I had started that book after a couple of people, not close friends, but people I knew who were my age had committed suicide. It just became obvious that something was going on. For the upper-middle class, particularly younger people, things are often, materially, very comfortable. And there’s also often a great sadness and emptiness. And it’s difficult to think about and difficult to come up with answers in the abstract.
I think it is true that we all worship and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different.
For instance, pleasure or drugs. Or…some kind of devotion to a pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline. Comprising one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement.
Part of the allure of both drugs and entertainment is to escape from my problems and my life and having to be stuck in here. I can pretend I’m James Bond or someone. It just seems fine over the short haul. As a way of life, it doesn’t work all that well though.
If talking about the more general allure of drugs to the extent that I understand, it seems to me to be, (and this isn’t a very original thing to say,) a pretty natural extension of corporate capitalist logic, which is, I want to feel exactly the way I want to feel, which is good for exactly this long and so I will exchange a certain amount of cash for this substance, and I will do it, but it’s all, of course, a lie, because the control gradually goes away and it stops being that I want to do it, it becomes that I feel I need to do it. And that shift from, I-want-something, to, I-feel-I-need-it, is a big one.
Whatever the conditions of hopelessness have to do with the one idea I think kids get exposed to very early that “you are the most important and what you want is the most important and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires”, the ideology perpetrated by advertising and entertainment, and the economy thrives on it.
It’s hard not to feel that way. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. Everything in your own immediate experience supports your deep belief that YOU are the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.
Do-what-you-want, gratify-your-appetites, that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire – we see it with children – does not seems to me to be happiness, but rather a strange kind of slavery, because corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish, self-centered, and wanting to have fun all the time, is the best way to sell you things.
Language like, the wounded inner child, the inner pain, is part of the pop psychological movement, a sort of popular Freudianism that has its own paradox, which is that the more we are taught to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration, and the more we remain children.
No nobody talks about it as such though. They talk about it as the freedom of choice. You have the right to have things, and spend this much money and you can have this stuff. It works very well as a system for running an economy and keeping goods produced and sold. The ways in which it doesn’t work are much more difficult to talk about.
One of the things it causes is tension and unhappiness in people. The paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to. Because I can say to you, “Feeling uneasy? Life feels empty?”‘Well, here’s something you can buy or something you can go do.” The economics term is inelasticity of demand. I demand all the time, no matter what the price of it is. And it works really well in an economic way.
What’s insidious about entertainment is that it is so god damn entertaining. If fighting against entertainment is even required, how does one do it. One is to direct the attack only to people who are willing to listen to the complexity, but those aren’t the people who are enslaved by entertainment anyway. Or to find some way to make the attack on entertainment entertaining in which case you’ve been captured by the very thing you’re fighting against.