Post by dudetyson on Aug 28, 2011 20:49:47 GMT -6
Fight Club is a great movie. Lately its attack on consumerism, in the name of actually leading an authentic life, has very much resonated with me.
I’ve often defended consumerism from random varieties of leftists. As an enthusiastic Trot-bot, I have usually moaned that the working class deserves to have its iPods and that anything else is idealist, hippy, primitivist, sentimental, confused, fair-trade, reformist deviation from the pure light of Lenin’s wisdom.
Fight Club’s anti-consumerism appealed to me more when I was a teenager, too, and I hesitate to admit that this was probably because I was provided for. I was never really into stuff anyway, but whatever I wanted, I got. My parents often fretted because during birthdays and Christmases, I just really wouldn’t request anything but a list of odd books (and satanically-titled metal albums, before I learned how to download; that always made for a nice gift from Aunt Phyllis). However, I was never one of the kids whose parents couldn’t afford to get them video games…or healthcare, or whatever.
However, this was before I was thrust into the world of having to support myself. To be honest I’m not 100% in that world yet, but the percentage is definitely progressing. Piece by piece, things I took for granted as a child are now on me, at a time when making good money fresh out of college is anything but guaranteed.
Unlike all the people who clamor that when you grow up and face reality you become a staunch conservative, entering fiscal adulthood has only made me want to take the axe to the bank accounts of the elite all the more. This is probably because I’m not a bootlicking tool who responds to my circumstances and problems by justifying them, but hey, if that’s your thing, who am I to judge?
Getting back to the point – I wasn’t sure precisely what my relationship to consumerism/things would become as I actually became burdened with paying for all this shit. I must again painfully admit that, at first, I faced a strong temptation to buy into it all.
I started thinking that maybe I should get nice new clothes, maybe even a new car. Definitely a nice place. I wanted to keep up with all the latest games, all the latest computer-phone supergadgets. And I'd have to have a big enough salary to pay for all this. But why?
Part of it was just an honest interest in these things, and my likely deflection from having half of them I consider grounds for class rage. Part of it was a temptation to pretend that my economic trajectory is considerably higher than it realistically is.
But there was something deeper, beneath all of that. What had happened to me?
When I was young, and spending my adolescence reflecting on the deep, morally and perhaps literally apocalyptic tensions and problems of this planet, I was inspired by a short essay called “Catechism of a Revolutionist.” To this day it is the fiercest piece of writing I have ever encountered. Not surprisingly it reflected my mood. In those times I was more politically informed by consumer-based politics. I thought my mere subsistence was supporting the wretched oppression of people in warzones and sweatshops around the world, and perhaps indirectly my own, too. So right off the bat I was not morally neutral, but in the red. I was making a decision that a human being cannot look at themselves in a mirror without shame unless they are dedicating themselves, to the point of death, to the end of the system they live under. So I inscribed the Catechism into my soul:
“The revolutionist is a person consecrated and doomed. He is merciless toward the state and toward the whole formal social structure of educated society; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.”
“The revolutionist knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.”
That was my life once. What happened to me since?
I believe I took that bit about “if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily” a little too far. No, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about destroying the conventions – I wasn’t enthusiastic enough. While having these adolescent reflections on our species’ nightmare history and existence, I also made a decision to make a compromise. I didn’t feel capable of waging the all-out terrorist insurrection which the Catechism recommends, nor would it in retrospect even have accomplished anything. So I furiously resolved not to make any drastic moves just yet, but to someday figure out exactly what I should do -- and to do it.
However, I became much too accustomed to this separate peace, this cold war between myself and the political order. In the final analysis, I didn’t sustain my hatred enough.
Why didn’t I? Actually, for a rather sunny and positive reason – I found answers. I stumbled upon the methods which Lenin both advocated and successfully practiced for building a mass revolt. They were much less destructive, much more transformative, much more majority-oriented, and much more conceivably effective than the Catechism’s pure offensive. I decided that this massive baseline scorn for everything I saw could be replaced by an articulated idea, a clearly laid-out plan. I decided that correct ideas backed up by historical facts and statistical evidence, rather than a moral insistence, would sustain my campaign.
