Listen to this
I have been trying to think through and make sense of what it means to work across youth-adult relations in an age of authoritarianism and incipient fascist relations. What is my/our accountability across generations as an elder member of our global community? If I believe that the dominant discourse is becoming saturated with hatred and calls for violence against those most vulnerable in our societies across the world, what is my responsibility to those young people being immersed in that toxic stream of vitriol and misinformation?
Obviously, for those of us heavily invested in care as a central driving principle of our work and our lives, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The capacity for extreme violence at all levels, from the personal to the level of state sponsored genocide is escalating alongside a persistent effort to deny and obfuscate the fact it is and has occurred. The blatant erasure of what is right in front of our eyes and the denial of historical memory is a hall mark of fascist and authoritarian regimes wherever and whenever they come to power. The fabrication of violent enemies of the state as a justification of state sponsored violence is escalating around the world. The deaths of people simply trying to live their lives, at the hands of the military and here in the U.S. at the hands of multiple individuals with guns is unconscionably high and yet there is little to no accountability on the part of those who are ostensibly running the system of governance on our behalf. The deaths of our fellow planetary citizen non-combatants simply slide into the slipstream of a million media feeds inundating us with the psychotic babbling of a system no longer capable of reason or rational response.
I find myself astonished by the level of blatant moral corruption we are facing in the world of what Freud would term Thanatos or the death drive. Freud theorized that this drive towards self-destruction or self-harm operates largely unconsciously at the level of individual self-sabotage or self-destructive behavior. He imagined that it didn’t apply to societies as such, because societies represented civilization which was designed to repress and contain such destructive drives. He pointed out that the death drive could be channeled outward as aggression towards others but didn’t imagine a world in which the fundamental ethos of a society might become a drive towards self-destruction and death.
To understand how a society could become centered on Thantos as a driving force, we must understand the fundamentals of capitalism as a foundational logic for our contemporary world. Capitalism has for the duration of its time as the emerging dominant system of rule over the past 600 years or so, has been remarkably violent and unconscionably brutal in its treatment of all living things. From genocidal forays into indigenous cultures across the world, to the extractive exploitation of resources, to the enslavement of millions, and wars upon wars upon wars, capitalism has been responsible for the deaths of millions of humans and the extinction of innumerable species of plants and animals. As Marcuse argues, “capitalism – though framed as the affluent society – is predicated on the death, destruction, and domination of a great majority of people. Therefore, the enjoyment that it propagates is always only available to a select few.”
The understanding of capitalism as a system that produces immense wealth, and a lifestyle of limitless consumption can give the impression that life under capitalism is a life of ever-increasing prosperity and pleasure. And indeed, that is the dominant and persistent discourse. All of us have the promise of a life of limitless pleasure through the consumption of goods and services designed specifically to meet our needs and desires. All we have to do is find the means necessary for purchase. And therein lies the problem, because for the great majority of us, the capacity for limitless expenditure is actually profoundly limited by the wage structure of our labor for the capitalist system. Although there is endless promise, there is less and less follow through on our ability to belong and to participate in the cycle of wealth creation and conspicuous consumption.
In a recent report on NPR Marketplace, it was reported that the wealthiest top 10% of Americans now account for nearly 50% of all consumer spending. High income consumers are purchasing luxury items and services, while lower- and middle-income families have had to cut back on household necessities and large purchases. Of course, this is reflective of ever-increasing economic disparities. For households in the U.S. earning less than $175,00.00 a year, their purchasing power has barely kept up with inflation, meaning their ability to participate in the economy has stagnated and/or declined.
The brutality of a system that hoards its resources in such a way as to deny all life the capacity to thrive cannot be underestimated. The ability to generate immense wealth in the form of the money sign requires tremendous savagery that eliminates 100-200 species a day, that forces people off their homelands and into indefinite unlanded purgatory, that rips into the earth to extract and deplete the reserves of minerals and petroleum, that depletes reserves of clean and water can only sustain itself on a web of deceit and falsehood. If people were able to fully comprehend the levels of death, destruction and domination involved in the daily activities of wealth accumulation that directly immiserate their lives it would be intolerable. And so, a story must be woven that obscures these realities so that the plunder can continue.
