The Great Inversion
Lexical Note
“The New Age movement” is an awkward phrase to reiterate throughout a piece. “New Ageism” is also awkward, now that “ageism” has become another politically correct hurdle we have to negotiate over or around in our everyday discourse. So, distasteful as it is, we can see no other recourse than to use “New Age” as a noun representing the movement.
Early New Age
As a spiritual renaissance, New Age started off respectably enough in the late sixties. Taking its cue from Alan Watts’ cosmopolitan version of Zen Buddhism, early New Age introduced to a generation of free spirited materialists whose minds, through the use of marijuana and hallucinogens, had become unusually receptive compared to those of their close progenitors’, that old and reliable route to enlightenment, the dissolution of the ego and union with the One-and-All.
So far, so good. Without any single particular spiritual practice behind it – its pantheon found room for Meister Eckhart, 12th century Zen masters, Rumi, Timothy Leary et. al. – New Age emphasized the goal, spiritual enlightenment, rather than the way to its achievement, which was regarded as only a tool. This seemed to be, and still does seem to have been, a wise attitude. However, the broad tolerance of New Age practice may be one of the things that brought about New Age’s swift decay into nothing more than an excuse for self-indulgence.
Since its practitioners were open to everything – taking their cue from the old Chinese saying, there are many paths to the top of the mountain – any spiritual or quasi-spiritual system was able to join the New Age bandwagon, from the obsessive contrivances of sincere kooks to the elaborate snares woven of psychobabble and theobabble by cynical hucksters, as well as reinvigorated old favorites such as astrology and numerology.
Late New Age
Sometime during the 1980’s New Age began to turn inside-out. Its goal, instead of enlightenment, became self-fulfillment. We are not sure what caused this. Perhaps because of the intense competition among innumerable New Age methods, the focus of their messages became the benefits they would bring to the individuals they were trying to beguile instead of their common goal of enlightenment. But that’s just a guess. Another possibility – call it elitism, if you must – is that most people are unable to intellectualize a universal truth (hence the anthropomorphizing of the Supreme Being) and New Age, in its original form, was simply beyond popularization.
In Every Nook and Cranny
Unfortunately, what could have been, what should have been, a flash-in-the-pan, like Rousseauism in the 18th century or spiritualism at the turn of the last two centuries, has permeated our culture. The well-being of the individual reigns as the supreme value. For example, in today’s world, not only is there nothing shameful about having as one’s primary goal the attainment of goods (in both the psychological and material senses), it is regarded as admirable. And what is the primary goal of education today? Self-esteem.
Again, we can only hazard a guess about the mechanism of the proliferation and longevity of narcissism: The metastasization throughout the world of Anglophone popular culture through the medium of its music, against which regional cultures – from the tribal cultures of Africa to the high culture of Europe – could not contend, carried with it, like a parasite, the selfish, hedonistic and vapid attitudes of late New Age.
Goodbye “You’re Welcome,” Hello “No Problem"
Self-centeredness has become so ingrained in social interactions that it now passes for normal. For example, the communication to a friend of one’s personal problem – bad health, financial woes, family conflicts – in hopes of some sympathy, more often than not is met by a recital of one’s friend’s own bad health, financial woes or family conflicts. If asked, the friend probably would say that by responding to your problems with problems of his own he was demonstrating empathy and understanding. What he really was doing, by saying “me too” instead of “poor you,” was making himself the center of the conversation.
An acquaintance of mine had a blood test that was positive for a serious disease – not to worry, the results turned out to be a false-positive. However, the nurse who phoned to convey those initial positive results prefaced her conversation, most unprofessionally, with, “I’ve been dreading calling you.” The nurse most likely believed that by communicating her personal distress she was establishing some sort of sympathetic rapport with the patient. What she really was doing was, again, making her feelings, her actions, the subject of a conversation which should have been about the patient, and incidentally adding to the anxiety which it was the nurse’s responsibility to assuage.
The shift from “You’re welcome” to “No problem” perfectly epitomizes the change in social relations brought about by the primacy of self-regard. The former means, “You are welcome to the favor for which you have just thanked me.” The latter means, “The inconvenience I experienced in granting the favor for which you just thanked me was not all that onerous.” The subject of “You’re welcome” is you; the subject of “No problem” is I.
