Words&Dirt

“Sokolov watched the slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration.  He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing.  Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this situation at essentially zero.  And yet this Muslim Negro, the victim of a surprise raid, handcuffed to an unwilling hostage, and squarely in Sokolov’s rifle sights, had apparently managed to make good his escape simply by taking advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself at random.  Of course, the distraction posed by the explosion and collapse of the building had helped him enormously, but it was admirable nonetheless.  From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed God was on their side.  Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.

And so what moved him onward and down the office building’s stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 339-40

“Fantasies are not the best basis on which to construct family relationships and personal ties.  Western individualism has always fed daydreams about escaping external constraints and family obligations, but prior to the era of mass consumption, most people had no doubt that the real world imposed limits on self-aggrandizement.  They knew that the only sure source of self-identity and security lay in relationships with others.  Consumer society has increasingly broken down our sense that we depend on others, that we have to live with tradeoffs or accept a package deal in order to maintain social networks.

‘The sky’s the limit.’  ‘Go for the gusto.’  ‘Why settle for anything less than the best?’  Consumer culture insists that we can pick and choose from the ‘free market’ of goods, emotions, images, relationships: If we are ‘smart shoppers’ we can ‘have it all’ and still ‘stand out from the crowd.’  Revlon alone offers women more than 150 different shades of lipstick, but saleswomen at cosmetic counters tell prospective buyers that the way to customize the ‘perfect look for you‘ is by layering two or three different colors at the same time.  ‘The only limit is your imagination.’  The cumulative result of these messages is that many people have learned to experience liberation ‘not as the freedom to choose one course of action over another but as the freedom to choose everything at once.’  We have begun to believe that we can shop around not only for things but also for commitments, that we can play mix and match even with our personal identities and most intimate relations.  Simultaneously, we experience a blurring of the distinction between illusion and reality, people and goods, image and identity, self and surroundings.

The flip side of the urge to have it all is the fear of settling for too little.  Something more real might come along; or what we thought was permanent might dissolve at any moment.  The modern urge to transcend constraints––of nature, other people, or even of our own human limitations––is itself a sort of compulsion.  ‘Struggling to liberate ourselves from time, space, and culture, we are too busy to be satisfied.’  Economist David Levine claims that market society has created ‘a social hierarchy of neediness,’ in which people define their worth by the number of needs they seek to fill.  A recent article in USA Today reports that the ‘perfect day,’ spent on pursuits recommended by time management experts, is forty-two hours long!  Some individuals turn even leisure into a form of relentless work as they strive to avoid ‘missing out’ on opportunities.  Others are terrified by the possibility of ‘premature’ commitment: The sense that all choice is good and more choice is better is a profoundly destabilizing one for interpersonal relationships.

It is important not to exaggerate this trait.  Most people whose relationships break up, for example, are not pursuing individual ‘liberation’ or hedonism.  One major study of divorced fathers found that they deeply desired ‘sustained, meaningful relationships’ rather than ‘superficial encounters.’  The difficulty of building such relationships today is as much a product of the unrealistic private family ideals I described in chapters 3 and 5 as it is of purely selfish individualism.  Many people’s ‘self-absorption’ results not from desire for instant gratification but from a desperate attempt to reconstruct their inner selves to cope with new life experiences and changing roles.

Still, the more people deny the social basis of their identity, the more easily seduced they are by consumerism’s promise that one can become anything one wishes.  And the more we see our identity as a personal achievement that can be constructed or made over with the aid of commodities, self-help books, or new social skills, the more we value but the less we are able to define the one good that becomes scarce in a consumer society: sincerity.  As targets of too many competing claims from advertisers and as perceptive observers of our own self-preservation, we are acutely aware of our vulnerability to delusion and our capacity to delude.  Thus we are haunted by doubt about our authenticity, our ‘true feelings,’ our very existence apart from the ‘dazzling array of images’ with which we have surrounded ourselves.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 176-7