Who Exactly are You Mad at?

What is wrong with society and what should be different?

I will admit that my anger was completely phony until about 2016. Until that moment - a politically activating moment for many Americans - I was your pretty standard liberal. My anger was an act of mimicry, a parroting of the anger of those around me. I was “angry” at global warming, at foreign wars, at corporate exploitation, at “hypocrisy” (whatever that is). I sat at coffeeshops and house parties and in my friends’ basements complaining about the injustices and greed of this world, but I never really felt any of it. With the one exception of 9/11, the world presented on the evening news existed only in the abstract, a simulacra of which I had no interface. Come to think of it, 9/11 was abstract as well, albeit an abstraction in vivid hi-fidelity. Would have been a different story if I was drafted, but I wasn’t. So it’s not.

You could say that I’m ignorant, uncaring, “privileged,” or psychopathic, but at the end of the day I’m fairly certain that 95% of my age and income cohort felt (or did not feel) the same way. Being the product of a working-class American family is characterized by a certain sense of removal; a feeling that there is a whole bunch of stuff going on in the world around you that has absolutely nothing to do with you. I was certainly aware that there were people out there suffering the barbs of poverty, the war on drugs, conflicts in the Middle East, etc, but it had very little day-to-day impact on me. I didn’t feel it.

To say this in today’s cultural milieu is now considered taboo. The idea that my youth was not constantly invaded by political consequence, or that I was at the very least not endlessly preoccupied by it, now somehow indicates a weakness of character. By some strange alchemy of the present zeitgeist, it now means I was morally flawed by not being awakened to this horrible, nasty, no-good world going on around me. But is this not exactly the victory sought after by social mobility? It used to be. What is the point of wanting better circumstances if you cannot enjoy the fruits of that higher station? Especially if the main prize of moving out of the lower-class is not having to think about your class anymore? Think about how my grandfather would have felt to know that the fruits of all of his hard work are now called “whiteness.” I mean he was Sicilian, too!

The prevailing ideology is that I should not enjoy social advantage if I am not also persistently encumbered by the dreadful experiences of those below me. While I think it’s rather rotten to be completely oblivious to the plight of those without, I also think it is absurd and emotionally unhealthy to poison the enjoyment of your life with a recursive guilt reflex. To believe this is to believe that the only people in this world who have any right to enjoy things such as a day at the beach or a Sunday drive are the poor. I think this is especially frustrating for the middle class, whose slightly more comfortable social perch is still pretty shitty.

It is for this reason that so much animosity has emerged between the lower and middle classes, rather than a more intuitive struggle between the lower and upper class. Yet however unintuitive this reality is, it is also not surprising. It has always been a vexing political project for the so-called 1%, who - despite their wealth - must eternally contend with the mathematical impasse of being, well…one percent of the population. How does such a small group get their way politically? How can they convince 99% of the population to favor political projects that work in the favor of so few, at the expense of so many?

Well, through manipulation of course. The most hilarious iteration of this was certainly “Reaganomics,” which used the extremely relatable metaphor of “stuff dripping” in order to convince people that a concentration of wealth at the highest level of society would “trickle downward” to the grateful open mouths below. Since then the rationalizations have become increasingly ridiculous and obscured, a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat and an intensification of sales tactics that have resulted in a method of governance that employs the same strategies of impenetrable mystification as a car salesman. Actually, not even the car salesman but the car sales manager who they call over at the end to intimidate/threaten you until you agree to the gap protection insurance.

The middle class mindset is the middle way; the tao of being neither king nor pauper. Certainly I would have loved being shuttled to my grade school basketball games in a BMW or having a water-slide in my backyard, but this was for rich people. Instead I got a Ford Taurus and a four-foot pool in the backyard. Sure, I could have spent my time marching and protesting for those with a three-foot pool and no car at all, but who had the time? My dad worked three jobs, my mom worked two, and there were seven of us with one bathroom.