It Gets Worse
However, the disconcerting effects of the change in interpersonal relations caused by the New Age inspired shift from you to I is nothing compared to the disastrous effects of its spawn, relativism, on culture, society, political systems and international relations.
Early Relativism
Deep, thoughtful relativism predates New Age narcissism. The revelation of cultural relativism in the first half of the 20th century came about not only through the works of anthropologists such as Boas, Benedict and Meade, but the works of visual artists who, in the remarkable period of aesthetic receptivity before World War I, discovered the sophisticated beauty of the art of cultures, primarily African, which had been thought of as “primitive.”
However, the realization that other cultures, even materially backward ones had, just as we have, complex social structures, carefully crafted moral and ethical boundaries, governance based on precedence, and aesthetic standards, did not in any way diminish the value of our own culture. That is the way they do things; this is the way we do things. If there are worthwhile ideas which we can learn from them, the beauty of non-representational art, the value of leisure, the innocent nature of sexual intercourse, then let us adopt them into our culture. Early cultural relativism was absorbed by Western culture and enriched it.
Late Relativism
The many-paths-to-the-top-of-the-mountain openness of early New Age may have played some role in the rise of the pernicious relativism that infects modern life, but its primary source is the inversion of spirituality from an outward to an inward impulse. Instead of a universal truth, each individual seeks his own personal truth. Thus there are as many truths as there are minds to grasp them. The validity of personal truths derived from nothing more than strong opinions – from climate change denial to the belief that capitalism is intrinsically evil – is supported by the authority which modern culture has granted to the individual. We have reached the point where many people, most perhaps, accept as reality whatever concept seems to them most comfortable.
The result of such a plethora of truths is the blurring of reality. Scientifically proven truths have come to have no more weight than biblical truths, truths expounded to followers by their leaders, truths as set out by one’s favorite newspaper columnist or talk show host or truths that are simply more convenient than others. The source for the neo-cons’ contempt for “the reality-based community” which opposed the Iraq War can be found, whether they would have admitted it or not, in New Age.
We – meaning early 21st century adults – still have enough practical background, when push comes to shove, to fall back on the “hard,” empirical, evidence-based reality which we were taught to respect. What will happen in the coming generation, which is being educated in a world of fuzzy reality, is frightening to contemplate.
Rights vs. Obligations
With the exaltation of the self has come the transformation of individual rights into individual entitlements. It has brought to fruition the aberrations foreseen by Simone Weil when she lamented the fact that the political revolutions of the 18th century were based on rights instead of obligations. We often wonder how much a difference that small shift in focus would have made. Instead of the accused’s having a right to a fair trial, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to ensure the accused a fair trial; instead of everyone’s having the right to free speech, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to ensure everyone’s free speech; instead of an individual’s right not to be subject to unwarranted searches, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to refrain from such searches.
When individual rights were first promulgated, society was a web of obligations – some formally ordained, but most customary. An important distinction between obligations and rights is that obligations imply a mutuality, which rights do not. The obligations that a serf owed the manor were matched by obligations that the manor owed the serf. The obligation of the debtor to repay with interest was matched by an obligation of the creditor to keep the terms of the loan within customary boundaries. The chivalric obligations of a man toward a woman were matched by submissive obligations on a woman’s part. We are not suggesting that these mutual obligations were equitable. If they had been, then perhaps the Age of Revolution would have been unnecessary. The obligations of the more powerful party – the manor, the creditor, the male – were the less onerous. Still, there was a mutuality implied which does not exist when a right, as opposed to an obligation, is exacted.
Since the introduction of the concept of individual rights, the social fabric of obligations has frayed. An employer who once may have felt morally bound to a sort of paternalistic attitude towards his employees, when faced with paying contracted compensation won by workers under collective bargaining rights, is likely to see his workers more as adversaries than collaborators. Now that a debtor’s right to know the exact terms of a loan has been legislated, the creditor – a credit card company, for example – has no moral compunction about granting that right by setting out in tiny print arcane and complicated fees and penalties. The relationship between the sexes has become sometimes acrimoniously, sometimes comically, complex, now that women’s equal rights have engendered not only strict legal statutes, but also ill-defined new mores. A superior and an underling of opposite sexes find themselves in a perpetual quandary over what the one may or may not require of the other; a man and woman who have reached a closed door at the same moment often find themselves performing a most awkward and absurd dance; writers’ trains of thought are constantly interrupted by a perplexity how to express the impersonal third person pronoun: “he?” “she?” “he and she?” “she and he?” “they?”
