Waste Culture, War Economy

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country. – Raymond Chandler

I think my first wake up call came when I realized the emptiness inherent in the western way of life: in what I was taught in school were the only meaningful pursuits in life. Amusement, i.e. self-gratification, and the riches with which to buy the former. Drugs were a necessity of this lifestyle. Drugs and alcohol and other means of blinding one to the realities hidden behind the glittering surface, some of which I touch upon in my previous post.

Another thing was waking up to the fact that this regimented machine of work, pay, envy, debt, drugs, sex, work pay, envy and yet more debt drives this machine while the slaves running it service the machinists and are kept docile through distractions: the bread and circus of gratuitious sex and voyuerism that is entertainment. We're fools to buy into this. Fools to willingly believe in the manufactured dream-world that leaves us ignorant of the true state of things.

We bloggers like to boast of our ability to see through the lies of mainstream media, yet some of us fall for its more lurid aspects hoping to escape without ever questioning whether that flight into self-gratification and objectification is not a worse form of slavery. And if we can't see this any talk of "winning back our minds" is plain guff, if our minds turn to mush at the beck and call of what's between our legs. The painted image of yet another lie. Then we've lost. Then we've opted once more for the blue pill. Once more for the return to the safe cryonic womb that keeps us barely alive in order to feed off our energy.

Reading Camus at the age of seventeen was yet another wake up call. Passages such as: "One can never cease to wonder at the fact that all men live as if they knew nothing." This sparked the flame in me that wanted to know, wanted to pull away that veil between me and a simple cup of coffee, a buttercup pushing through concrete, the simple act of holding a loved one's hand in the rain, the fresh smell of bread outside the bakery at four in the morning. I sold my TV then. Haven't had one since.

How to describe that awakening? Camus did it best when he wrote:

"At times the set pieces collapse. Wake up, grab the streetcar, four hours at the office or factory, eat, streetcar, fours hours of work, eat, sleep, and monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday to the same rhythm – this routine is for the most part easy to follow. But one fine day the question occurs: why? - and thus the process is begun, in immense disgust coupled with amazement. 'Begun' is a crucial word here. Disgust is the last stage of a mechanical life, but it heralds a new forward movement in the mind. It awakens thoughts and calls forth what follows. And what follows is either an unconscious return to the chain or the irrevocable awakening."*

Around the same time I began smoking Camels, imitating Philip Marlowe. I intuitively identified with him as a role model. It was not that I wanted to be a detective, more the fact that there were so few men around you kind of had to go with the best you could find. And in Marlowe Chandler had set out to portray a man fit for these cheap times. Describing this man in The Simple Art of Murder he wrote:

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

Of this man's opposite he wrote:

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

And of the sham, of this debased effegy we call "snivelization," where we're taught to believe in manufactured dreams at the cost of humanity, Chandler had this to say.

"This country through its enormous talent for manufacture has worked itself into an economy of overproduction, which is probably a permanent economy. Half the world is starving, or at any rate badly underfed, yet we have to have a new refrigerator and a new automobile every year or so. If we don’t, we feel inferior because we are made to feel inferior. The kind of economy we have can only continue to exist if there is an enormous artificial wastage of manufactured product. We get that kind of waste in a war. In time of peace you have to create it artificially by advertising (Raymond Chandler Speaking: Penguin, 1973)."

To fool onself into believing that the modus of the machine, the language of advertisement, the cheapness of the sell and what's being sold, the extent to which these things permeate our lives, does not affect us, does not put us to sleep, does not cheapen us as long as we remain unaware of it is probably the greatest lie of all.

Peace.

[*my translation]