There is no doubt that we had a kind of “privilege,” but anyone who thinks this privilege was enough to catalyze the sort of social re-orientation imagined by today’s standards is just being intellectually dishonest. Anyone in my position would have carried on in just the same way, if not from the pressure of economics then simply by the sheer force of social conformity. Everyone in my neighborhood acted basically the same way. To see this as a sort of exclusionary collusion is insane. We were all just getting by. If someone suddenly started running down my street screaming about our privilege, we would have just shut our blinds until the crazy man was gone.

But perhaps I’m creating a false dichotomy? Surely there are other options between fanaticism and resignation. There very well may be a moderate path, but even such a recommendation of moderation now falls flat. To somehow advocate a life of extreme commitment but then suddenly switch to a suggestion of moderation is a clear manipulation on the very face of it, i.e., “be moderate in only the specific ways I want you to be moderate, but extreme in all others.” To that, the residents of my childhood street collectively respond:

“Nah…fuck off.”

But I can understand the optics of this, me in my backyard eating kielbasa during a summer barbecue, my father enjoying a rare night off, while at the same time the wealthy are on the TV set pledging $10 million to the environment or racial justice and the poor are dying from police brutality or with needles in their arms…it certainly looks like I’m the only one who doesn’t care. Stroll further down the timeline of causality and you get insight into the friction that often occurs in the dialogues between activists and Italians. “You want to tear down my Columbus statue? Over my dead body!”

The tearing down of a statue is as symbolic as the statue was in the first place. And that is not to say it doesn’t matter - symbolism is the actual currency the world turns on. However it is to say that symbols rarely represent the actual thing they claim to symbolize. Columbus is less about Italian pride than he is about making Italians feel like they were a part of the American experience. Tearing down Columbus is less about toppling white supremacy than it is about a demonstration of social power, i.e. “we do this because we can.” In this way a power struggle is not only inevitable, but obvious. When I was a kid, 85% of my street was either Italian, Irish, or Polish. Now it’s probably 15%. Do you think those 15% are ready to just wave the red, green, and white flag? Hell no! To the very last goombah they fight to keep their power. No one actually wants to give up power, unless…

Unless they aren’t actually giving up any power at all! And such is the real privilege of the “elite,” that they can give a million dollars to “the environment,” that they can implement anti-racist policies, that they can take a stand against trans violence in their 3rd floor break room without giving up anything at all - or at least giving up so little they basically do not even feel it. Such is not the case for your working class family of seven, and why they so often reply with something akin to, “so what do you want me to do now? Say what? Not buy from Amazon, why? Put what sign on my front lawn? Why would I do that?” It all seems so silly when your life is consumed by that same god damn muffler problem that happened last winter.

As the problem of consciousness is centered on when it emerged, the problem of this new brand of political consciousness centers on assuming it never emerged. Almost everyone knows that nobody thought this way in 1996, but we are all now tortured by the enforced revisionism that it indeed did, and that it was only you who chose to be so ignorant and asleep. The idea that humans function this way is absurd to the point of laughter, but of course you must not laugh. Under no circumstances shall you find any of this funny - people are dying out there for God’s sake.

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But I did not intend to write a piece of apologia for working class anesthesia, nor to gripe about demonizing cultural norms. I will leave that bit to the National Review Republicans who seemingly never quit complaining that the rules of social engagement changed in 2010 and nobody cleared it with them first. The actual purpose of this piece was to explore the internalization of this cultural mandate of being angry and miserable at all times. The arguments are really no longer about whether or not you should be miserable, only about what kind of miserable you will be.

The main choices are obvious. On one hand you are miserable about the wealthy, about capitalism, racism, bigotry, about greed and consumerism, domestic terrorists, “men” in general, or peak oil. On the other hand you are miserable about immigrants, foreign terrorists, godlessness, lawlessness, men wearing dresses, people not standing in proper lines at the grocery store, or any of the myriad ways of talking about black people without using the words “black people.” If you’re a more refined individual with just a bit of contrarianism in you, you’re likely to be upset about form rather than function; you’re upset about the manufactured consent, the electoral process, the invisible ideology that we’re all trapped in, market manipulation either in the realm of actual markets or “markets of ideas,” and a general pervasion of what you would maybe call…ennui?

