Amerika

When I talk to suicidal people that I care about, I get angry. I recognize that we can’t really save these people, that a will to live must come from within, and though we might help others regain this, we ultimately can’t do it for them. This painful frustration combines with a deep revulsion for listless, dejected, and lifeless modes of thought.

I end up in a similar rage when listening to John Lennon’s Imagine. Read through the lyrics with me and I’ll show you why.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Lennon is doing more than criticizing religion here; he is affirming plain, boring, hopeless materialism. Lennon preaches that this earth, this dirt, is all there is. All is merely meaningless atoms, occasionally being bound in a solid, but usually just wandering randomly and bouncing off other atoms. Nothing has any value or purpose beyond, we presume, human desires like fame, money, popularity and other palliative distractions.

It’s certainly easy for modern people, who have had no contact with traditional religion, who have no real understanding of what heaven is, to imagine it doesn’t exist. They don’t even have to try; they were born into this belief and follow it unquestioningly. This belief is the official view of science, government and most artists, just as it was the official policy of the French Revolution and Bolshevik rebels.

Despite this, the wife batterer presents this materialism the same way a teenage atheist smugly announces that he’s noticed that there wouldn’t be room for all the animals in the Arc, and so there is no God, and aren’t you amazed at how smart he is for figuring this out?

Imagine all the people
Living for today

This we don’t have to imagine! We already live in a sea of myopic hedonists with no attention span, and we’ll be seeing even more of them if current trends of low fertility of the highly intelligent and mass immigration from high time preference populations continue. Might as well tell a fish to imagine water.

Even more, in this statement we see Lennon’s real solution to humanity: stop aspiring, stop dreaming, just hang out and be cool with each other like good little hippies. That sounds groovy until you realize that someone will have to grow the food and fix the roads, so there’s going to be some kind of Soviet society to enforce that so all you hep cats can keep the love-in alive.

Is this as bleak as the USSR? You bet. It shows what happens when, like Lennon, your belief system is based in the idea that your own troubles are the fault of civilization, and the correct answer is to dismantle civilization and reduce it to a hipster party. Then when morning comes, the good feelings are gone and you must find some way to force the beautiful people to start the cleanup.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do

The underlying assumption is that wars happen because there are countries, that conflict is merely the by-product of arbitrary lines in the ground. Conflict is in fact present in every ecosystem, and is a necessary result of very basic factors like resource finiteness. Borders, well defended borders, actually shield against this conflict.

Pacifism is another negative emotion. Where a sensible view would be that struggle creates evolution, the pacifist vision — a lot like heat-death — is to eliminate all conflict and just go with the flow. Endless compromise, settling, rationalization and justification, but no forward action.

Nothing to kill or die for

Here is the most depressing line in the song. It’s so blatantly chilling and bleak that we should question the sanity of those who enjoy the song. Do they not notice? Is this actually appealing to them?

Nothing to kill or die for means that there is nothing worth killing or dying for. All that exists is mundane, petty, worthless. It’s not clear how Lennon imagines children fitting into this picture — does he wish people didn’t love their children enough to kill and die for them, or does he wish no one had children? Does he imagine a loveless world or a suicidal population? Either way, this fantasy of his is fundamentally horrible and miserable.

And no religion too

Well, except Islam. We can’t ever oppose or offend Islam in any way. Our minds are so overthrown by political correctness that we can’t even imagine doing so.

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Lennon really double-downstrokes that pacifism chord. Here we have the belief that the best thing to do in a knife fight is put down the knife and hug the opponent. A pattern emerges: this entire song is comprised of Leftist ideas that only work, only play out in the intended manner, in the imagination of a leftist.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

When a leftist says “we hope you’ll join us”, consider it a threat.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can

He means communism, and that’s sad enough, but consider the words at face value and it sounds like poverty — no one has anything. It’s no coincidence that that’s the reality that communism has historically moved towards. It is also not coincidental that those who preach “no possessions” tend to be, like John Lennon or Hugo Chavez, immensely wealthy.

No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Yeah, we get it, international communism. It’s not a good idea, and it’s always accompanied by loads of greed and hunger. When does he stop to think that if it were this simple, it would have been solved already. Or that long-haired drop-outs have been preaching this kind of philosophy since the dawn of time, and every time it has been tried, it has failed.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

You are a dreamer, John, and your dream is a miserable lie. So then why is this so popular? How can such an evil, depressing song be so popular?

The music itself is highly simplified and dull. If I play the tune in my head and allow an image to form (try it) what I see is padded walls and drooling patients being soothed by bland melodies as they’re beckoned to take their medications, sup their mush, and have their backsides wiped. This is not so far off from its intended purpose.

The song promises extreme comfort, complete shielding from nature and all its dangers, like hunger and death. It promises a sterile freedom from consequences and ultimate safety, showing us a world where nothing bad ever happens. This will all happen, if we only just imagine it. Ironically, it’s very similar to the popular notion of heaven conceived as a kind of Earth II, where things are pretty much like they are here, but without the meanies and bad stuff, and with comfy clouds and smooth jazz.

Now, no healthy person wants to die, or wants their loved ones to die, but retreating from danger into a psychology that denies its inherent value, a psychology that refuses to accept that death and pain are not just unavoidable, but vital to life results in a mind that has disengaged from life. Someone who adheres to this utopian pablum has abdicated from life, from actively participating in this world. This means they are also cut off from everything good. Blindfolded and groping, they will still experience pain and death, but won’t see why, won’t understand, and can only find solace in delusion.

These people, those who are moved to tears by this song, want to sleep, sleep forever in death. Freedom from conflict is impossible in this world, and can only be achieved by slipping into death.

Next time you see this song played in the wake of a terrorist attack, consider the audience as members of a death cult. They’ve just witness a terrible tragedy, an attack on them and their people, and they steadfastly refuse to address the cause, or retaliate in any way. They remain committed to the demise of their people.

It’s depressing observing a single suicidal person, and far more so observing a suicidal people. That’s why this is the most depressing song ever: it’s the song of a suicidal people.

Tags: atheism, communism, john lennon, suicide