However, throughout my participation in the socialist movement, I have found that the simple acknowledgment of the pragmatism or accuracy of Marxism is NOT REMOTELY enough to keep you involved.
Marxism claims to be mostly based in the economic interests of the working class. Yes, ultimately for a marxist revolutionary movement to succeed, the working class’ own simple desire to have enough, to have more, to not be exploited is the primary engine of the movement.
However, for the front line troops and early adopters who actually lay the groundwork for the success of this mass realization and mass rebellion, it’s not that simple. It’s extremely rare that sincere political activity will get you anything personally in a nonrevolutionary period, unless of course you are a sellout taking the subtle bribes of the system to be one of its spokespeople. Actually in a mundane sense it will probably make your life worse. You will spend time and money. You will encounter the full spectrum of humanity’s collective failures, on the other side and in your own. Sometimes, rarely, your organizing can get you a better contract at your job. It can also get you fired. You might even end up with an arrest record, or be assaulted by cops or right-wingers.
Clearly, an emotional drive above and beyond material self-interest is required to stick with this. I had tried to “slow down, enjoy life, enjoy the little things” far too much to tolerate the above penalties. My mistake, because even the little things are wretched and spoiled. Again, my mistake was that I didn’t sustain my hatred. So I’m reversing my mistake. I’m not pretending I’m okay, just to get by. This planet is in the midst of something far worse than the Dark Ages, and yes, it does materially and emotionally affect me even if my efforts cannot immediately fix it, and I’m not going to emotionally push that away.
This reversal in my thoughts has made me come to a different conclusion about my comfortable compromise with consumerism (not that I would probably be able to afford living up to it anyway).
We are not slaves to our possessions simply because we want to have certain things in order to eagerly use and consume them. We are slaves to our possessions because we must overwork ourselves to maintain them in order to keep up the appearance of being a stable, competent, upstanding participant in our nation’s dominant culture. Having a shitty car or apartment does the same thing to you as being gay: perhaps it doesn’t class you with homeless people or violent criminals, but it makes you distinctively NOT a model American.
I am NOT a model American. Nor do I feel that propping myself up as one will really open any doors for me, for the things I truly want to do -- a recent realization. I will NOT throw away my life filling out endless applications, most of them pointless and hopeless, I will not throw away my life going to extra school with likely no sure career at the end of it, I will not work unpaid internships, I will not freak out over grades or image or money to the extent required to land me a nice job which includes me in the Model Americans and allows me to afford a nice new car. Fuck you all, all you Model Americans who expect me to also get caught up in your whitebread “nice neat flaming little shit,” to quote Tyler Durden. I have a revolution to be building.
Politically materialist, I find in my personal life I am supremely spiritual. The great or terrible moments of my life are not the moments of most intense physical pain or pleasure, or my dull daily discomforts. They are not my new possessions, nor my loss of them. They are not my graduations. Even my loves, with all the emotional intensity they bring me, pale in comparison to my personal forward march. Instead I live for moments of hell-bent resolution, and the perilous meanderings, the falls and the returns, of persevering in that resolution. I live for the shocked moments of illusions stripped away, the dawning that what I know and am has a burning relevance to all the rest of our species, and all of the silent connectings of one truth to another truth inside my mind. I live mostly for the vocalized, embodied, articulated connectings of truth to truth in OTHER people’s minds – speeches, writings, conversations, distribution of print material, and of course, less verbal and more bodily activities such as mass marches have an incredible communicative ability of their own.
If Marx said that humanity makes history, but not in circumstances of its own choosing, is this determinism? We could argue that all a person’s thoughts emerge from some material circumstance or another, which is also a Marxist theme – but no matter what correlations or correspondences we draw, we cannot prove that LITERALLY every thought comes from the material realm.