Truly, the only thing that now binds us, besides our shared universal hatred of Meghan Markle, is our general sense of misery. No matter the 4,000 years of human wisdom that document the obvious superiority of balance and moderation, we will insist on being the generation that defies this by proving you can only be happy on one extreme or the other. The only social choice seems to be whether you will be one who indulges or one who fights, each side flaunting the thrills and frills of their choices while condescending to the other, each secretly participating in the activities of the other. Brilliantly, there is now even architecture in place for attacking those along the center line themselves, with cautionary Facebook statuses abounding that not choosing a side is a special sort of evil. That’s right, I see you Joanne…not writing that status…pretending you’re on vacation…Joanne the Bigot…

(Joanne was in a hiking accident and had to be airlifted to a level one trauma center. Her insurance was reviewed because she did not post a black square as her instagram profile picture, aka “claim rejected on the grounds of bigotry)

As I went from high school to college and beyond, my increasing “knowledge” (mostly ideology/propaganda) seemed to make it incumbent upon me to rise out of my middle class ignorance and enter into a broader social consciousness. To not examine the world around me seemed irresponsible, and I soon even began to loathe those I encountered who chose to remain in the blissful ignorance of youth. As I ramped up my fight for a “better world,” one where all were equal and all was just, a strange byproduct emerged; I began to hate this other group of “unawakened” people. Not all unawakened people, of course, just the ones who should “know better.” The other unawakened people had the excuse of being, well…”put upon.” These people also had false consciousness, but their false consciousness was a punishment while the false consciousness of the people I hated was a treat. A vacation. A hall pass from having to sit around and be miserable all day like me.

How I differentiated between these two groups was something I thought was intentional, but of course was either completely random or at least outwardly prescribed by forces who consistently claimed to have the best interests of all in mind. Many people in major cities, especially people under 40, had the exact same experiences as I did. At least for awhile. And then in 2016, when the whole parade came to a screeching halt, many of us found some new thing inside of us. Actually, to be precise, it was not a new thing - it was a very old thing that we had tucked away in the basement of our souls so that our persona could match the cultural demands. But breaking points like 2016 - hard as they may be to endure - are uniquely powerful in the way that they can dislodge things in us long tucked away. And for the first time I started to remember how I used to feel, which was “nothing at all.”

I felt nothing at all, politically speaking, for most of my life. I did not choose to feel nothing, I simply did. There - I admitted it. Can you admit it too? Well that depends on the trappings you find yourself in. If you are someone completely buried in the ideology of “now,” either socially or professionally, then you most certainly either hide your nothingness, or you deny it to the point of gaslighting yourself. You re-cast your blissful carefree youth as a hateful excursion of privilege, one in which you wined and dined while the rest of the world turned and burned.

Bullshit. That wasn’t what happened!

The truth is that this present norm of enforced resentement is a Girardian invention of mimetic misery. We are miserable because our friend is miserable. The problem is that some of us just go harder in the paint than others when it comes to being depressed, and when we look to others to find out how to not completely drown in this misery, the answers are scant. And of course they are, since the misery of our friends is, in the first place, not always even real! It is an aesthetic, an embodied personality that they assume in order to prove to others that they are not ignorant, while simultaneously remaining conveniently ignorant in every other conceivable way.

When there are too many false signals in a system, the system’s feedback loops become corrupted. Thrown out of balance, we cease being able to respond appropriately to excesses of pain or pleasure. It is for this reason that those addicted to opiates are shown to have a condition called “hyperalgesia.” They are more sensitive to pain because they are attenuated to a base state of painlessness. So as in the body, so too in the body politic: as we continue our mission of social sanitization and elimination of interpersonal friction, our ability to handle those inevitable pain points decreases. We become less resilient, to the point in which even the slightest insult or derision becomes a cataclysmic offense.

