sitting through lessons and watching television programs on the equal worth of everyone, and thinking on it now I’d say I intuited that equality was a regulative ideal and a polite fiction, and that society very much runs on an order of formal appearances on top of organic appearances; what we say superimposed onto what we see; we try not to verbally highlight already glaring disparities, though institutions classify and distribute rewards and punishments through objectivized evaluation of academic and athletic performance, and our social groups and subcultural movements form out of less quantifiable and externally imposed force differentials.

A precarious equilibrium must obtain between what our eyes show us and what we can speak into being, as it’s possible to launch a series of absurdities by speech and law, and an asymbolic human animal isn’t a harmless simpleton, but a sterile monster. A verbal exoskeleton is necessary in any social order; without it a group collapses into snarling goo. Insufficiently tactful, decorous, cohesive fictions among speaking animals indicates an evolutionarily unique stage of socialized savagery.

Today, two extremes predominate in a chaotic field: aggression, rapacity and power flaunt themselves, while at the same time a stupefying euphemistic tide muddies the clear perception of intensifying heterogeneity. These symbolic tendencies symptomize and feed back into increasing wealth and power disparities on a large scale and an ongoing breakdown in microsocial modelling, with large numbers of people (of formerly bonded units) missing the shared experiences and embodied organic rhythms to adequately mirror and articulate actual similarities and differences for the purpose of constructing regulative fictions and inspiring creative expression and genuinely incisive critical discussion. Dissimulation and imitation make up the fundamentals of artistic processes, scientific rationality and public discussion; but dissimulation itself depends on a fairly stable relation between organism and environment, that is to say, an exchange or interaction between the two, and not, on the other hand, two detached simulations projecting their opposite out of their own impoverished resources.

To pretend, to play, to feint, to create artifice, is to necessarily engage with and be engaged by an external, populated world, a nature, a greater whole; which is why, apart from all other considerations, the idea of living inside a simulation makes no sense, as a simulation presupposes a distinction between itself and what it models; but, the idea of universal simulation does grow out of a pervasive sense of the remoteness or inaccesibility of the world and others apart from their reduction to manipulable code.

A nature subsumed by human constructs, that is almost or entirely a product of human electromechanical engineering, what is called the Anthropocene, is a human environment without human animals, as human animals socialize each other through their dissimulative and imitative instincts, which are grounded in an external nature and embodied rhythms woven into larger cycles that have been disrupted or destroyed. Human nature thus completes itself by expunging humans through the mechanical reproduction of its extinct species being.

In less than a month I turn 39 years old. Today I have allergies, at least I hope; if not that then it’s something much worse; progressively debilitating respiratory diseases, aids, other autoimmune disorders.

My throat hurts and my nose runs and I sneeze off and on for days. Sometimes I have to breathe through my mouth. I get sinus headaches; it feels like someone punching me in the face while I’m underwater. I no longer feel as hale as I used to, as naturally superior to the boys with braces and inhalers and prescription underwear. I also need corrective lenses, among other technological supplements.

But I still want to live, and to preserve the vital illusion of independent and natural health, my immortality, not just the eternity of life in general, or nature or being. Contrary to one established school of wisdom, while the fact of death might be structurally integral to life, the thought of death makes no impression, or it enervates. Invoking mortality is ritualistic self-deception, motivated by a need to perform a talismanic act that might enhance our experience and ward off annihilation. The more alive we are, the less heedful of death; with this thought, I’m in agreement with Nietzsche, Spinoza and Epicurus. The other alternative to pagan brooding over eternal nothingness in an effort to jolt ourselves into savoring an orgy is religious belief in an afterlife, faith in the soul’s immortality. Harder to uphold than all other options, for me at least.

Which is why I’d rather not think about allergies at all or pursue a self-cancelling feeling of vitality through slavish adherence to empirically researched longevity techniques, diet plans and exercise routines, embalming myself with science. I spontaneously view animals in general as more vigorous and present and existent than humans, because they flee death when it approaches and then forget all about it; except for elephants, who visit graveyards, whose beauty and majesty carries a hint of the sepulchral that resembles our heavy remembrances.

Either my body has deteriorated or my habitat has turned hostile. The anthropomorphized air puts me in a headlock, bullies me like I’m an asthmatic 5^th grader. Summer in Indianapolis this year, the humidity a scourge from a swamp god. In my ancient, badly insulated second floor apartment, I suck down the sweaty heat of refrigerated runoff, and the early roman empire lead based AC duct blows black mold into my lungs and dampened nethers. My toenails look like the bark of a diseased tree.

Out in the city, the streets are riddled with orange cones, construction equipment, fat guys watching one other guy operate heavy machinery. Under the overpasses, urban castaways nod and doze among shopping carts, piles of plastic and nonbiodegradable foodstuffs. A hot fog lies heavy on the land.

This is a city that requires a personal vehicle, unless you rent an apartment inside the downtown wholefoods. Yet the infrastructure chews up cars like a woodchipper. Instead of investing in public transportation, or changing the character of neighborhoods, the plan is to constantly but unevenly carry through construction projects on the roads to accommodate more cars, which makes driving more tedious, unruly and stressful. Indianapolis is also the kind of place where you take the same route a hundred thousand times, and one day a building on this route will have been demolished; you drive past a heap of rotting wood and blackened stone and shattered brick, and you have no idea what it was.

When not worrying about my sinuses, my allergies, I track other ambiguous signs of health and disease. Sometimes my ears ring and my jaw hurts. I remember my dentist said I grind my teeth; they sold me an expensive mouth guard I tried to wear once; one night I’ll wake up and my skull will be powder. On days off I poop sporadically all through the morning. I can’t tell if it’s just a leisurely activity or an emergency bowel condition. (In a history of the Vietnam war, I read about an American POW who had diarrhea 84 times in one day, and I was shocked. Sure, I’ve had diarrhea 50 times a day, but 84?)

Self-deception isn’t just what I observe in others; as long as I’m in some sense human, I can’t forget death, nor can my awareness of mortality give me mastery over it or prod me into having a better time at the bar. Death isn’t reducible to a pop philosophy jingle that stimulates a consumerist appetite; it is not to be instrumentalized or incorporated or dismissed; in naturalistic terms, death is an inescapable consequence of crossing a threshold of social complexity (here I mean complexity not in the sense of quantity or technological extension, but in the sense of relational duration and emotional depth, by strength of individualization and recognition of the other and identification through stable roles and shared memories, as well as the background context of inherited practices and beliefs); a high degree of relationship intensity causes individual life to stand out in sharp definition, and when an individual dies, their absence is absorbed and mourned by those to whom they were bonded, and the death of the other is then internalized and anticipated as one’s own fate.

If we remaining humans (remaining in the sense of having lost much of what defined us, though we’re more numerous than ever) have come closer to therapeutically exercising death for the sake of experience or administering it as a medical procedure to cure illness and sorrow, or technoscientifically delaying, blunting or finally eliminating it, then we have been able to achieve this in part through a decline in social complexity, a relational and emotional diminishment counterbalanced by a rise in technical pursuit of survival. A consuming fear of death without the capacity to mourn and remember marks an evolutionary moment of a species without orientation.