And would we be faced with such an enormous gap between the rich and the poor if the wealthy and the middle-class and the legislators they elect, many of whom call themselves Christians, still felt an obligation of charity to the least fortunate? But the least fortunate are acknowledged to have rights, and government has decided that they are entitled to enough public assistance to keep them from starving. As the poor clamor, with varying degrees of success, for increases in their measly allowance, any sense of obligation that the more fortunate might have towards them is mitigated, and often completely expunged, by the sense that the poor, like every other group, are participating in a political battle of conflicting rights. Since it is a battle, not a social transaction, the stronger party revels in the weakness of its adversary, instead of making humane allowances for it.
The Last Straw
To the inversion of spirituality, from enlightenment to self-fulfillment, and the inversion of social responsibility, from obligations to political rights and entitlements, we can add the inversion of capitalism from a demand-based economic system to a supply-based one, widely called consumerism.
In classic capitalism, supply followed demand. The telephone was invented. A few wealthy or gadget-inclined people bought them. The device caught on. There was a larger demand. More telephones were manufactured. At some point, when the market became saturated with telephones, demand slacked off, as did production. Telephone manufacturers used their accumulated capital to refine and improve the telephone. The public’s reaction to each improved model, whether it was considered desirable enough to warrant the replacement of an old phone with a new one or not, drove the industry accordingly to adjust its manufacturing quotas and inventory.
In the new capitalism, the opposite occurs: demand follows supply. Telephones constantly are being incrementally refined and improved, then manufactured in the millions. Then these new models are offered for sale -- they are "marketed." Accumulated capital is spent not on making the phones, which is relatively cheap, but on creating a desire among consumers for the new telephones which already are in inventory.
The creation of this desire which, if advertisers are successful, becomes a virtual need, is facilitated by the intense focus of people on their own well-being, on feeling as good about themselves as they can. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of the promotion of consumer products, to the degree that it is literally impossible for anyone who is not an absolute recluse to avoid it, reinforces the primacy of individual well-being over the community.
As the significance of the self increases, the significance of the other is neglected. The neglected other is not only the universal truth that is the aim of spiritual enlightenment, not only the physical world around us, once known as reality, but other individuals, other selves, our fellow inhabitants of this inverted world. With this neglect, the social fabric becomes weaker. It is true that there are other people outside our immediate circle of family and friends who draw our attention, people who are often in are thoughts, for whom we feel sympathy, dismay, approval or disapproval, but they are not the people we see in the aisles in the supermarket, or who pass by us in their cars, or sit across from us in the subway. The “others” we care about are phantoms, effigies, constructs, fabricated celebrities, heroes, victims, villains, furnished to us by the media for whom we are nothing more than economic entities, prospective customers to be flattered, pandered to, and cajoled.
A Conspiracy? No. Exploitation? Yes.
This is not a conflict between us (the little folk) and them (the people “in control”). They are not in control, any more than we are. We and they are simply playing out our roles in an historical process. They are just as much caught up in it as we are. As individuals they are subject to the same consumerist pressures, the same transitional bewilderment, the same relativistic vagueness of universal values as we are.
The system is, however, exploitive, just as the old capitalist system was exploitive. Now, instead of the victim being the underpaid laborer, the victim is the over-spending consumer. In one sense, anyone who has been browbeaten, brainwashed and bullied into buying something he does not need and would not have wanted if he had not been browbeaten, brainwashed and bullied, has been exploited. The billionaire who has been convinced by ads in the Robb Report that he needs to replace his old yacht with a new one because it allows him to reach Barbados without stopping in Grand Turk to refuel, or is ashamed to see his old, shoddy yacht docked beside all the new ones at the marina, has been just as exploited as the impoverished single mother who has put another $250 on her credit card (with an 18% annual interest rate) to buy a pair of sneakers for her son because she has been repeatedly shown dramatizations that imply that the improvement to his self-esteem that the sneakers will bring will turn him into a happy, well adjusted teen-ager. In the Marxist sense of capitalist exploitation, it is the consumers who go into debt to buy things they do not need who are the equivalent of the exploited 19th century miners and millworkers whose meagerly compensated labor enriched the upper class.