What, then, is this mysterious substance by which humanity, circumstances notwithstanding, freely makes history? Because I believe Marx was right on this one – and so is James Cameron in Terminator – NO FATE. All the material ducks lined up in a row do not guarantee any movement forward or backward; it is up to us. So what is this agency we have? Is it a soul? And what, then, is a soul? What is it made of? What is this capacity I have to experience the world, what is it made of? Is mind a substance like matter? Are emotions really just chemicals, or are they not also – emotions! Do we have a will? Is it free? Does it matter? What could a free will possibly mean – randomness? Does it mean that it follows its own patterns, inscribed in some spirit-realm, perhaps another dimension, or a dispersed network of quantum entanglements in our neurons? And who or what, then, created these patterns, and how does that make us free?
I don’t pretend to have an answer. Instead I thrill in the glory, the beauty and mystery of it. I live for my Will. I live for my Soul, and also those of others – for Humanity, and not the gentle, tolerant picture of humanity, but its besieged Wills, as they buckle under the weight of massive, mechanical institutions, mired in a war to lift themselves out of the mud, the primordial soup. I live for the emerging monster of a united global underclass, still sleeping beneath the waves, but stirring. I live for the sometimes-waking, sometimes-slumbering souls and wills of others, cohering and dissolving and re-solidifying, which form the substance of the great sleeping monster’s semi-consciousness.
I am a soldier of the World-Spirit. I am not, however, in support of the cheap, superficial zeitgeist described by Hegel, which was nothing but each society’s comfortable prejudices and illusions about itself. I am a soldier of the World-Spirit’s insurgent subconscious-become-awake, its insurgent truth, its insurgent desire and will. Mine is a religion where solitary spiritual seeking and the clacking steps, the many-voiced songs of marching columns converge into synonymity. The last line of the Catechism: “To weld this world into one single unconquerable and all-destructive force -- this is our organization, our conspiracy, our task.”
I know what was inside Jesus that made him feel that living under a death sentence was his destiny. Life is nothing but hideous random circumstances and disappointed hopes; it is of no value. Not Life, but Living – willpower, moods, decisions – is everything. Jesus said,
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26
Or more succinctly in Matthew 16:24,
“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”
I’ve often defended consumerism from random varieties of leftists. As an enthusiastic Trot-bot, I have usually moaned that the working class deserves to have its iPods and that anything else is idealist, hippy, primitivist, sentimental, confused, fair-trade, reformist deviation from the pure light of Lenin’s wisdom.
Fight Club’s anti-consumerism appealed to me more when I was a teenager, too, and I hesitate to admit that this was probably because I was provided for. I was never really into stuff anyway, but whatever I wanted, I got. My parents often fretted because during birthdays and Christmases, I just really wouldn’t request anything but a list of odd books (and satanically-titled metal albums, before I learned how to download; that always made for a nice gift from Aunt Phyllis). However, I was never one of the kids whose parents couldn’t afford to get them video games…or healthcare, or whatever.
However, this was before I was thrust into the world of having to support myself. To be honest I’m not 100% in that world yet, but the percentage is definitely progressing. Piece by piece, things I took for granted as a child are now on me, at a time when making good money fresh out of college is anything but guaranteed.
Unlike all the people who clamor that when you grow up and face reality you become a staunch conservative, entering fiscal adulthood has only made me want to take the axe to the bank accounts of the elite all the more. This is probably because I’m not a bootlicking tool who responds to my circumstances and problems by justifying them, but hey, if that’s your thing, who am I to judge?
Getting back to the point – I wasn’t sure precisely what my relationship to consumerism/things would become as I actually became burdened with paying for all this shit. I must again painfully admit that, at first, I faced a strong temptation to buy into it all.
I started thinking that maybe I should get nice new clothes, maybe even a new car. Definitely a nice place. I wanted to keep up with all the latest games, all the latest computer-phone supergadgets. And I'd have to have a big enough salary to pay for all this. But why?
Part of it was just an honest interest in these things, and my likely deflection from having half of them I consider grounds for class rage. Part of it was a temptation to pretend that my economic trajectory is considerably higher than it realistically is.
