I shared this video of dogs coming down some kind of playground chute or slide on Facebook. The dogs all look very happy at the bottom and some even try to climb back up for a second ride. Still, a few people looked at the video and wondered if the dogs had been frightened and not wanted to go. Had they been forced down the chute – pushed into it – against their will? It didn't matter to these people that the dogs had had a great experience and were happy at the bottom. They were focused on the fear the animals might have felt at the top. They were concerned that cruelty and trauma might have been involved. I suppose you might say they were woke.
These people made me wonder whether I should feel bad for having shared the video. But I couldn’t. The dogs were unharmed and obviously happy. It seemed to me that they were better off after going down the chute than they had been before.
Then it came to me that those dogs being put through a chute were a metaphor for things like education, hard work and the duties we all owe to community and society.
Not many people enjoy being educated, or working hard, or having to obey laws and rules and conventions. Social duties like voting are a real chore, as is everything else we need to do to play our part in a complex modern society – paying taxes, going on jury duty, wearing a mask during a pandemic, obeying road rules, etc. These things are difficult, tedious, sometimes painful, always more or less unpleasant. Not as bad as going to the dentist, true, but no fun.
Yet when we've done them, the benefits are clear to us. We’re personally empowered, have added to our own resources and feel good about ourselves. Often we find that we've enjoyed the ride despite ourselves, just like the dogs in the video. And everyone around us (i.e. society) has benefited too
But since these things don't seem like fun (and even daunting or scary at first), we often have to be coerced into them – ‘trained’, if you like, or ‘traumatized’ and ‘brainwashed’ if you prefer. Much of this is done to us as children, but it continues into adulthood – difficult and unpleasant things that we do or endure in order to improve our own lives, and the lives of others, in the long run.
Wise folk have no problem with this. Others resent it and often push back. The rebels used to be ignored or suffer general rebuke for as long as people accepted that some irritations and inconveniences are necessary in life. But they don’t any more. They think they don’t need to. And so the rebellion spreads.
That is only possible because the world, compared to how it was (say) fifty years ago, is richer, healthier, better developed and – in the places where most of us live, at least – cleaner. Life, most of the time, is not that hard. And for all the worry about growing authoritarianism, people today have many more choices than they did back then, which makes them, by definition, more free.
All this is great – progress! But something else was happening too, silently and without many people noticing, while we were beating back poverty around the world, destroying Communism on the left and old elites on the right, and establishing our interconnected, mediated consumer society. We slipped our tether to reality, and we didn’t even realize that we were now adrift.
Life today, even for modest working folk in most parts of the world, has a lot in common with the old dream of living in Aladdin's cave. Everything is available at the touch of a screen (to be lusted after and yearned for even if we can’t afford it); household chores and most jobs are easy and safe, wars and revolutions are rare (except when, and where, they aren't) and everything is about aspiration: getting better, doing great, cutting away all the stuff that keeps you from ‘ascending’ – materially, socially, spiritually. But along the way, we became distanced from and largely forgot about the real, dirty, complex, difficult processes that deliver to us the necessities and luxuries of life – the factories, farms, roads and bridges and other infrastructure, the legal systems, bureaucracies and governments needed to manage and regulate it, the social conventions that keep us from one another’s throats. We have even learnt to look away from the huge amounts of hard labour and misery that are still needed to make our everyone-an-island consumer society work. We can do this because everything now comes and goes through a media-devised interface – a simulation of the world that is partly designed to help you escape from ugly reality into a paradise of artificial entertainment, but mainly designed to encourage you to consume – by making you anxious and envious and discontented, because that’s the way you get people to want things. Trust me on this: I was an advertising and public relations man for 35 years, and I've sold everything from antacids to education reform. I know how people are made to want things: by appealing to their lowest instincts.
Lost in this consumerist simulation of reality, we – the bourgeoisie, the striving classes (once known as the working class but now including clerical, sales – ‘and marketing’ – and mid-level executive workers), even some of the upper classes – have come to ignore or take for granted the contract that we are all party to – the mutual agreement that props up the real world. Forgetting our commitments, we have come to think that all the things we enjoy so easily nowadays – every one of which is a privilege – are ours by right. We have forgotten that life is difficult and dangerous, that it demands labour and sacrifice and growing a thicker skin. We have become infantilized: spoilt brats who don't see why they have to go through the chute. We don't just want it all and want it now; we want it our way, too, without any sacrifice on our own part.
Few any longer enjoy the happiness and peace of mind that comes from having gone through the chute, of being a fully equipped, adequately educated and emotionally mature adult. Few people derive any satisfaction from doing the right thing in life, or in doing their part to help make the world go round. And society, bereft of their participation, becomes a little less functional, a bit less effective. Slowly, it begins to crumble.
In some places, like the unhappy, brutalized, communalist state that has displaced my native country of Ceylon, society is at the point of collapse. In the West and the technocratic East, despite all the weeping and wailing, it’s still pretty strong; but it won’t be if this goes on for much longer. Consumer capitalism has become a victim of its own success. It has become disconnected from reality, and it has no place left to go but down.
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