SpaceX successfully rockets Crew Dragon ship for astronauts into space.

I was there to view this launch from as close as you can get. Even with all the waiting in queues, the standing around and the security theater, it was worth every moment of inconvenience and annoyance to stand across the lagoon and watch that violent candle punch its way into the sky.

It’s easy to see why so many — liberals and conservatives alike — are opposed to projects like this, are offended in a deep sense by their very existence. Hearing the palpable excitement and the cheers of the SpaceX employees and NASA staff over the audio feed as the rocket flawlessly ascended into the exosphere, the moment of triumph had united all of us into a collective assemblage, a unit that could threaten existing orders, could take unified action, could become a common polity.

Instead of the reasons people profess to believe something, I attempt to discern the true rationale behind their ideological approach. And in this case, our current social acculturation simply demands that we disavow collective actions like these, that we disdain anyone or anything who wishes to transcend our individual limitations, who wants more than to have us as pawns hopping around a chessboard, doomed to be picked off the forces of economic “reality.”

No, SpaceX and NASA isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But the nitpicks and remonstrances of the apathetic naysayers reveal more than they know: that they want us to stay earthbound in reality and in philosophy, with no dreams, no aspirations, nothing but Jackson’s “conditions of absolute reality.”

This is not how humans live. This is not how I live or can live. I reject and deny these conditions, just as the launch did. Just as we all should.