But there was something deeper, beneath all of that. What had happened to me?
When I was young, and spending my adolescence reflecting on the deep, morally and perhaps literally apocalyptic tensions and problems of this planet, I was inspired by a short essay called “Catechism of a Revolutionist.” To this day it is the fiercest piece of writing I have ever encountered. Not surprisingly it reflected my mood. In those times I was more politically informed by consumer-based politics. I thought my mere subsistence was supporting the wretched oppression of people in warzones and sweatshops around the world, and perhaps indirectly my own, too. So right off the bat I was not morally neutral, but in the red. I was making a decision that a human being cannot look at themselves in a mirror without shame unless they are dedicating themselves, to the point of death, to the end of the system they live under. So I inscribed the Catechism into my soul:
“The revolutionist is a person consecrated and doomed. He is merciless toward the state and toward the whole formal social structure of educated society; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.”
“The revolutionist knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.”
That was my life once. What happened to me since?
I believe I took that bit about “if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily” a little too far. No, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about destroying the conventions – I wasn’t enthusiastic enough. While having these adolescent reflections on our species’ nightmare history and existence, I also made a decision to make a compromise. I didn’t feel capable of waging the all-out terrorist insurrection which the Catechism recommends, nor would it in retrospect even have accomplished anything. So I furiously resolved not to make any drastic moves just yet, but to someday figure out exactly what I should do -- and to do it.
However, I became much too accustomed to this separate peace, this cold war between myself and the political order. In the final analysis, I didn’t sustain my hatred enough.
Why didn’t I? Actually, for a rather sunny and positive reason – I found answers. I stumbled upon the methods which Lenin both advocated and successfully practiced for building a mass revolt. They were much less destructive, much more transformative, much more majority-oriented, and much more conceivably effective than the Catechism’s pure offensive. I decided that this massive baseline scorn for everything I saw could be replaced by an articulated idea, a clearly laid-out plan. I decided that correct ideas backed up by historical facts and statistical evidence, rather than a moral insistence, would sustain my campaign.
However, throughout my participation in the socialist movement, I have found that the simple acknowledgment of the pragmatism or accuracy of Marxism is NOT REMOTELY enough to keep you involved.
Marxism claims to be mostly based in the economic interests of the working class. Yes, ultimately for a marxist revolutionary movement to succeed, the working class’ own simple desire to have enough, to have more, to not be exploited is the primary engine of the movement.
However, for the front line troops and early adopters who actually lay the groundwork for the success of this mass realization and mass rebellion, it’s not that simple. It’s extremely rare that sincere political activity will get you anything personally in a nonrevolutionary period, unless of course you are a sellout taking the subtle bribes of the system to be one of its spokespeople. Actually in a mundane sense it will probably make your life worse. You will spend time and money. You will encounter the full spectrum of humanity’s collective failures, on the other side and in your own. Sometimes, rarely, your organizing can get you a better contract at your job. It can also get you fired. You might even end up with an arrest record, or be assaulted by cops or right-wingers.
Clearly, an emotional drive above and beyond material self-interest is required to stick with this. I had tried to “slow down, enjoy life, enjoy the little things” far too much to tolerate the above penalties. My mistake, because even the little things are wretched and spoiled. Again, my mistake was that I didn’t sustain my hatred. So I’m reversing my mistake. I’m not pretending I’m okay, just to get by. This planet is in the midst of something far worse than the Dark Ages, and yes, it does materially and emotionally affect me even if my efforts cannot immediately fix it, and I’m not going to emotionally push that away.
This reversal in my thoughts has made me come to a different conclusion about my comfortable compromise with consumerism (not that I would probably be able to afford living up to it anyway).
We are not slaves to our possessions simply because we want to have certain things in order to eagerly use and consume them. We are slaves to our possessions because we must overwork ourselves to maintain them in order to keep up the appearance of being a stable, competent, upstanding participant in our nation’s dominant culture. Having a shitty car or apartment does the same thing to you as being gay: perhaps it doesn’t class you with homeless people or violent criminals, but it makes you distinctively NOT a model American.
