Panem et Circenses in 2025

The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that the masses of his day no longer cared for politics or justice. All they wanted was “panem et circenses”, bread and circuses. As long as the state kept them fed and entertained, they would tolerate corruption, cruelty, and decay.

Fast forward two thousand years, and America is running the same playbook.

The “bread” comes in the form of bare-minimum survival: Social Security under constant attack, wages that don’t keep up with rent, food assistance treated like a privilege. The ruling class never allows enough to thrive, only enough to keep people working, consuming, and afraid to lose what little they have.

The “circuses” are endless. Culture wars dominate the headlines while wages stagnate. Trump performs like a professional wrestler, throwing insults and manufacturing enemies for the crowd to boo. Media corporations serve up nonstop drama — from celebrity meltdowns to political theater — so long as it keeps people glued to their screens and not in the streets. Meanwhile, the real show goes unseen: corporate tax breaks, union-busting, deregulation, mass surveillance, and endless war. The bread gets thinner, the circuses get louder.

But history shows us something important: empires can only distract their people for so long. Rome collapsed under its own contradictions. Capitalism in 2025 is not immune.

The question is whether we stay in the stands, cheering while the empire crumbles, or whether we organize, educate, and fight to build something better.

Candide Through an Absurd and Anti-Natalist Lens

I finished Voltaire’s Candide. I bought it I don’t know how long ago, but I’d get distracted with other books as I often do and just forgot about it until recently. All I can say is “Wow!” It was an excellent satire of philosophy in general. Me, being who I am though, I read it through a lens of pessimism, absurdism, and anti-natalism. It’s surprisingly modern and disturbingly relevant.

Right from the start the main character — Candide — and his world are full of relentless misfortune: he starts out expelled from his home, pushed into a brutal army; he witnesses earthquakes, massacres, and hangings. Everywhere he goes, human cruelty and disaster dominate.

For someone like me that’s attuned to anti-natalist thought, the lesson is clear: life is unpredictably cruel, and no amount of idealism or hope can shield anyone from suffering. The character of Pangloss and his philosophy — “this is the best of all possible worlds” — is not comforting. It’s absurd. Voltaire mocks it precisely to show that optimism can blind us to reality.

Candide meets kings unthroned, slaves chained to oars, prostitutes forced by circumstance, and monks trapped in religious life against their will. From the sites of Libson to El Dorado and Paris to Venice, suffering is universal. It doesn’t discriminate by wealth, status, or virtue.

All of this perfectly aligns with anti-natalism. Why bring new life into a world so unpredictable, so cruel, and so universally painful? Voltaire’s stories of absurdly recurring disasters reinforce the ethical argument that procreation inevitably imposes suffering on others. Human ideas are fragile. Pursuits that seem meaningful such as love, wealth, status, and fame often collapse under the weight of reality. For an absurdist like myself, this is expected. The universe offers no inherent purpose and our “ideals” are more likely than not arbitrary constructs.

The end of the book says “We must cultivate our garden.” This is Voltaire’s practical work. Life is absurd and full of suffering, but we can still create meaning in small, tangible ways: tending to our responsibilities, helping others, or our own little personal projects. For an absurdist anti-natalist this means to me:

Accept the universe’s lack’s lack of inherent meaning. Do what you can to reduce suffering wherever possible. And focus on tangible, ethical, or creative work rather than abstract speculation.

So, what did I take away from the satirical work? I learned through its absurd coincidences, relentless misfortunes, and philosophical debates that it mirrors these truths: life is cruel, unpredictable, and often meaningless.

However, like Candide, we are not powerless. We can act, work, and cultivate our little gardens in such a chaotic world, and in doing so, carve out a fragile, ethical, and perhaps even joyful corner of existence.

Favorite Books #6-10

A while back, I gave you a list of my top 5 favorite books. It’s taken me some time and a lot of thinking to think of numbers 6-10, but I think I’ve got them. So, here they are:

6. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti’s philosophical pessimism is a cold and meditative. It’s about the horrors of consciousness and human suffering. He argues that awareness itself is a curse, and it’s a theme that lingers in your brain long after you finish the book.

7. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The main character embodies self-loathing, resentment, and intellectual rebellion. His critique of optimism exposes the contradictions of human desire and freedom which reveals our capacity for irrationality and cruelty.

8. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

I know I’ve moved away from Nietzsche over the years, but this book was my introduction to philosophy. It helped me discover other philosophers and led me to my favorite (Albert Camus.) This book challenges traditional morality, urging the creation of new values. It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s also poetic and absurd which I love. It insists we confront the void with courage and creativity.

9. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

The author that made me a lover of reading and books in general. It’s still the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It isn’t just about the supernatural. It’s a meditation on grief, denial, and the impossibility of reversing death. It confronts us with the inevitability of loss and the consequences of trying to cheat the natural order.

10. Blindness by Jose Saramago

A society stripped of sight which exposes the fragility and moral ambiguity of civilization. It’s a very grim reflection on human nature. Survival instincts clash with morality which can lead to brutality. It’s been a while since I read it, but it still lingers in the back of my mind so I had to put it on the list.

The Myth of Choice

**This is not my original work. I received it in an email from a group I joined called “Simplifying Socialism.”**

We’re told capitalism is freedom because it gives us choice. Thousands of products, dozens of brands, endless options. Pick your sneakers, your streaming service, your fast-food meal. The market is democracy in action, right?

But peek behind the curtain and you’ll see how “free” the choices we make actually are.

Abundance as Illusion

Walk into any grocery store and you’ll see aisle after aisle packed with competing brands. Twenty different cereals, fifty kinds of chips, hundreds of drink options. It feels like abundance. But behind the labels, the vast majority of those products are owned by the same handful of corporations. Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Kraft Heinz — a tiny cluster of companies control most of what fills the shelves.

What looks like competition is often monopoly in disguise. The “choice” isn’t between different visions of production or different systems of ownership. It’s just which logo you want stamped on the same profit-driven structure.

This isn’t just food. Tech is the same story. We’re told we have freedom because we can pick Apple or Samsung, Android or iPhone. But each comes with its own traps (proprietary software, built-in obsolescence, surveillance baked into the product). The decision is narrowed to surface-level differences while the real power remains untouched.

The illusion of abundance is shoved down our throats as we are relegated from humans to consumers.

Essentials Without Real Options

The illusion gets crueler when we look at the choices that actually matter for survival.

Healthcare: You can choose between insurance plans, but every option is unaffordable, confusing, and leaves you vulnerable. Millions still go bankrupt over medical bills. Your healthcare is often tied to your employment. Where’s the freedom in that?
Housing: You can pick your landlord, but the rent keeps climbing. You can choose between renting forever or drowning in mortgage debt. Owning a home isn’t a dream for most — it’s a chain and shackles.
Work: You can choose which boss to sell your labor to, but you can’t opt out of selling it entirely. Unless you’re independently wealthy, your “choice” is which workplace will exploit you. Fear not, you can make the choice to go into business for yourself (if you have good credit).

Capitalism calls this freedom, but it’s a false freedom. A choice within limits you didn’t set, with outcomes you can’t control. Real freedom lies not in the illusion of choice, but in the ability to live day-to-day without the worry of hospital bills or rising rent prices destroying our dignity.

Manufactured Desires

Even when options exist, they’re shaped by advertising and cultural pressure. “Choice” becomes less about what you want and more about what you’ve been convinced to want.

Do you really need a new phone every year, or has marketing manufactured that need? Do you choose fast fashion because it’s what you want, or because the industry deliberately conditions you to keep buying at the pace of their profits? Do you have any use whatsoever for Birkenstocks, or do you want them because they are trendy right now?

Capitalism sells us the story that we’re sovereign consumers making rational decisions. But in reality, our desires are engineered, our needs distorted, and our choices narrowed to what generates profit. Capitalism wins when companies succeed at turning our wants into needs, or at least by making us think that we need things we absolutely do not.

