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Title: Indulge… & Undermine Author: CrimethInc. Date: November 1, 2001 Language: en Topics: Harbinger, culture Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/indulge-undermine
Have you noticed — exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed
by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory
within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around… from new-age
prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone
exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which
ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?
This just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every
front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway —
they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole
context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have
to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste
much better, because the nuclear family — for those who still have even
that — is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking
and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of
community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses
would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology
has claimed the hours once used to write letters — and killed all the
passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this
society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to
imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around
us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel,
every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization
that creates us.
Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but
not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires — no such
things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self — you
are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy
about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and
attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s
not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes
them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The
accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact
be “happy” — but it is a different happiness than the one they
experience on the lam.
If our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our
environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these
environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel
however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet
advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a
man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter,
success, and companionship is already established by his society, and
all that remains is for him to choose between established options
(bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or
Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of
this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us.
Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure
that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit,
custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up to you to create these
situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.
And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary
change, is going on constantly and everywhere — and everyone plays a
part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast
of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply
whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing
transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of
your own power — or frame your actions as reactions, participating in
unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were
purely a victim of circumstance.
If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we
want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But
the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in
reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already
happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no
way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.
So forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen — the best
reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live.
It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a
relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and
outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on
between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No
institution can offer you freedom — but you can experience it in
challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up
their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the
tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert
economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to:
rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the
ones who exercise it.
Shout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our
own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology,
literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck
buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate
mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances
and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and
programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our
ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony
columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living
up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines,
listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell
us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the
same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to — and gnashing our
teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the
cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable,
inescapable tragedies — they’re consequences of the passivity to which
we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on
the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms
before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in
our own epics, masters of our own fate.
If we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world — but to
begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all
of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have
all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each
other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear
nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the
opposite?
Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order
that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause
and effect that produced you — not with any amount of willpower. The
trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously
subvert it — that create, in the process of satisfying those desires,
conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find
leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you
need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself;
if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for
everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your
conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more
effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle”
passed down from a humorless Christianity.
To return, finally, to the original question — yes, we too are making
suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to
deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not
to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages
them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic — but today,
refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs
and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their
control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist
in the absence of control — it is something we have to make together.
Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the
world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society,
influencing and being influenced as we do.
We make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we
hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in
a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing
with our passions — and so to enter a world of total liberty and
diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See
you on the other side.