What is sometimes surprising to me is that the evidence of Thanatos is not hidden from view. The hand of death is obvious everywhere. We see it daily in the despair and suicidal behavior that now crosses all generations. We see it in the wanton and indifferent destruction of living things both human and more than human. We see it in the food precarity and failing health resources of our neighbors and ourselves. It is not hidden from us. And yet for too many of us, we don’t see it as a pattern. Instead, we see as a point in time and space. A single instance. It is a passing crisis that will be resolved, and life will return to normal soon.
And yet, that moment of transition out of crisis and back to normal doesn’t seem to be arriving. We are inundated with discourses that promise us a future in which all will be well. We will become the communities and nation states promised to us by the capitalist ethos. We are told to be patient and wait our turn. The wheel will turn in our favor, and we too will become the beneficiaries of the monetization of all life. It is a constant drone in the background of all of our institutions, media feeds, and family discourses of personal ambition and overcoming. We just need to stick it out or periodically protest a particularly egregious injustice in which the system has gone a bit too far. Once that is straightened out, we can get back to business in a very literal sense. For most of us there is really no sense of an exit strategy, just better or worse versions of the existing system of rule. We have been convinced that there is no fundamental change possible.
R.D. Laing many years ago, looked at families and the ways they induct their children into lives of complicity with the dominant system. He suggested that the training children receive from birth forward is saturated with messages that normalize and perpetuate the induction of family members into the brutality of he termed madness of the capitalist way of life. He argued that the intense immersion into the logics of capitalism as an acceptable and even desirable way to live, created what he called a family trance that blinded family members from seeing what was really happening around them. He said that this trance was enforced by the family as a kind of sleepwalking through life, and that anyone who attempted to wake up would be punished.
Laing located his critique in the life of the family, but I would argue that we are now in a global trance that has insinuated itself into all aspects of our lives and institutions. I was reminded of this as I read a story in the New York Times about a mother’s struggle to meet the consumer needs of her ten-year-old daughter. The story was about her daughter’s intense desire to own a Labubu doll. The article was titled Rescuing My Daughter from the Cult of Labubu and recounted her daughter’s obsession with the doll (certainly not the first or last doll fad) and gradual disenchantment. But what struck me was the following description of her ten-year old’s life and her own:
If social media is the main outlet for mindless scrolling and bed rot for millennials and Gen Z-ers, then for members of Gen Alpha, like my daughter, the preferred rush seems to be online shopping. The ability to think of something — a miniature snow cone maker, a water bottle shaped like a penguin, magnetic socks that can hold hands — and then actually find it online in a minute, with the option to click once and procure it, seems like catnip to certain kids’ brains. (And adult brains, too. Believe me, I have known plenty of midnight marathons on the RealReal website.)
Gille Deleuze in his prescient essay Postscript in the Society of Control makes the argument that as capitalism develops in the 21st century, as an increasingly virtual mode of economic rule, that we will increasingly be seen less as individuals and more as what he terms dividuals. Dividuals he defines as marketing niches rather than identities linked to personhood. For the existing system of rule, human beings are valuable only in their relation to the market and so we are entranced into a life of infinite consumption and the rush of shopping. As Deleuze puts it:
The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters … Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
Stengers and Pignarre refer to this new mode of control as the sorcery of capitalism. They recount a kind of sorcery that has the capacity to entrance us in such a way that the extremities of immiseration of our physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological lives becomes invisible. We become relationally disabled such that the suffering of others becomes a kind of collateral damage as we numb ourselves through an array of addictive acts of consumption. Such a socio-cultural trance induced anesthesia provides the global cover for the force of Thanatos to take hold in its most aggressive collective formations.
I started this column with a question about what my accountability is under such circumstances. While I honestly don’t have a full and comprehensive response to the question, I think a part of it resides in what Sartre referred to as Bad Faith. Sartre defined Bad Faith as a way of deceiving oneself into denying the capacity each of us has to take on the possibility of radical freedom. Radical freedom, he argued, is composed of acts that affirm dynamism and creativity over our predetermined social roles. It is a way of breaking our trance and waking up to the living material possibilities of our lives. Such acts of freedom break the endless monotony and emptiness of endless consumption.
As an elder member of our community perhaps a part of my role might be to continually reawaken myself from this dead zone that is suffocating all my relations. Maybe my job is to shout “wake up” in the mirror and in the street until I am awake enough to see how many of my relations are walking free of trance and wondering what it is we can do next. And then to join them.
