(though not necessarily in that order)
The challenge I set myself in the last post -- to describe the transition from the subject matter of Cluetrain and Gonzo Marketing to my present concerns -- turned out to be more of a challenge than I'd figured on. It involves changes in my personal life (as if there were any other sort) whose bases, you could say, are still emotionally loaded. The closer blogging gets to the bone, the more often this will happen. I could have said writing instead of blogging there, but there's a difference. If you're writing from the heart of that personal life, than which there is no other, that publish button is already pretty scary. Not to re-flog a well-flogged horse, but I would propose this as a critical delta between blogging and journalism. Most sorts of journalism, I should add. That was the basis of my interest in the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson. You can say he was too stoned to care, but I know he had moments of terror up on that high wire, yet he always hit the send key on that fax machine. Damn the torpedoes, the vampire bats, the fearful, loathsome consequences. Respect.
So yeah, I hit into some of that weather for a couple days here, and the plane is still a bit rocky from the turbulence. All the baggage fell out of the overhead compartments, lunch got distributed more rapidly than planned, and I think we lost a couple passengers from severe negative pressure in the rest rooms. Requiescat in pace. It was quick anyway.
The Cluetrain Manifesto was about how companies have come to treat human beings as metonymic "eyeballs," statistical abstractions of demographics and buying patterns. And about how that approach was not gonna work so pretty good on the internet, where we could talk back. And more important, talk among ourselves. Compare notes, compare experiences, and realize -- if we hadn't already -- how dehumanizing traditional media had been.
Gonzo Marketing -- which, to the chagrin of many and the delight of some, was not really a "marketing book" -- looked more deeply, more historically into how that dehumanization had come about. It was largely a story about mass production, mass advertising, and the broadcast media that served both. There was more, of course (including lots of terrible jokes), but that was the gist of the thing. How had we come to be characterized as "consumers," and what could we do to either a) retaliate -- an ever popular indoor sport -- or b) find better things to do with our humanity, if any.
Then there was a rift in the fabric of time and space, a darkness visible to none but myself; in short, bad days at Black Rock. Many of them, seemingly interminable, leading nowhere. It was that "if any" rider, above, that did it. Because if anything requires thick description it's our various concepts and fantasies, embedded so deep we can't see them, of what it is that makes us human. Diversity is wonderful, yeah, sign me up. DNA and childhood being what they are -- which is simply: complex -- diversity is not a menu option. It's the set course. So it's rare to never, slim to none, the chances that our concepts and fantasies of selfhood will ever match those of another. This keeps things, as you may have noticed, interesting.
Nonetheless, we have expectations, some entirely reasonable, that our differences fall within a common frame we think of -- more often take for granted -- as human. However, these expectations shatter, along with much of the inherently fragile psyche they've helped to cohere -- when your mother, say, brutally beats and sexually abuses you; when someone ushers you into a shower room that's really a gas chamber because you're a Jew; when you realize suddenly what it is to be out on a date with Ted Bundy.
Inhumanity, as it turns out, is not so rare as we'd like to think. Take a look around. And strangely enough, the social and personal pathologies that destroy what is most human in us come in sheep's clothing, disguised as caring, sensitive, spiritual inner guides. But caveat emptor, consumer. If you go dancing in the light, watch you don't dance off the end of a pier. Or a scaffold.
The reappearance of the consumer is no accident here, as these pathologies largely entail love grotesquely morphed into psychic accumulation and consumption. An intimate table for two with you as the naked lunch.
"But Ted, I thought we were going to..." And that's all she wrote.
Now Mr. Bundy was a psychopath, which is shorthand for one "suffering" from Antisocial Personality Disorder. They don't suffer, though. They let other people do that for them, and they get off on it. They have no conscience whatsoever, no remorse. In the hierarchy of personality disorders, Antisocials are right at the top. Incurable. They either end up on death row or in the CEO's suite (we could all cite examples, I'm sure, from recent news reports). Fortunately, true psychopaths are rare.
Less rare are representatives of the next rung down: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A lot less rare than they're thought to be, in fact, narcissists very rarely seek treatment because, you see, they're perfect. So why would they need "help"? It's a seamless rationale -- and one supported and encouraged by society at large, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in 1979 in The Culture of Narcissism. In the 1991 reprint edition, he added an Afterword that touched on the phenomenon of the New Age, warning of its narcissistic inclinations. But that was 15 years ago, and much has happened since. And much more has happened over the centuries leading up to this contemporary "philosophy" of high-horse crypto-spiritual self delusion. Looking back, following the trail of scattered breadcrumbs in reverse, I encountered those themes I mentioned in my last post: various perverse permutations on "self-esteem," the "human potential" movement, the ubiquitous American concept of manifest destiny, Transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, Theosophy, eugenics, fascism, and the whole occult magical mystery tour that brings us back full-circle to the spiritual-but-not-religious secret handshake of an Age that is anything but New.
But completing that circuit has taken three years. Almost exactly three years ago (more of the story here), when all this was far from an exercise in intellectual abstraction, I ran into a book in London that may very well have saved my life. Narcissism and Intimacy, which I found in a Borders store near Oxford Circus, was my first introduction to the amazing, astounding, literally maddening world of personality disorders. I underlined nearly the entire book during that long, too-long, heartbreaking week at the Langham Hilton.
What led me, like some half-crazed detective, from that book and that bookstore to reading tons of the sort of thing you see below... well, that's the book I'm working on now. I do so hope you'll like it when it's finally soup.
from: Nazis Not the Only Ones Seeking a 'Master Race'
by George McEvoy
source: The Palm Beach Post, 10 February 2001
In case you thought crackpot master race beliefs were the sole property of European Nazis, consider this:
Late last week, lawmakers in the Commonwealth of Virginia voted 85-10 to express official "regret" for that state's former policy of selective breeding - and for practices which included the forced sterilization of 8,000 men and women because of supposed "hereditary defects."
Last week's resolution expressed "profound regret over the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement in this country and the incalculable human damage done in the name of eugenics."
The resolution also called on society to "reject absolutely any such abhorrent pseudo-scientific movement in the future."
The forced sterilization policy was no arcane hangover from the days of slavery. Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924 and was still ordering such surgical procedures as late as 1979, according to The Washington Post....
Virginia was by no means alone in this cruel practice, nor was it limited to the South.
The American eugenics movement began with the 20th century, long before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. It was a time full of half-baked scientific theories such as phrenology, whose practitioners believed they could predict a person's future behavior by the bumps on his head.
Indiana passed the country's first forced sterilization law in 1907, and within a short time, 30 states in all had such laws on their books.
Over the next 70 years, state government hospitals are believed to have sterilized more than 60,000 men and women. Only California, with 20,000 forced sterilizations, had more than Virginia....
A University of Virginia historian, Paul Lombardo, has noted that "the Nazis took great comfort from the eugenics movement in America."
Hitler's propagandists would refer to it in trying to justify their own "master race" theories.
So don't say it can't happen here.
It already has.