Freedom vs. Necessity

Here’s the Marxist insight: freedom isn’t about picking between products; it’s about control over the conditions of your life.

Choosing between Uber and Lyft is not real freedom.
Choosing between ten brands of sneakers is not real freedom.
Choosing between healthcare plans that all bankrupt you is not real freedom.

Freedom is having power over how your labor is used, how resources are distributed, and how your community is shaped. It’s the ability to decide not just between products, but between systems, to collectively govern the economy instead of being governed by it.

That kind of choice, democratic, collective, meaningful, is what socialism points toward. A society built on real collaboration instead of false competition is what we are missing out on by continuing to accept capitalism. Our labor keeps the machine going but instead of reward we are met with a whip to the back proclaiming that we must “work harder!” That is the reality of capitalism.

Conclusion

Capitalism hands us a menu full of small, shallow choices while stripping us of the big ones that matter. We can debate endlessly about which streaming service to pay for, but we have no say in whether housing is affordable, whether our cities are polluted, or whether our labor enriches us or someone else.

Socialism isn’t about taking away freedom. It’s about making real freedom possible. Because the ability to pick between fifty cereals means nothing if you can’t afford breakfast. We can, and we must, leave capitalism in the “museum of antiquities,” as Engels put it.

The future belongs to us, but it will not be handed to us.

As An Anarcho-Communist/Libertarian Socialist

As an anarcho-communist/libertarian socialist, I believe…

… in the abolition of capitalism, a system built on exploitation, hierarchy, and the commodification of human life

… in the abolition of the state, which exists only to enforce domination, protect property, and preserve inequality

… in mutual aid, where people support one another freely, without coercion or profit

… in solidarity, where the liberation of one is bound up with the liberation of all

… in free association and voluntary cooperation, where communities govern themselves collectively

… in dismantling all hierarchies — economic, political, and social — so that no one has power over another

… in common ownership of resources, where life’s necessities are freely shared rather than sold

… in a world where care replaces coercion, freedom replaces domination, and collective flourishing replaces individual greed.

When “A Life is a Life” Rings Hollow

Recently, I commented on someone’s Facebook post regarding Charlie Kirk’s death: “Rest in piss.” The poster unfriended me as a result, and scolded me with the phrase “A life is a life.” On the surface, that sounds noble, even Christian. But the same person openly supports Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That contradiction deserves to be unpacked.

Jesus told His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44). Many Christians take this as a call to respond to hatred with grace. By that standard, mocking Kirk after death is uncharitable.

But Christianity also has another thread: he prophetic tradition. The Hebrew prophets denounced kings and rulers with brutal honesty. Jesus Himself called Herod “that fox” (Luke 13:32) and condemned religious leaders as “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27). Sharp words, in this tradition, are not petty insults but moral indictments. Whether my words fall into that tradition is up for debate. But the precedent stands.

If someone insists “a life is a life,” then Christian teaching requires consistency. God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). Every life, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is of equal worth. Jesus went further, placing special emphasis on the vulnerable: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matthew 25:40)

Supporting a war that takes thousands of innocent lives undermines the very principle they tried to use against me. The prophets warned Israel itself of judgment when it oppressed others: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” (Amos 5:24) You cannot bless bombs and call it Christian compassion.

So which stance is more at odds with Christianity? A sharp insult aimed at a pundit whose rhetoric fuels division, or support for state violence that kills children? If we measure by the Gospel’s core commitments — justice, mercy, peacemaking — the second weighs heavier.

Christianity calls us not just to kindness in tone but to solidarity with the oppressed. “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9) is not a suggestion. It is a central demand of discipleship.

A life is a life. But if we really believe that, then it applies to every human beings, not just to the ones we admire politically. If we claim Christianity, we cannot apply compassion selectively. It is hypocrisy to weep for a pundit’s dignity while ignoring the suffering of children under bombs. If Christ’s words mean anything, they demand more from us than that.

Freedom, American-Style: Guns Over Healthcare

It says a lot about the state of America when you point out that the U.S. has fallen to 57th place in the global freedom index, and the response you get from a Trump supporter is: “Yeah, well, I get to own guns.”

