Brief notes in praise or condemnation of twenty common totems (ideas that are believed to have positive ‘spiritual’ significance; the opposite of taboos). I have already published here free encomia on unlikeableness, anarchism, and failure, and vituperia on abstract philosophy, video games and modern literature. Here are a few sweeping gestures on related themes, to stir up your juices…
Contra
Against Progress
Progress is the dominant religion of the world. Its central myth is that industrial technology and the hyper-rational mode of thought it rests upon, will, by using magical sources of fairy energy, deliver us from the misery the system itself manufactures. That civilisation has been a disaster for humanity, that every technological solution to that disaster has caused more problems (such as sickness, madness, loneliness and despair), that all civilisations, including our own, are brought down by declining returns on energy investment and that (unlike pre-industrial tools) industrial machines and post-industrial computers rob man of his autonomy, impose artificial needs and concentrate power in a professional class which then subjugates everyone else; all this, along with the solution to progress, is heresy.
Against Charity
Even putting aside the corruption and innate self-interest of modern charities, which, like all capitalist institutions, are tools of power and put making money (and paying salaries, particularly the bloated salaries of the bosses) above helping the people and animals they are charged with protecting, charity itself normalises slavery and justifies iniquity. Shelter does nothing to address the cause of poverty, the WWF does nothing to address the destruction of wildlife and Cancer Research does nothing to address a cancerous civilisation. They offer palliatives and, above all, a means to assuage guilt, which is why the most guilty people are so attracted to charity and why philanthropy, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, is ‘the mark of a wicked man.’
Against Pity
The opposite of pity is not heartlessness, but empathy. Pity is an emotion, and like all emotions it is addictive, performative and ineffective. Pity, like sex and outrage, is a commodity that the media sells. Pity reduces the pitied to a safely manageable thing. Empathy, by contrast, eludes commodification, which is why, like the collective spirit that empathy allows the individual access to, it is outlawed by a technical system which demands discrete neutrality. Empathy is not neutral. It is prejudiced. It is also unsafe and painful, two more characteristics which managerial technicalism must prohibit. It hurts to feel the inner condition of the world, and to respond to it aptly puts the empathic at considerable risk, for empathy refuses to pander to emotional exhortations to charitably pity. Empathy can turn away and refuse to help. Empathy can hurt. Empathy can kill.
Against Politeness
Politeness is not the same as courtesy. Courtesy involves sacrifice of my self, so that I may be with the other, and she with me. Politeness, on the other hand, keeps the other at arm’s length, tolerates the other, resists her, tightens me up against my fellow man who is merely allowed to do or say or think this or that. Courtesy does not allow in this way. There is no permission about it, no legality, no rights. Courtesy thus, is unlawful, which means it can — must — involve hilarious insult and brutal rejection. Where courtesy comes from the heart (‘cor’) politeness is a social polish (‘politus’) applied to social antagonisms which disrupt technicalism. We are compelled to be polite, which is why the most submissive people are unfailingly well mannered, and why we can talk of courteous, or courtly love, but polite love sounds monstrous.
Against Wisdom
There is a grasping in the anxious heart for wisdom, sometimes called ‘self-help’, sometimes called ‘great literature’, sometimes called ‘satsang’. Partly because fulfilment has come to be understood as a technique of self-management, of ‘optimally’ employing all the shattered bits of the self. Thus we read wise books with an unquenchable thirst, as if there is some great secret, some aphoristic magic spell that is good for every moment; unquenchable because the desire to manage the self creates the frustration it professes to alleviate. It’s the same with beauty. Ugly selves go into nature or into an art gallery and try to suck all the loveliness out of the experience, trying to get, get, get. I am not saying, I hope you can see, that there is no reason to read the Gita, walk in the meadows or stand silent before the sunflowers, but there is nothing there that isn’t already here.
Against Choice
All indecision is selfish and all choices lead to regret. Listen: ‘I have decided I love you.’ Can you hear the problem here? The only thing you can decide to do, is not love someone (not be happy, not do the right thing), because decision is personal, and the personality cannot love. An impersonal experience of the situation dissolves indecision, which is why the best advisors give you no advice, mad advice (mad, that is, to the personality), or they change your experience of the problem. It’s also why there is a glorious sense of choicelessness about all your happiest moments, why renouncing choice is so painful and so terrible, and why nobody, but nobody, can help you with the most important decision you ever have to make which, at least potentially, can only be resolved by what is considered ‘insanity’.
Against Wanting
What the world calls love is ardent wanting. Wanting is not the same as desire, which, like honest conscience, is a message sent from the future to meet it in the present, a message that you ignore at your peril, but which contains, unlike fake conscience, no demand. Where wanting is always for me, a grasping claw, desire is an open hand, it asks, it seeks, it might need, but it does not demand. Desire produces no regret, wanting infects the guts with frustration at not getting and guilt at the manner in which it was got. Beware of wanting, but note too that wanting can only perceive wanting. It ‘understand the price of everything, but the value of nothing’. We, following Oscar Wilde, call the filter that wanting places between consciousness and the world, ‘cynicism’.
Against Sex
Sex is not making love. Sex drives couples apart, making love brings them together. Sex is selfish, making love is selfless. Sex leads to regret, making love does not. Sex numbs the senses, making love intensifies them. Sex disguises itself as sentimental feeling, making love is unsentimental and unemotional. Sex can be rated, making love is ineffable. Sex is merely pleasurable, making love is outrageous ecstasy. Sex makes the rest of the day problematic, making love makes the rest of the day a breeze. Sex causes premature ejaculation and impotence, making love solves all sexual frustration. Sex needs props and performance, making love stands as naked as the bodies which make it. Sex sells, making love gives. Sex will crucify you, making love will resurrect you.
Against Life
To hell with life! Ivan Illich raised a triumphant fist against the modern idolatry of bare life or ‘bio-life’, an idea of the earth and of existence, a discrete ideological artefact that dominates the safe, painless, biofascist society of the spectacle in which we are compelled to merely exist and in which unconditional enjoyment has been displaced by compensatory stimulation. Where life, in the sacred sense of the word, is either subordinate to death, or one with it — and therefore ineffable and resistant to commodification and institutionalisation — the profane bio-life of institutional power, stands only for itself, a professionally-managed abstract good (e.g. the statistical cases of the ‘pandemic’) to which everything, including the earth itself, must be sacrificed.
Against Freedom
Freedom to do what you please and what you will leads to the same misery as being told what to do by someone else. The former freedom is subjective, the latter constraint is objective, but both illusions are created by a self which brings subjectivity and objectivity into existence and then spends its life oscillating between the anguish of freedom and the misery of constraint. Mortality itself, the ultimate constraint, is no more overcome by the imagined freedom of living forever in an after-life paradise (or, worse, success) than ‘I will love you forever’ refers to immortality. Love and death are not resolved at the end of infinite tomorrows, in a pleasure-park of freedom, but in consciousness of the timeless, here and now. This is real, panjective freedom, but not as the world knows it.