Eating S**t (and liking it, too)

The purchasing of consumer goods is often an enjoyable experience. This doesn't just apply to those of us that do it excessively. There's a universal trait of pleasure that results from choice and subsequently from the creation of a consumer identity. So, looking at these two notions a little closer:

Choice denotes freedom and autonomy. As individuals with unique tastes and outlooks we select what appeals to us or what suits our circumstances best. I might buy a can of peeled tomatoes if my favourite meal is a pasta dish with a tomato-based sauce. You might buy lentils because you're a vegetarian and you need some supplementary iron in your diet. Theoretically, these choices are solely ours to make, but this is something of an illusion. If I want a can of chopped, peeled whole tomatoes that weighs in at 500g, I can't buy it because no local supermarket stocks it. To a degree, this is fair enough; we can't ask for exactly what we want. The point remains, however, that the freedom associated with choice is not as pure as it sometimes feels like it is.

Consumer identity is built upon this structured freedom of choice. The clothes you choose to wear, the technological devices through which you communicate and interact with multimedia, the food you eat and your preferred form of transport are parts of who you are because they compose your day-to-day experiences and shape your interaction with other people. You express yourself through a plethora of small fragments of meaning.

This is pretty suggestive of a possible reason for brand loyalty and compulsive shopping. Both seem to be somewhat desperate acts. Brand loyalty resounds as something peculiarly religious. It's the worship of something non-physical, often on irrational grounds. Just as a Catholic Christian takes his or her religion to be a critical component of his or her identity, so the disciples of brand names of consumer products integrate the brand into a sense of who they are. Compulsive shopping is similar in its apparent search for 'something to fill the hole'. The notion of consumer activity being used as some sort of substitute for filling up the 'emptiness inside' is almost cliched, but perhaps this is not without cause. This kind of behaviour frames consumerism as a sort of religion for late capitalist societies.

Most religions offer some form of transcendence, which I personally believe is an important part of human existence. When I talk of transcendence, I'm referring to the sensation of somewhat losing a sense of oneself, of gaining an awareness of being part of something larger or something eternal. Modern means of reaching such a state seem to be found in the use of some illicit drugs, religious experiences, and love. Unfortunately, the inherently material nature of consumerism doesn't provide the means for transcendence. Those who attempt to 'fill the hole' this way tend to remain disappointed, because they're unconsciously trying to correct a spiritual problem with a material solution.

I can't pretend to have the answer to this problem, so I'll look instead at some of the goods we buy that are of questionable value. One of the principal techniques of therapists for shopaholics is to try to instil a sense of distinction between want and need. Here are a couple of things that I think I can reason into the former category:


Portable DVD players. I work part-time in sales in consumer electronics, and some of the things I sell I admittedly struggle to believe in. This is one such thing. Now that discipline is pretty much admonished as a method of parenting, one of the only ways to shut the kids up while they're pestering you in the back seat is to put a 7-10 inch LCD screen in front of their faces. Power the thing through your cigarette lighter to suck up the car battery extra fast, and let Billy's favourite movie teach him the things that he should be learning from you. Nothing like some high-powered electronic media to further weaken the ties of the nuclear family.

Global positioning systems. A street directory costs as little as a twentieth the amount. The time it takes to power up these things and get them to communicate with satellites dwarfs the time it takes to work out where to go from a map book. OK, sympathy must be extended to those that can't read a map to save themselves, and in those cases, maybe the lower-end models make a worthwhile purchase. I can better understand the purchase of one of the more basic units, but the higher-end ones have all sorts of useless crap tacked on to them, like bluetooth, a massive amount of hard drive space and synchronisation with your MP3 player. These things are a prime example of the way that technological developments sometimes strip us of our independence; why do it yourself when your GPS can do it for you?

Four-wheel drives. They guzzle fuel, they make for terrible parking, they're dangerous to other motorists and they're not as safe for the passengers as some would believe. They make a nice status symbol for anyone with an overpowering inferiority complex. They have no use in suburbia. If you live rurally, or regularly drive off the beaten track, as is the case in the photo, you've got more of a case for needing one. Still, whatever the state of the oil crisis, you can rest assured that it isn't really that bad if city folk are still driving these things around.

Wants, not needs. The real problem is, this stuff keeps our economy going. How do we escape it without fiscal devastation? That's something for a radical economist to answer.

Next post I want to look at emo culture.

Unleashing the Rage

I stress once more that anybody who is sensitive to discussion about school shootings or related problems, in a particular or a general sense, should not read on. I can't be rendered insensitive if I warn you and offer you the informed choice of not to read this. What follows is why I think these terrible occurrences are happening with such frequency. If anybody wants to input a difference of opinion, feel free.

Some people are less stable than others. No matter what the nature of social integration in a given society is like, some individuals will always fail to meet the unspoken standards determined by social customs. There's nothing wrong with this; it's natural, and, to a degree, quite healthy. What is constantly debated by academics and civil forces is the appropriate and ethical means with which to constrain deviant activities when they're no longer healthy, no longer productive and are a positive threat to the lives of other citizens. We live in a liberal society. Questions of where to draw the line of state interference and surveillance of indivdual lives are constantly being raised without answer.

