Spent a couple of hours at the library today. When I feel things coming apart at the seams I go there, read this and that, pick things up at random, and usually find exactly what I need. Today was no exception.
I got a stack of books on the usual stuff - cultural studies, media and communication theory, business strategy, mostly boring but sometimes I find something interesting - and plucked Timothy Leary’s “Politics of Self-Determination” off a shelf as I was passing by.
Now, I have never given Leary a fair shake because I’ve only read his really disjointed psychadelia stuff and it just never really grabbed me. I think I picked up that book today because it was electric orange. I read it first and spent an hour devouring it, and here I am changed again.
The extent to which we automatically and implicitly demonstrate patterns of co-operation and submission to social demands - even in the most democratic society - is quite striking. Failure to do so invites such real or fantasized threats to life that we automatically commit ourselves in countless ways to the interpersonal pressure of parents, societies, contemporaries. — TL
And there you have it.
My own failure (there’s that word again) to commit to a job that I hate for the sake of making money has definitely gotten me real threats to life (ie, death threats - yes, kids, I get them! - as well as feeling like I’m somehow going to starve or die or be evicted or any other major personal tragedy my mind can come up with) as well as imagined ones (I can blame the meltdown over the past few days squarely on lying awake at night afraid that the debt people are sending large men with black dogs to take me away for not having all the money I owe them in small unmarked bills under my bed). So maybe I’m not losing my mind or doing the wrong thing, maybe all this panic really is a symptom of struggling against a system designed to punish anyone who dares to see what’s outside it.
I feel a little closer to the definition of success. This Leary quote definitely made me think: is “success” and all the weight attributed to it just a method of control? Someone in Austin who I interviewed had a really interesting view of money as a violent thing, that it imposes will and power on others in an oppressive way to make the world bend to the whim of whomever has the cash. Is success and the threat of being unsuccessful a means of control, making sure that society functions by getting everyone to behave in predictable (and controllable) ways?
Maybe the whole “success” term is just incidental, but it’s an interesting model. We’re constantly inundated with triggers for desire - marketing is an efficient and ruthless machine - hell, even I want an iPod (there, I admitted it). Every problem, from mental malaise to body odour to deep spiritual emptiness can be solved with an outlay of cash. If everyone decides that this television-tinted success is hollow and empty and not what they want, then what the hell is society going to do? Constantly triggering desire and threatening anyone who thinks different with ostracism and branding them a pariah seems a pretty efficient way to make sure that we all show up to work on time on Monday morning.
And before you even think of calling me a layabout who is just checking out for the sake of checking out, let me relate a story from one of my many past corporate jobs:
I was twenty-one, in the second year of my degree and running the education department in a psychiatric hospital (as an art undergrad, haha, the irony) and I hated that job. It was awful, the politics sucked, my boss Chuckles was a basketcase, I was constantly attending Team Buiding exercises that were like Dilbert in motion, the workload was ridiculous, and no matter how much I did I was constantly told that I really wasn’t measuring up, maybe you should do this as well. I was working 35 hours a week in that place and going to school with every other available shred of the week.
And I did it for two years, destroying my sanity and making me loathe my life, making me hate being alive, because I was terrified of quitting - if I quit, how am I going to handle debt? How am I going to pay rent? What will my parents say? Everyone’s going to think I’m just non-committal, lazy. This is how it’s supposed to feel, everyone hates work, suck it up and deal. Management must have smelled a sucker because soon I was assisting two doctors and a social worker, running the education department, doing graphic design for the hospital, managing Chuckles’ fragile ego and temper, working two hours a day in the psychiatric ER, and thinking that this was just the way it was, there was no other way around it, what am I going to do, quit? I’m a little attached to eating and having a place to live, and I have two years of a degree left.
One sunny June day during a meeting where I was getting words about not working hard enough I snapped and told them where they could stick that job, collected my crap out of my desk, tossed in my keys and walked home in the glorious sunshine. I had never felt such a rush of freedom. Soon I was dealing with the terrible reality that kept me in that job for so long - debt, insecurity, how do I pay the rent this month, and so on - and although that sucked too at least I felt I wasn’t at a dead end.
Amazingly, I probably never would have quit if the higher up hadn’t been an intolerable bitch during that meeting. I really thought I would die without that job. I was completely convinced that the debt people would get word immediately and show up and shake the change out of my pockets, that my landlord would nail an eviction notice to my door by the time I got home, that my family would disown me. None of that happened, and instead I started thinking about what I actually wanted instead of trying to grab all the money I could.
If I had known what doing the unthinkable - quitting - would actually be like … well, I probably wouldn’t show up to work either. So why are we all terrified of doing the opposite of what these messages are coming from - and where the hell are these messages coming from in the first place?
If you’ve got something to add, say it, I want to hear what you’re thinking.