Opting Out
It is possible for an individual to opt out of the system. Many people do to one extent or another. There are plenty of people, of all spiritual persuasions, who have not lost their yearning for universal truth and who continue to practice to attain it. There are plenty of people with strong, sure values, who have not given in to relativistic confusion. There are plenty of people who draw a line at some aspect of consumerism.
The problem is, when it comes to leading a normal, everyday life, it is becoming more and more difficult to opt out. For example, many banks now penalize customers who do not manage their accounts on-line. People with i-phones now have an advantage when it comes to hailing a taxi. Some social service benefits now can be accessed only on line.
Any opposition to the great inversion of human values, any effort to reign in this juggernaut of selfish, thoughtless acquisitiveness by attacking it directly is doomed to fail. It is too big, too overwhelming, too ubiquitous. However, politically and socially active organizations could be successful in ensuring that the necessary activities of an engaged life are not curtailed for those who voluntarily opt out, those who cannot afford to join in, and those too old to change or too out-of-step to cope.
A Perfect Storm
A world without meaning, a society without cohesion, individuals obsessed with themselves – a perfect storm. But there is something a bit misleading in the term “perfect.” While meteorologists may be able to give a fairly detailed description of a perfect storm, trace its origins and predict its disintegration, what occurs on the land and sea below is unpredictable chaos. In the same way, while we have been able to enumerate in a somewhat organized fashion – we hope – different facets of the great inversion of long-standing norms, the future shape of the spiritual, social and economic chaos, already in progress, brought about by this world-wide cultural revolution – for that is what it is – is beyond our imagination.
Lexical Note
“The New Age movement” is an awkward phrase to reiterate throughout a piece. “New Ageism” is also awkward, now that “ageism” has become another politically correct hurdle we have to negotiate over or around in our everyday discourse. So, distasteful as it is, we can see no other recourse than to use “New Age” as a noun representing the movement.
Early New Age
As a spiritual renaissance, New Age started off respectably enough in the late sixties. Taking its cue from Alan Watts’ cosmopolitan version of Zen Buddhism, early New Age introduced to a generation of free spirited materialists whose minds, through the use of marijuana and hallucinogens, had become unusually receptive compared to those of their close progenitors’, that old and reliable route to enlightenment, the dissolution of the ego and union with the One-and-All.
So far, so good. Without any single particular spiritual practice behind it – its pantheon found room for Meister Eckhart, 12th century Zen masters, Rumi, Timothy Leary et. al. – New Age emphasized the goal, spiritual enlightenment, rather than the way to its achievement, which was regarded as only a tool. This seemed to be, and still does seem to have been, a wise attitude. However, the broad tolerance of New Age practice may be one of the things that brought about New Age’s swift decay into nothing more than an excuse for self-indulgence.
Since its practitioners were open to everything – taking their cue from the old Chinese saying, there are many paths to the top of the mountain – any spiritual or quasi-spiritual system was able to join the New Age bandwagon, from the obsessive contrivances of sincere kooks to the elaborate snares woven of psychobabble and theobabble by cynical hucksters, as well as reinvigorated old favorites such as astrology and numerology.
Late New Age
Sometime during the 1980’s New Age began to turn inside-out. Its goal, instead of enlightenment, became self-fulfillment. We are not sure what caused this. Perhaps because of the intense competition among innumerable New Age methods, the focus of their messages became the benefits they would bring to the individuals they were trying to beguile instead of their common goal of enlightenment. But that’s just a guess. Another possibility – call it elitism, if you must – is that most people are unable to intellectualize a universal truth (hence the anthropomorphizing of the Supreme Being) and New Age, in its original form, was simply beyond popularization.
