Daily Reflections

08/30/2022

Tears for Fears Might Just Have Been Right

“Everybody wants to rule the world”

I remember, vaguely, when that video premiered on MTV. In the dining room at my grandparents’ house. The stale and sweet odor of a very polish dinner (from the night before) wafting past the Formica countertops and over the firm, food speckled flat carpeting. There was a point in our mass media culture when there were only a few channels, and everyone had the same sense of what was on. Parents and their children had MTV, for example, on for background noise. Like a picture filled novelty radio.

And we all knew the song. Heavy rotation wasn’t a targeted marketing ploy at that point in Music Television’s tragic exodus from Walking like Egyptians to a promise land in The Real World. There simply wasn’t a ton of content for a 24-hour music video channel, so repeats were necessary. But it saved us the trouble of counting seconds on rewind to hear that song again on our cassette deck.

So it comes on, at an unremarkable time in the afternoon. My Aunts, Lori and Sandy were finishing up laundry or something while discussing how very much they too would like to rule the world. I spoke up.

“Well, I don’t.”

Both of these young aunts of mine and I had a rapport as they were my regular babysitters, and that shared experience allowed them to shift quite seamlessly to a conversation with a 6 year old contrarian. So much a contrarian at that age, I imagine I could have auditioned for Oscar the Grouch had my beard filled out a decade early.

It is funny to me now that I couldn’t have possibly know what a contrarian was at that age, let alone spell it, but I was insightful enough to realize the following when asked by my aunts,

“Why wouldn’t you want to rule the world?”

“It would be boring,” I snapped immediately, “and a lot of work.”

The laughter that erupted could have caused the explosion of George Michael’s jukebox. But here’s the thing, I don’t think I was wrong. I remember thinking about how much responsibility that would be. I couldn’t have possibly had enough peripheral awareness or wholistic thinking about me in or hidden in the depth of my Oshkosh B’Gosh overall pockets. Just a sense. The kind of insight only children have. Aftershocks of the connection to the source being severed so recently.

What would it really mean to rule the world? To be responsible for the order of it all? To keep all the trains running on time. To monitor everything as it unfolds across myriad self-perpetuating cultural and sociological narratives – the conscious and unconscious ones. Even considering such a task with marginally accurate ideation is enough to want to take shelter under the umbrella of a divine architect.

So, what then? Do we want to actually run the show? I think my six-year-old self gets the prize for best appraisal. Nobody wants to rule the world is these are the conditions. Instead, I think, we want the world to make sense all the time. To do so, we have to know what all the rules are in advance. Half of playing this game is just learning the rules and I think all of us players know that.

That’s why there are so many nuances, versions and facelifts to the basic tenets of living. We all need to feel in control. It’s soothing. And control is nothing more than knowing the outcome in advance. By this definition, yeah…

“Everybody wants to rule the world”

But six-year-old me was right about the ramifications of wanting to, just as surely as teenage me was grateful that satellite bangs would be flattened by a raspberry beret before I started liking girls.