This is the American illusion of freedom distilled into a single sentence. Forget healthcare, forget workers’ rights, forget privacy, forget the surveillance state, forget the crushing weight of debt—because hey, you can still buy a gun. That’s supposed to make us the freest country on Earth.

But what kind of freedom is that, really? Is it freedom when millions can’t afford basic healthcare? When a medical emergency can bankrupt a family? When corporations own politicians, and workers are trapped in jobs just to keep health insurance? Is it freedom when your choices are narrowed down to which corporate brand you’ll consume, which billionaire will own your data, and which politician will fail you more slowly?

The gun argument is really a confession. It’s saying: “We’ve lost so much freedom that the only one we cling to is the ability to arm ourselves.” Guns have become the consolation prize in a country where every other right and protection is chipped away.

You can’t afford insulin, but you can afford an AR-15. You can’t get mental healthcare, but you can stockpile ammo. You can’t get your child’s asthma medication covered, but you can walk into a Walmart and walk out with a weapon of war. This isn’t freedom. It’s a parody of it.

Real freedom isn’t just the right to own a gun. Real freedom is the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy, to have control over your workplace and your government, to exist without being exploited by corporations or surveilled by the state. Real freedom is collective, not individualistic. It’s not about clutching a weapon in the ruins, it’s about building a society where weapons aren’t necessary.

The sad truth is that when a Trump supporter says “I get to own guns,” what they’re really saying is: “This is the only freedom I have left, and I’m going to cling to it no matter what else is taken from me.” But clinging to a single hollow freedom while the rest are stripped away isn’t liberty. It’s defeat dressed up as patriotism.

And that’s why America is 57th in freedom. Because we’ve traded healthcare for hardware, dignity for firepower, and genuine liberty for a cheap illusion of it.

Selective Mourning and Manufactured Outrage

When a right-wing figure dies, suddenly the people who spend their days justifying or ignoring violence discover empathy. They’ll tell you “a death is a death” as if life holds equal value across the board in their worldview. But where are those words when children are gunned down in schools? Where is that empathy when Palestinian families are slaughtered under U.S.-funded bombs? Where is it when systemic violence claims lives every single day?

It’s not there. Because for them, “a death is a death” doesn’t mean all lives matter. It means their lives matter. It means people who share their ideology deserve to be grieved publicly and sanctified, while the countless victims of the systems they defend are dismissed as “collateral damage.”

This selective mourning is not compassion. It’s politics dressed up as morality. It’s weaponized empathy, trotted out to silence critique and demand reverence for people who built their careers on dehumanizing others.

If you only recognize the humanity of those who look like you, think like you, or vote like you, then you don’t actually value human life, you value your tribe.

Until these same voices express outrage with the same urgency for the deaths of the powerless, the dispossessed, the marginalized, their sanctimony rings hollow.

A death isn’t just a death when power decides whose life is worthy of grief and whose is not. And if we’re going to talk about respect for the dead, then we need to start with respect for the living, the ones whose deaths could have been prevented if empathy weren’t rationed out by ideology.

Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?

The September 11th attacks shocked the world, but the question of why they happened — and whether they could have been prevented — has complex answers. While it’s easy to reduce the tragedy to “terrorists hate America,” the reality is far more nuanced. U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East played a major role in creating the conditions of al-Qaeda’s attacks.

Osama bin Laden didn’t randomly choose the U.S. as a target. His motivations were explicitly tied to American actions in the Middle East such as:

U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia: After the Gulf War (1990-1991), the U.S. stationed forces in the kingdom that hosts Islam’s two holiest sites. Bin Laden called this “the greatest of calamities” and used it to rally followers.

Support for Israel: U.S. financial and military support for Israel, especially during the Palestinian intifadas, was repeatedly cited in al-Qaeda statements.

Sanctions and bombings in Iraq: The 1990s saw widespread suffering from U.S.-led sanctions and military actions, which bin Laden highlighted as crimes against Muslims.

Backing authoritarian regimes: Support for rulers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere fed narratives of Western oppression.

Bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa called for expelling U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. His 1998 fatwa, issued jointly with other jihadist leaders went further: it authorized attacks on Americans, including civilians, citing U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, sanctions and bombings in Iraq, and support for Israel.

Even after 9/11, he framed the attacks as a defensive retaliation against decades of U.S. policies harming Muslims.

Even American authorities and politicians recognized that foreign policy mattered.

The 9/11 Commission Report (2004): Directly linked al-Qaeda’s motivations to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Middle East policies.

CIA analysts and intelligence officers repeatedly stated that bin Laden’s grievances were policy-driven, not about “hating American freedom.”

Political leaders such as Bill Clinton admitted troop presence enraged bin Laden, and even George W. Bush acknowledged the strategic challenge of stationing forces in Saudi Arabia.

Now, the question is “Could it have been prevented?” Experts highlight several ways different choices might have reduced the risk such as…

Moving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia sooner could have removed the most symbolic grievance. Reducing heavy-handed interventions, rethinking support for authoritarian regimes, and avoiding civilian harm could have undermined the al-Qaeda narrative.

Agencies had multiple warnings that something was going to happen but failed to connect the dots. Better sharing might have stopped the plot.

Targeting the financial and communications networks of extremist groups early could have reduced recruitment. And investments in education and development could have made al-Qaeda’s message less appealing to potential recruits.

Even small adjustments in U.S. policy and intelligence could have drastically lowered the likelihood of the attacks.

9/11 wasn’t simply an attack on American freedoms, it was a violent response to decades of U.S. actions in the Middle East. Understanding these connections isn’t about excusing terrorism; it’s about recognizing how foreign policy decisions have real-world consequences. By studying history, we can see how better choices might prevent future tragedies.

TL/DR: 9/11 wasn’t random. Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. in response to American policies in the Middle East: troops in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel, sanctions and bombings in Iraq, and backing authoritarian regimes. Bin Laden’s fatwas explicitly cited these grievances. U.S. officials later acknowledged the connection. Better foreign policy, intelligent coordination, and limiting extremist networks might have prevented the attacks

Does Love Exist? A Cynic’s Reflection

Keep in mind that I’m writing this as a cynical, misanthropic pessimist, okay? But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declare with a mix of bitterness and certainty that “love doesn’t exist.” As if it’s some grand revelation. As if anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Again, coming from a cynist, I think this particular claim misses the mark. Love is real and it’s one of the most undeniable forces in human life.

When someone insists love isn’t real, they’re usually speaking out of pain, disappointment, or distrust. Maybe they were betrayed by a partner, so now love seems like nothing more than a manipulation. Maybe they’ve embraced a biological reductionism: “love is just chemicals firing off in the brain so it doesn’t count.” Maybe they’ve taken their own misanthropy so far that they can’t imagine people acting out of genuine care for one another. I sympathize with all of that, but I don’t buy the conclusion.

If we deny love because it can be explained chemically, we’d have to deny everything else too such as joy, grief, awe, even the taste of a favorite meal. Reduction doesn’t mean negation. Love might be tied to hormones and neurons, but so is every other human experience. That doesn’t make it unreal. It makes it embodied.

If we deny love because people fail at it, because they betray or exploit in its name, then we’d have to deny courage, kindness, or justice too. Every virtue gets betrayed. That doesn’t erase the thing itself, it only proves how fragile and valuable it is.

Love shows up in too many undeniable forms to write it off. A parent staying awake with a sick child. Friends carrying each other through decades of hardship. Strangers risking something for people they’ll never see again. Protestors linking arms against police lines for the sake of those they’ll never meet. Even grief is a form of love. What else is mourning but love with nowhere to go?

Cynicism has its uses. It can cut through illusion and sentimentality. But cynicism that denies love altogether becomes just another illusion, one that pretends detachment will protect us from hurt. In reality, it only leaves us emptier.

Love exists. It’s not perfect, not eternal, not invulnerable. But it is as real as anything else that shapes our lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make us stronger; it only makes us lonelier.