In Every Nook and Cranny
Unfortunately, what could have been, what should have been, a flash-in-the-pan, like Rousseauism in the 18th century or spiritualism at the turn of the last two centuries, has permeated our culture. The well-being of the individual reigns as the supreme value. For example, in today’s world, not only is there nothing shameful about having as one’s primary goal the attainment of goods (in both the psychological and material senses), it is regarded as admirable. And what is the primary goal of education today? Self-esteem.
Again, we can only hazard a guess about the mechanism of the proliferation and longevity of narcissism: The metastasization throughout the world of Anglophone popular culture through the medium of its music, against which regional cultures – from the tribal cultures of Africa to the high culture of Europe – could not contend, carried with it, like a parasite, the selfish, hedonistic and vapid attitudes of late New Age.
Goodbye “You’re Welcome,” Hello “No Problem"
Self-centeredness has become so ingrained in social interactions that it now passes for normal. For example, the communication to a friend of one’s personal problem – bad health, financial woes, family conflicts – in hopes of some sympathy, more often than not is met by a recital of one’s friend’s own bad health, financial woes or family conflicts. If asked, the friend probably would say that by responding to your problems with problems of his own he was demonstrating empathy and understanding. What he really was doing, by saying “me too” instead of “poor you,” was making himself the center of the conversation.
An acquaintance of mine had a blood test that was positive for a serious disease – not to worry, the results turned out to be a false-positive. However, the nurse who phoned to convey those initial positive results prefaced her conversation, most unprofessionally, with, “I’ve been dreading calling you.” The nurse most likely believed that by communicating her personal distress she was establishing some sort of sympathetic rapport with the patient. What she really was doing was, again, making her feelings, her actions, the subject of a conversation which should have been about the patient, and incidentally adding to the anxiety which it was the nurse’s responsibility to assuage.
The shift from “You’re welcome” to “No problem” perfectly epitomizes the change in social relations brought about by the primacy of self-regard. The former means, “You are welcome to the favor for which you have just thanked me.” The latter means, “The inconvenience I experienced in granting the favor for which you just thanked me was not all that onerous.” The subject of “You’re welcome” is you; the subject of “No problem” is I.
It Gets Worse
However, the disconcerting effects of the change in interpersonal relations caused by the New Age inspired shift from you to I is nothing compared to the disastrous effects of its spawn, relativism, on culture, society, political systems and international relations.
Early Relativism
Deep, thoughtful relativism predates New Age narcissism. The revelation of cultural relativism in the first half of the 20th century came about not only through the works of anthropologists such as Boas, Benedict and Meade, but the works of visual artists who, in the remarkable period of aesthetic receptivity before World War I, discovered the sophisticated beauty of the art of cultures, primarily African, which had been thought of as “primitive.”
However, the realization that other cultures, even materially backward ones had, just as we have, complex social structures, carefully crafted moral and ethical boundaries, governance based on precedence, and aesthetic standards, did not in any way diminish the value of our own culture. That is the way they do things; this is the way we do things. If there are worthwhile ideas which we can learn from them, the beauty of non-representational art, the value of leisure, the innocent nature of sexual intercourse, then let us adopt them into our culture. Early cultural relativism was absorbed by Western culture and enriched it.
Late Relativism
The many-paths-to-the-top-of-the-mountain openness of early New Age may have played some role in the rise of the pernicious relativism that infects modern life, but its primary source is the inversion of spirituality from an outward to an inward impulse. Instead of a universal truth, each individual seeks his own personal truth. Thus there are as many truths as there are minds to grasp them. The validity of personal truths derived from nothing more than strong opinions – from climate change denial to the belief that capitalism is intrinsically evil – is supported by the authority which modern culture has granted to the individual. We have reached the point where many people, most perhaps, accept as reality whatever concept seems to them most comfortable.
The result of such a plethora of truths is the blurring of reality. Scientifically proven truths have come to have no more weight than biblical truths, truths expounded to followers by their leaders, truths as set out by one’s favorite newspaper columnist or talk show host or truths that are simply more convenient than others. The source for the neo-cons’ contempt for “the reality-based community” which opposed the Iraq War can be found, whether they would have admitted it or not, in New Age.
