Inertia, when applied to humans, means that you continue indefinitely in whatever state of activity you’re in. If you’re in a state of rest, you continue in a state of rest. If you’re mindlessly doing something, you continue to mindlessly do it. The key here is that for inertia to be present, a person has to at least partially surrender conscious control. We could say that inertia is the temporal manifestation of two concepts that have been discussed a lot in this column: numbness and the experiential vacuum.
In other words, numbness does not always lead to a state of stillness, It can also lead to a state of repetitive motion activity. This should be distinguished from a routine action which has a beginning, a middle and an end and which forms a coherent part of a larger life narrative. A routine action is performed through conscious control to achieve a specified purpose. Shaving, making the bed, washing clothes, putting gas in the car.
This is all very different from the endless movement of the different forms in a lava lamp, and the endless addictive behavior of an addict who has little or no control over what he is doing. The addict has little or no conscious choice over whether or not to keep moving in an addictive manner. The numbness pushes the person to keep moving in order to try to pull into a more vibrant state of mind. And the addictive kick works in conjunction with the addictive action to help draw the addict temporarily out of his foundational numbness.
I say temporarily, because an addictive kick is an attempt to diminish symptoms of inertia and doesn’t address the long term problems of permanently eliminating the numbness from the person’s life. In the long run, the addict needs more than a seemingly endless motion to pull him out of his vacuum state of mind. Which is why the inertia action keeps moving on.
Inertia exists in opposition to two other distinct human conditions. One is freedom. In this case, I am referring to freedom as the situation where a person does have control over his actions and is psychologically vibrantly alive enough such that he doesn’t feel a need to resort to unconscious repetitive inertia actions in order to feel alive. This, of course, is the ideal human condition in terms of human comfort levels, happiness and functionality. But real freedom usually requires a certain amount of grounding in a more traditional natural environment, which is simply not readily available for most people today. And without that grounding, those people are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the experiential vacuum, of numbness.
Which is why so many people today purposely create the other situation under consideration today- namely oppression – in order to pull themselves out of their numbness and escape the control by their inertia actions. In other words, oppression is not always simply thrust upon a person against his will. Sometimes, it is created by the numb person himself to act as a form of overstimulating shock therapy. A good example of this is all the right-wing conspiracy theories percolating in the United States today, theories such as those of QAnon. Sometimes oppression is provoked among real live adversaries in the external world. Those same right-wing people, who were involved in the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington D.C. have provoked a response from the American government in which many of the participants are going to end up going to jail.
Nothing like a revolution to shock a person out of his external world inertia. And the oppression provided by self-inflicted punishment in the form of being locked up in jail may be precisely what some of the insurrectionists need to pull away from the inertia in their lives. The jail time gives them a cause as well as making them a cause for others.
The discomfort from inertia can lead to desperate pain-filled responses in order to get rid of it. That’s how awful a relentless inertia can be.