Situated now, as we are, in a system so hypervigilant to pain, it is no wonder why we find comfort in a worldview that tends toward eternal resentment. Place someone from 1343 in our modern world, and their heads may explode from the sheer amounts of pleasure and freedom they are able to enjoy. Walk up to this 1343 person and tell them how miserable you are, and they might laugh and ask you why. You tell them you are miserable because you feel that the range of your human possibility has been circumscribed by technological advancements and constricted social dialogue. They laugh at you some more. They say “yes, but look at all the different types of breads you have!”

This is not to say we shouldn’t be mad at the way that our cell phones and social media hypnotize us or entrap us. These are real problems for real people of this day and age. Yet I can’t help but wonder if we over-exaggerate this misery to a certain extent as a means of copycatting one another. I have been finding it helpful, lately, to ask myself two questions:

1. What exactly are you mad about?

2. Why are you mad about that?

These two questions have been very clarifying for me. And my application of them has been brutal. This is to say, I ask them repeatedly until I get the truth. I do not settle for the first answers, which are usually the words of someone else planted into my head. I keep asking why until I get to the answers spoken from the most vulnerable parts of myself, written in the language of children. These answers are hard to admit, but are the most “real.”

I complain a lot about language policing, for example. About the hordes of psychotic voluntary language police who roam the internet looking to be offended. Why is it that I am angry about this? I could bore you with several thousand words of confabulated nonsense explaining my position. But at the end of the day, the only real answer is: “I am afraid I will get in trouble if I say something wrong, and everyone will hate me even though I am a nice person.” This is a real fear, and as an adult, it can translate into actual fearful circumstances, such as social ostracization and a loss of income.

So what does my inner “adult” say to my inner “child?” Well, the adult has just the answer: “don’t worry little one, I won’t let us get in trouble. I’ll keep cover for us. I’ll act miserable and dissatisfied the whole time so that no one we’ll suspect us of a thing.” And what is that “thing” that I’m worried of being suspected of? Well happiness, of course.

Happiness is not allowed anymore, unless you meet very strict definitions of vulnerability and historical exploitation. Yet the range of history that can be the case study for this exploitation is also subject to ideology, so please - Irish people - don’t get excited. You still have to be miserable.

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Once again I repeat - this is not new. None of this is new. Humans, subject to the demands of culture at the expense of their internal desires, have always had to suffer a degree of social containment. As Freud said, “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Maturation is the process of figuring out which parts of ourselves can face outward, and which must be tucked away. However, we have forgotten that these tucked away parts must have avenues of expression, lest they explode forth in the most unexpected - and often violent - ways possible.

When the social order is built around an ideal of balance and moderation, it is expected that such “venting” of our shadowy parts needs to happen. We need to watch horror movies and explode fireworks and occasionally let off some really loud farts on wooden chairs. But when the social order is built on a fanaticism, usually in the form of “saintliness,” then the tolerance for chair farts, and all other means of shadow expression, are curtailed. This does not lead to the demolition of shadow as the saintly class would hope. It just means a suppression of the shadow, that finds its way out in extreme and insane ways. I need give you no nudges to think about how this plays out in our country.

The point is that consistent social flagellation may not be the answer, no matter how much it seems like it should be. There may in fact be some counter-intuitive value to mindlessness. There may be a value to the mind-stream of human consciousness that somehow manifests in good karma, even if it would appear ridiculous to think that grilling kielbasa could indirectly make the world a better place. All I know is that I am tired of being miserable and resentful just because I’m being told to be. It is throwing my body systems out of whack to the point that I can’t even tell when I actually should be miserable and resentful.

I wish to enter a period of relaxation, as offensive as that may be to hear. I want to read more, and write more. I’m very behind on things, especially things that I enjoy. I wish to take a few rounds off in the fight to enjoy the breeze, and I wish to do so without feeling guilty about it. And fear not! Though you may miss me on the battlefield, I assure you - I never had any idea what I was fighting for in the first place nor did I ever experience a single victory. We were just shooting air all along. A miserable little war.