We – meaning early 21st century adults – still have enough practical background, when push comes to shove, to fall back on the “hard,” empirical, evidence-based reality which we were taught to respect. What will happen in the coming generation, which is being educated in a world of fuzzy reality, is frightening to contemplate.
Rights vs. Obligations
With the exaltation of the self has come the transformation of individual rights into individual entitlements. It has brought to fruition the aberrations foreseen by Simone Weil when she lamented the fact that the political revolutions of the 18th century were based on rights instead of obligations. We often wonder how much a difference that small shift in focus would have made. Instead of the accused’s having a right to a fair trial, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to ensure the accused a fair trial; instead of everyone’s having the right to free speech, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to ensure everyone’s free speech; instead of an individual’s right not to be subject to unwarranted searches, it would be our (we, the people’s) obligation to refrain from such searches.
When individual rights were first promulgated, society was a web of obligations – some formally ordained, but most customary. An important distinction between obligations and rights is that obligations imply a mutuality, which rights do not. The obligations that a serf owed the manor were matched by obligations that the manor owed the serf. The obligation of the debtor to repay with interest was matched by an obligation of the creditor to keep the terms of the loan within customary boundaries. The chivalric obligations of a man toward a woman were matched by submissive obligations on a woman’s part. We are not suggesting that these mutual obligations were equitable. If they had been, then perhaps the Age of Revolution would have been unnecessary. The obligations of the more powerful party – the manor, the creditor, the male – were the less onerous. Still, there was a mutuality implied which does not exist when a right, as opposed to an obligation, is exacted.
Since the introduction of the concept of individual rights, the social fabric of obligations has frayed. An employer who once may have felt morally bound to a sort of paternalistic attitude towards his employees, when faced with paying contracted compensation won by workers under collective bargaining rights, is likely to see his workers more as adversaries than collaborators. Now that a debtor’s right to know the exact terms of a loan has been legislated, the creditor – a credit card company, for example – has no moral compunction about granting that right by setting out in tiny print arcane and complicated fees and penalties. The relationship between the sexes has become sometimes acrimoniously, sometimes comically, complex, now that women’s equal rights have engendered not only strict legal statutes, but also ill-defined new mores. A superior and an underling of opposite sexes find themselves in a perpetual quandary over what the one may or may not require of the other; a man and woman who have reached a closed door at the same moment often find themselves performing a most awkward and absurd dance; writers’ trains of thought are constantly interrupted by a perplexity how to express the impersonal third person pronoun: “he?” “she?” “he and she?” “she and he?” “they?”
And would we be faced with such an enormous gap between the rich and the poor if the wealthy and the middle-class and the legislators they elect, many of whom call themselves Christians, still felt an obligation of charity to the least fortunate? But the least fortunate are acknowledged to have rights, and government has decided that they are entitled to enough public assistance to keep them from starving. As the poor clamor, with varying degrees of success, for increases in their measly allowance, any sense of obligation that the more fortunate might have towards them is mitigated, and often completely expunged, by the sense that the poor, like every other group, are participating in a political battle of conflicting rights. Since it is a battle, not a social transaction, the stronger party revels in the weakness of its adversary, instead of making humane allowances for it.
The Last Straw
To the inversion of spirituality, from enlightenment to self-fulfillment, and the inversion of social responsibility, from obligations to political rights and entitlements, we can add the inversion of capitalism from a demand-based economic system to a supply-based one, widely called consumerism.
In classic capitalism, supply followed demand. The telephone was invented. A few wealthy or gadget-inclined people bought them. The device caught on. There was a larger demand. More telephones were manufactured. At some point, when the market became saturated with telephones, demand slacked off, as did production. Telephone manufacturers used their accumulated capital to refine and improve the telephone. The public’s reaction to each improved model, whether it was considered desirable enough to warrant the replacement of an old phone with a new one or not, drove the industry accordingly to adjust its manufacturing quotas and inventory.
In the new capitalism, the opposite occurs: demand follows supply. Telephones constantly are being incrementally refined and improved, then manufactured in the millions. Then these new models are offered for sale -- they are "marketed." Accumulated capital is spent not on making the phones, which is relatively cheap, but on creating a desire among consumers for the new telephones which already are in inventory.