I am NOT a model American. Nor do I feel that propping myself up as one will really open any doors for me, for the things I truly want to do -- a recent realization. I will NOT throw away my life filling out endless applications, most of them pointless and hopeless, I will not throw away my life going to extra school with likely no sure career at the end of it, I will not work unpaid internships, I will not freak out over grades or image or money to the extent required to land me a nice job which includes me in the Model Americans and allows me to afford a nice new car. Fuck you all, all you Model Americans who expect me to also get caught up in your whitebread “nice neat flaming little shit,” to quote Tyler Durden. I have a revolution to be building.
Politically materialist, I find in my personal life I am supremely spiritual. The great or terrible moments of my life are not the moments of most intense physical pain or pleasure, or my dull daily discomforts. They are not my new possessions, nor my loss of them. They are not my graduations. Even my loves, with all the emotional intensity they bring me, pale in comparison to my personal forward march. Instead I live for moments of hell-bent resolution, and the perilous meanderings, the falls and the returns, of persevering in that resolution. I live for the shocked moments of illusions stripped away, the dawning that what I know and am has a burning relevance to all the rest of our species, and all of the silent connectings of one truth to another truth inside my mind. I live mostly for the vocalized, embodied, articulated connectings of truth to truth in OTHER people’s minds – speeches, writings, conversations, distribution of print material, and of course, less verbal and more bodily activities such as mass marches have an incredible communicative ability of their own.
If Marx said that humanity makes history, but not in circumstances of its own choosing, is this determinism? We could argue that all a person’s thoughts emerge from some material circumstance or another, which is also a Marxist theme – but no matter what correlations or correspondences we draw, we cannot prove that LITERALLY every thought comes from the material realm.
What, then, is this mysterious substance by which humanity, circumstances notwithstanding, freely makes history? Because I believe Marx was right on this one – and so is James Cameron in Terminator – NO FATE. All the material ducks lined up in a row do not guarantee any movement forward or backward; it is up to us. So what is this agency we have? Is it a soul? And what, then, is a soul? What is it made of? What is this capacity I have to experience the world, what is it made of? Is mind a substance like matter? Are emotions really just chemicals, or are they not also – emotions! Do we have a will? Is it free? Does it matter? What could a free will possibly mean – randomness? Does it mean that it follows its own patterns, inscribed in some spirit-realm, perhaps another dimension, or a dispersed network of quantum entanglements in our neurons? And who or what, then, created these patterns, and how does that make us free?
I don’t pretend to have an answer. Instead I thrill in the glory, the beauty and mystery of it. I live for my Will. I live for my Soul, and also those of others – for Humanity, and not the gentle, tolerant picture of humanity, but its besieged Wills, as they buckle under the weight of massive, mechanical institutions, mired in a war to lift themselves out of the mud, the primordial soup. I live for the emerging monster of a united global underclass, still sleeping beneath the waves, but stirring. I live for the sometimes-waking, sometimes-slumbering souls and wills of others, cohering and dissolving and re-solidifying, which form the substance of the great sleeping monster’s semi-consciousness.
I am a soldier of the World-Spirit. I am not, however, in support of the cheap, superficial zeitgeist described by Hegel, which was nothing but each society’s comfortable prejudices and illusions about itself. I am a soldier of the World-Spirit’s insurgent subconscious-become-awake, its insurgent truth, its insurgent desire and will. Mine is a religion where solitary spiritual seeking and the clacking steps, the many-voiced songs of marching columns converge into synonymity. The last line of the Catechism: “To weld this world into one single unconquerable and all-destructive force -- this is our organization, our conspiracy, our task.”
I know what was inside Jesus that made him feel that living under a death sentence was his destiny. Life is nothing but hideous random circumstances and disappointed hopes; it is of no value. Not Life, but Living – willpower, moods, decisions – is everything. Jesus said,
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26
Or more succinctly in Matthew 16:24,
“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”