Nobody knows what to do. The front page of the paper (in an Australian city) responds to the killings of Cho Seung-Hui with the headline 'NOT AGAIN'. This immediately indicates a sense of hopelessness, of helplessness. We have no idea how to stop these maniacs from killing because we don't know when, where or how, until it's happened.

But we need to feel certain. We need progress. That's why there's so much public awareness about lax American gun laws. We have to feel like we're going somewhere, anywhere, to fix this problem. Questions of the appropriate interference of the state in people's lives are raised again in the problem of appropriate restrictions to the right to own a gun. This issue-within-an-issue suggests a desire to fix the problem as quickly and as simply as possible. And yes, there's something to be said for that. If a solution works, problem solved. Right?

Almost, but not quite. It's highly likely that if gun laws were waxed considerably, shootings like this would decrease in occurrence. But angry, psychotic young men would still be angry, psychotic young men, and if any of them did manage to still obtain a firearm and a few bullets - well, you know how the story goes. So what do we do?

Well, let's look at the causes. The ultimate cause in each case is a very angry young man who is different to the rest of us in two main respects:
1. He is very, very, very angry at everybody. Anger at one or a few people is applied to everybody he sees.
2. He no longer has a sense of restraint. He reaches a point where he can, for whatever reason, do what the rest of us could barely contemplate.

These causes seem to be too deeply psychologically embedded to be anything that can be caused by violent video games or heavy metal. If these were possible causes, why wouldn't anyone who plays Half-Life or listens to Marilyn Manson do terrible things like this? It has to be something that is more fundamental to the construction of the human psyche.

Yeah, I'm leaning towards social and cultural causes here. Might I stipulate that I wouldn't for a second absolve Mr. Seung-Hui of responsibility for his actions. However, there's an unresolvable sociological tension between individual autonomy and the impact of social forces on one's behaviour. What I'm trying to say is, it's nowhere near as simple as writing guys like these off as nutcases that shouldn't have been born. If circumstances had been different, who's to say whether or not what did happen, would've happened?

So let's look at cultural causes. Allow me to throw in a bit of psychoanalytic cultural theory here. A historian called Christopher Lasch wrote about American cultural narcissism (check out The Culture of Narcissism; it's a pretty interesting read). Narcissists are basically people who often appear to love themselves but are really filled with hate, and constantly require approval from others. This rage is caused primarily by parents who treat their children like consumer goods, like a part of themselves, and not an individual being. It's also caused by a lax education system and materialist social relations. The narcissistic kid subsequently grows up in an environment with very little discipline, and will often have to create his or her own sense of restriction and self-governance, which can overcompensate and become really aggressive. This, perhaps, is why easy-going families often raise nasty kids.

Cho Seung-Hui apparently grew up in seemingly quite a normal, healthy family. What if his upbringing helped to germinate a narcissistic personality? If this were the case, what if there was some other prevailing factor that encouraged Seung-Hui to redirect his self-directed rage outwards and mentally absolve himself of all of his actions? In his disturbing confessional video, Cheung-Hui had successfully excused himself for what he was about to do by conferring blame to other people, to society at large. If he managed to convince himself that it was totally society's fault that 'made him like this', what else was there to stop him from doing what he did on April 17?

Many western societies facilitate the shifting of responsibility for one's actions away from oneself. Hell, the sociological framework I've been talking in here comes dangerously close. And look at the way that therapy culture has allowed people to find an excuse to give up on life when when they may not always be quite as sick as they make themselves out to be.

My conclusion thus comes in the form of a question, because I'm not quite so arrogant as to state that what I believe IS the truth. What if these killings could be stopped by reconsidering the way that we raise our children, allowing them to understand themselves as fully functioning individuals with individual responsibilities?

Maybe I'm totally wrong and maybe I've just written a long spiel of total B.S. Maybe Seung-Hui's parents loved him as an autonomous human being and raised him in an environment of reasonable discipline. I don't know. I just think that all of this stuff about cultural narcissism explains a lot.

Next post I want to have a stab at the unnecessary consumer crap we buy.

Why I hate Adam Duritz from Counting Crows

Counting Crows are a genre-resisting band that draw elements from grunge, folk rock and country music. They released their first album, August and Everything After, in 1993. It was quite successful in the U.S. and internationally, and yielded the band's most prolific single, Mr. Jones. The band has since released three more studio albums, two live performance albums and a greatest hits. The fifth album is now being developed. Over time, and depending on where you'd draw the boundaries, the number of members in the band have varied from five to seven. Adam Duritz, the lead singer and lyricist, is pretty much a central icon of the band's identity.

Counting Crows have been charged with being a 'slow' band, or a 'lazy' band. They have released a studio album every three or four years. Most of the time this seems to be because Adam Duritz is a rather emotionally frail character, who finds touring and the musical production process taxing and challenging. This kind of frailty I would not hold against anybody. Hell, if I were famous, I'd probably struggle with the enormity of the responsibility too.

Mr. Duritz found himself feeling a lot of pressure while touring after the release of August. After Kurt Cobain died, he thought, for whatever reason, that he might go the same way. He has also, in recent years, experienced a protracted depressive episode that he is now gradually recovering from. This is also something I'd never hold against anybody.