The creation of this desire which, if advertisers are successful, becomes a virtual need, is facilitated by the intense focus of people on their own well-being, on feeling as good about themselves as they can. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of the promotion of consumer products, to the degree that it is literally impossible for anyone who is not an absolute recluse to avoid it, reinforces the primacy of individual well-being over the community.
As the significance of the self increases, the significance of the other is neglected. The neglected other is not only the universal truth that is the aim of spiritual enlightenment, not only the physical world around us, once known as reality, but other individuals, other selves, our fellow inhabitants of this inverted world. With this neglect, the social fabric becomes weaker. It is true that there are other people outside our immediate circle of family and friends who draw our attention, people who are often in are thoughts, for whom we feel sympathy, dismay, approval or disapproval, but they are not the people we see in the aisles in the supermarket, or who pass by us in their cars, or sit across from us in the subway. The “others” we care about are phantoms, effigies, constructs, fabricated celebrities, heroes, victims, villains, furnished to us by the media for whom we are nothing more than economic entities, prospective customers to be flattered, pandered to, and cajoled.
A Conspiracy? No. Exploitation? Yes.
This is not a conflict between us (the little folk) and them (the people “in control”). They are not in control, any more than we are. We and they are simply playing out our roles in an historical process. They are just as much caught up in it as we are. As individuals they are subject to the same consumerist pressures, the same transitional bewilderment, the same relativistic vagueness of universal values as we are.
The system is, however, exploitive, just as the old capitalist system was exploitive. Now, instead of the victim being the underpaid laborer, the victim is the over-spending consumer. In one sense, anyone who has been browbeaten, brainwashed and bullied into buying something he does not need and would not have wanted if he had not been browbeaten, brainwashed and bullied, has been exploited. The billionaire who has been convinced by ads in the Robb Report that he needs to replace his old yacht with a new one because it allows him to reach Barbados without stopping in Grand Turk to refuel, or is ashamed to see his old, shoddy yacht docked beside all the new ones at the marina, has been just as exploited as the impoverished single mother who has put another $250 on her credit card (with an 18% annual interest rate) to buy a pair of sneakers for her son because she has been repeatedly shown dramatizations that imply that the improvement to his self-esteem that the sneakers will bring will turn him into a happy, well adjusted teen-ager. In the Marxist sense of capitalist exploitation, it is the consumers who go into debt to buy things they do not need who are the equivalent of the exploited 19th century miners and millworkers whose meagerly compensated labor enriched the upper class.
Opting Out
It is possible for an individual to opt out of the system. Many people do to one extent or another. There are plenty of people, of all spiritual persuasions, who have not lost their yearning for universal truth and who continue to practice to attain it. There are plenty of people with strong, sure values, who have not given in to relativistic confusion. There are plenty of people who draw a line at some aspect of consumerism.
The problem is, when it comes to leading a normal, everyday life, it is becoming more and more difficult to opt out. For example, many banks now penalize customers who do not manage their accounts on-line. People with i-phones now have an advantage when it comes to hailing a taxi. Some social service benefits now can be accessed only on line.
Any opposition to the great inversion of human values, any effort to reign in this juggernaut of selfish, thoughtless acquisitiveness by attacking it directly is doomed to fail. It is too big, too overwhelming, too ubiquitous. However, politically and socially active organizations could be successful in ensuring that the necessary activities of an engaged life are not curtailed for those who voluntarily opt out, those who cannot afford to join in, and those too old to change or too out-of-step to cope.
A Perfect Storm
A world without meaning, a society without cohesion, individuals obsessed with themselves – a perfect storm. But there is something a bit misleading in the term “perfect.” While meteorologists may be able to give a fairly detailed description of a perfect storm, trace its origins and predict its disintegration, what occurs on the land and sea below is unpredictable chaos. In the same way, while we have been able to enumerate in a somewhat organized fashion – we hope – different facets of the great inversion of long-standing norms, the future shape of the spiritual, social and economic chaos, already in progress, brought about by this world-wide cultural revolution – for that is what it is – is beyond our imagination.