Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“I guess it all really started in his youth. Back then, Keens believed in the Messianic message found in Marx and Engels, as well as in the propaganda of the Bolsheviks — of a future society that finds its generation in one glorious revolution that eliminates all of the injustices of the world, that dismantles the oppressive machinery of the capitalists and reassemble it into an efficient and equitable system managed and run by the workers. Even during the thirties he was hesitant to accept that the Bolshevik revolution had degenerated into a Kafkaesque Inquisition, into a despotism in which the State's ability to perform surveillance on the population was about the only place one could find infrastructural efficiency. He wanted to believe, you see. He wanted to think that there was some potential for a return to Eden, for a return to innocence, for a return to peace. But this had been lost in Russia. He finally turned his back on the Bolsheviks when they formed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. 'How could an alliance with the Nazis be expedient to the global revolution?' he thought. And so he was once again without hope. The War came and went without any great change. If anything, he become more misanthropic, less sympathetic to the idea of there being some kind of integrity that is inherent in each human. By the way, if you've ever read Mailer's The Naked and the Dead , then you'll understand his complaint — a lot of American soldiers could have killed a Nazi with nothing more than a noose. But that's neither here nor there. He had always hated the right. I guess he just never realized how pervasive many of the tenets of Nazism are in America, especially the Midwest and the Plains.

“The point, though, is that he began to feel disgusted by the left, too. He couldn't accept what they were espousing in the wake of the war, at the advent of the Cold War. Even the less political rebels that came later, during the fifties and the sixties, he viewed with skepticism. He thought their counter-culture to be just as contrived as the rigid mores of the squares. True, these people, he felt, were onto something; but he believed that an ethos founded upon hedonism and anarchy and placed under the specious banner of love was doomed to fail. The truth was that the majority of the hippies did not want to actually destroy privatized industry and subsidized murder. As Robespierre said of Danton, they wanted a revolution without the revolution. They didn't want to overturn anything; they just wanted an endless vacation from it. Endless summer — as though these fucking idiots were children between seventh and eighth grade. Soon enough, all the revolutionaries were on CBS.

“And now that's all you see — the summer of love, when everything was fucking groovy. When you read something like Roth's American Pastoral , it seems unreal, overstated — because you rarely hear about the few real radicals during that decade. You don't hear about the bombs. No, it’s just the fucking saccharine: Sonny Bono as opposed to Sam Melville, the Moody Blues instead of MC5. Get what I'm saying? Rock replaced by pop; radicalism replaced by infantile recalcitrance. All of the rebellion of the sixties has been defanged, eviscerated, repackaged. And your generation and my generation eat it up. The Sixties was about the music, say the infomercials. No, it wasn't. The radicals of the Sixties attempted to wrestle civilization from the hands of plutocracy, but the hippies weren’t up to it. And so that generation fucking failed. They gave up, became immured to the atrocities taking place around the world, and fell in line. Yes, they became everything they hated; they became the bourgeois cows grazing out in the suburbs because they grew up. Grew up. Matured.” He sighs. “And now the elite are too strong. They own everything — everything has been subsumed by the monolithic nature of capitalism. As Floyd said it most succinctly, we're all just bricks in the wall.

“So there's no hope now. Hope for a better world is a fucking pipe dream. Any serious critique of the elite and the institutions that they control will eventually be disseminated by the elite and the institutions they control. If it's successful, they benefit — they make money. If it fails, they benefit — their crimes remain unknown. They always benefit. But that's not what bothers me. It's the complacency of the people.

“Do you realize we're about five decades away from having an environment so denigrated and polluted that only a fraction of the people on the Earth will be able to live above poverty, and yet there is no effort to confront any of these problems. Why? Because it will hurt profit margins. Who the fuck cares? The longer we wait, the more sacrifices we will have to make in order to live a life that is worthwhile. You can give up the joy of owning a car now, or in fifteen years you can give up eating anything grown in Kansas because the entire fucking state has become a desert. And what do people decide? They keep their car. Fuck the future. It’s the myopia of capitalism — the type of consequentialism that even Bentham couldn’t endorse. These people are like the fucking Munduruku — a people with a language that lacks any word for a specific number greater than four.”

Okay.

“It's this type of myopia that drives me crazy. Why would someone make such an irrational choice? It's not simple laziness. It's more insidious than that, more virulent, more surreptitious. It's because modern capitalism has turned happiness into a series of commodities; people equate their status, not just their economic status, but also their social status and their sense of integrity, with the things by which they are surrounded. Do you see what this means? The context in which modern man finds himself is one of anonymous consumption. Every facet of his routine — his routine! — reminds him of this, and this profound emptiness that man feels in this society is only nurtured by the manner in which he performs his labor, the manner in which he consumes his food, the manner in which he experiences leisure. He is robbed not only of his spontaneity, but of his will to create, too. And it's only the most incorrigible who will be able to endure in this environment without being dehumanized and subdued. And this incorrigible person is the artist. It is only the artist who will be able to maintain. People will call him eccentric, which is nothing more than a polite way of saying, 'You don't know how to follow protocol.' Dick always found this amusing. Artists are almost always eccentric. Do you see? It's because they still have the will to create — and maybe that's all Nietzsche's will to power really is. It's the capacity to shape…to create oneself, even if almost every component of that creation is determined and imposed. It's that tiny bit of autonomy, of freedom, of play, within a predetermined system that makes an artist an artist, a philosopher a philosopher. And maybe that's all Nietzsche's amor fati really amounts to, too: having the power to appreciate your own impotence.

“And that's what makes the artist stand out, what makes his existence necessarily tragic — his desire to be liberated from a world in which he is necessarily confined. But the majority of people in this country have not proven themselves capable of remaining independent in the face of so relentless an enemy. And the result is a pitiful, vacuous, and passive consumer, what a lot of thinkers, most notably Ortega y Gasset, have called mass-man,” he says, now with less passion. “The emptiness of which I speak results in what Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague, which is more of a personality type defined by extremely antisocial tendencies than a disease.

“Look, the point is that the will of most people in contemporary society lacks uniqueness. This is not an accident. The volition of mass-man is manufactured and polished by an economic system that seeks efficiency in both consumption and production. It's just the nature of capitalism, especially now in its more mature stage. So maybe the elite are not evil; they just don't realize that the mechanisms that they endorse and get rich from squelch individuality. We have been surrounded by forces that seek to prevent critical or existential thought, that seek to diminish any knowledge of history seen through a universal or unpatriotic lens, that seek to ingrain in us the idea that capitalism is not confined to an historical epoch, but that it is the natural order, the only condition under which man will not end up in the throes of ignorance, superstition, and penury. The education system encourages this. The media encourages this. The pharmaceutical industry encourages this. And these industries not only own the means of production in their respective fields; they own the government as well. They have come to control every element that comprises the context of mass-man's daily life; consequently, they now control the definitions of symbols, the symbols by which man navigates through this world.”