What I tend to hold against people are character flaws, and depression and sensitivity are not character flaws. What I have a problem with is Mr. Duritz's barely concealed contempt for his fan base and his lack of appreciation for the wealth and comfortable lifestyle that they've provided him. Allow me to illustrate.

In a blog posted to the official Counting Crows website (in December I believe), Mr. Duritz told his message board-dwelling fans something to the effect that 'some of you are f**king awful people'. This initially seems fair enough, given that there has been a lot of bitching and moaning on these message boards. I've not participated in it myself, but I've flicked through some of the threads and I see what he means.

Nonetheless, it begs the question: what makes the fans of a band disrespectful? Hardcore fans of some bands will psychologically adhere to their movements like little nazis, even if they make bad musical choices. This isn't the case for the Crows in either respect. They've consistently produced excellent music for about fifteen years, but their fans often show little respect. This little puzzle seems answerable by one simple hypothesis, that, once I'd realised it, seemed hard to refute: A BAND WILL RECEIVE ABOUT AS MUCH RESPECT FROM ITS FANS AS IT GIVES. Hell, just think of Pearl Jam. Two hours plus for a concert and endless bootlegs, as well as a hardworking ethic that drives them to create the best music possible. Their many hardcore fans are obsessive.

So what's disrespectful about Adam's behaviour? Consider a song called Have You Seen Me Lately from the second album, Recovering the Satellites. Adam sings 'Get away from me/this isn't gonna be easy/but I don't need you/believe me/you got a piece of me.../but I don't need anyone'. A reliable source has quoted Adam as saying that this is about how his fans don't understand him. So: he doesn't need his fans? He doesn't need them? If it weren't for his fans, he'd probably be working in an office or factory somewhere, or be a musician that constantly struggles to make a living. If he wishes he were in either position, it was his fault for getting signed in the first place. Sorry buddy, but fans are what you get when you earn lots of money in the music industry.

Moreover, he's stated that he does not find the music-making process enjoyable. Aside from this being a strangely plaintive thing to say, I must ask: why's he doing it in the first place? I don't doubt that he has enough money to retire - which is almost what he's done anyway, at the speed with which the band releases albums. Studios are generally pretty stingy, but Counting Crows are such a big band that I sincerely doubt that Mr. Duritz is not very comfortably off. Furthermore, when a fan on the message board accused the band of being lazy, Adam replied in a blog that it was really none of the fan's business. This is a pretty strong indication of a lack of respect.

All the guy wants is love. That's the way it seems to me, anyway. That's something I also understand on a very personal level, but what I can't understand is the way that, through so much of his behaviour and his expression, he seems to whine about how nobody understands him, how his fans don't understand him, and all he wants is the same damn thing that almost every person in the western world wants (if they haven't got it), but is apparently unique to his oh-so-sorrowful situation: love.

Why does this piss me off so much? This is a guy that doesn't know what he's got and won't take responsibility for his fans. I don't want to be the fan of a band whose lead singer seems to have no respect for his fans and won't understand that even if they don't understand him, they've bought the music that the band's produced because they enjoy it and respect his work as a musician. But I am a fan.

All of this being said, I think that Counting Crows are, musically, a brilliant band. Their music charts emotional territories that few bands can wander into. Duritz usually weaves his sorrow into his lyrics subtly enough to maintain a strong melancholic harmony without resorting to annoying pseudo-emotion. I would suggest that anyone interested in light rock of the '90s check out any of their studio albums.

Next post I want to talk about school shootings. Anyone sensitive to such material has been warned.

The Cultural Cringe

I wrote a list of stuff I'm interested in ranting about, and one thing that these phenomena generally seemed to have in common is that they can be framed in terms of my personal disenchantment about the culture I live in and western culture in general.

I'm not one of those unabiding pessimists that doesn't have the perspective to realise that things for us could be a lot worse (when I say us, I mean people in western societies - USA, Canada, Britain, west Europe). Conditions of material comfort for many of us, myself included, are to a degree that no other human society has hitherto experienced. We have the money for food, shelter and often even leisure. If I had the choice to either continue living my life or to immediately be reborn in some completely random place anywhere on the planet, I'd unequivocally choose the former.

This being said, in other respects I am a pessimist. I focus more on the negatives. I naturally find the widespread problems in western culture more interesting than the positives. That is what this blog is about.

I want to use the facelessness of the Internet to be a little polemical and as straightforward as possible, so I hope nobody gets offended. Unduly, anyway. I don't intend to defame or abuse for the sake of enjoyment. Many of us are unpleasant enough to swear at each other in chat rooms and message boards (I was guilty of it once or twice), and I figure I might as well direct that lack of restraint to something useful. Still, there's a shameful pleasure in dishing out verbal punishment on something. I'll do my best to direct it with justification. And please feel free to comment. But if you're just going to write telling me that I'm stupid because you know I'm wrong about something, don't waste your time.

So it begins - whatever it shall prove to be. My first entry (or the next one, anyway) will be about why Adam Duritz from Counting Crows is an idiot.