Henry Dampier

The only living person who probably cares about you unconditionally, if you’re lucky, is your mother. Even if you cave in someone’s skull with a claw hammer at the Dairy Queen in sight of several witnesses and a security camera, she’ll tell the local news station that you were always a good boy and that you didn’t do anything wrong.

Other people may or may not care about you, but the relationship is inherently conditional. You will have had to build some credibility with those people before expecting them to care about whether you live, die, or suffer.

This tends to be especially different for men to understand in comparison to how the broader society tends to treat women. A pretty girl in need will rarely be in need for long, but a man in need will rarely inspire much pity.

A lot of this derives from the broadly shared utilitarian values which have come to dominate the minds of most Westerners. They think about use-value rather than the value of the soul. Contrary to the egalitarian muddling about the ‘intrinsic value of life,’ until recently, the righteous were quite willing and capable to execute criminals in the service of justice without the plodding, maudlin procedures of death row, and the universally failed attempts to discover ‘humane’ methods of execution. Souls aren’t equal. Sinners and saints don’t go to the same place.

God does care about you — but he will boil you in shit for eternity if you’re bad. This tends to be lost somewhere in modern liturgical dissembling.

Because the indifference of the world is so painful to experience, secular teachers attempt to provide consolation by telling children that they’re ‘special’ and have inherent value. This belief as painkiller may provide the person with the courage that he needs to face the indifferent world. But more often, this false pride leads to a sense of being wounded by the  inevitable indifference of the others. People want to believe that they are valued just for existing, like they were as infants (if they were so lucky), sucking thick milk from a warm nipple, teething all along like an overgrown hairless gerbil.

Adult men(and older women) aren’t so lucky. Others value us based on our contributions to them, to institutions, and to the commonweal. The rule is give-and-take. This can be subverted by the pretend-to-give-and-then-really-take, or the take-take-take. But not for long, as subversion either chokes the host society or forces a purge.

If you want more from the world, you must be generous, even when you have nothing to give.

Today, people are both harder and softer than they were before.  Tracking the lives of people can be difficult, but we can more easily track the art that they create.

In terms of sensitivities, people are much less sensitive to images, especially moving images, than they once were. They need a lot of movement and stimulation to feel anything when looking at something. In older movies, you see a lot of long, tracking shots, or still scenes which are more similar to the perspective of a play spectator than that of a stedicam operator. Visual art is noisier. Magazine advertisements rarely have long copy anymore. Instead, they tend to have spectacular, erotic photos, usually with some kind of oblique teaser or legal fine print.

The sort of verbal allusions which were possible in ads from the 1960s and ’70s (see below for a famous one) tend to be avoided now. The kicker line is “we pick the lemons, you get the plums.” People would not read to the end, now, and the text would be too small for them.

 

I bet that if you took a survey of the American people today, most would not know what a plum is, and few would be able to identify that lemons and plums both grow on trees.  The level of literacy is just much lower.

When we think of men and women of the younger generation, their sensibilities tend to be formed, if they’re formed at all, by some mixture of the internet and television (with the majority going to the television, despite the furious pumping of internet stock-jobbers). Their senses are trained to the format of the 30 minute TV program, around which their lives revolve. The shows are 20-24 minutes long, there will be 6-10 minutes of ads, and the ads will be typically cut into formats of 30, 60, or 120 seconds with some rare ones lasting longer.

Further, when young people are texting and Facebooking, they are often doing it about television. When they’re not doing it about TV, they’re just showing each other pictures of their private parts, which really ought to just be renamed ‘parts for public use’ given the changes in mores.

America and most of the rest of the West has ceased to really become a cerebral culture. The leadership class in particular tends to prefer the conference, the blog post, the white paper, and the skimmable article to the book. It’s also not possible to be a real leader of a culture in which the typical person watches five hours of television a day unless you also partake in the highly stimulative audiovisual culture yourself.

This culture tends to frustrate the highly cerebral and literate. It has frustrated me all of my life, in part because I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t like me, and wanted everyone else to be more like me. I also came from an abnormally literate household even among my family’s peer group. It seemed to me just a matter of effort, nagging, and cultivation. The solution to me seemed ideological. Which it isn’t; not directly. And the problem to me was personal, redefined as political, and coming from vanity, along with a sense of equality.

So, we have a culture in which more text is being published than ever before, but the majority tends to be indifferent to printed text, regardless of the medium that it appears on. A minority of people consumes text voraciously. They tend to be smarter and more knowledgeable, because text is a denser medium, with the book being the most efficient means of transmitting knowledge from one person to many people ever yet devised.

Yet those people are often disconnected from their peers and the world of the body, because to disconnect from television is to become a bit of a pariah, in the same way as not being a member of a local church would have made you into a pariah or even an apostate in previous centuries. These visuals also deaden the imaginative mental habit which is necessary to make the enchantment of text work its magic on the heart and mind.

We also have to note that our public spaces are ugly and soul-destroying, looking sometimes like photographs of the Soviet Union, but with mostly smoother roads, more propaganda, and more ugly franchises catering to the degraded. This is why the screens are so dazzling to people. When the world is hideous and degraded, even a gaudy flash of something human is enough to captivate the attention.

Given that it’s not possible to change the sensibilities and habits of the people of the West entirely away from the quick-cut television experience which their entire lives orbit around, there are limits to how much written words alone can achieve in terms of moving the broader population.

My hope would be to encourage the better 20% to return to more literate habits. The best way to encourage this is to downplay the egalitarianism which encourages the high to slouch and the low to pretend to something that they’ll never achieve.

We also have to consider that we have become excessively articulated, too literally depicted, in a way that blots out meaning. We can flash 30 photographs a second at our eyes to create the illusion of motion and life, but even thousands of meaningless pictures flashed in front of our eyes may have less meaning than a single one.

If you spend enough time reading all the junk that people write about relationships and manners, you will usually come to someone who teaches that it’s good to want to be ‘authentic’ all of the time. What this usually means is that one should be open and honest about all the thoughts and feelings that come to your head. It also means that a person should not hide different parts of their lives from others.

Part of Facebook’s mission statement, which it adheres to, is to make the world ‘more open and connected,’ to discourage through technology and design the keeping-away of separate, private selves which older internet applications used to encourage. America Online, Facebook’s direct predeccessor, used to discourage the use of real names in their signup process.

This variety of authenticity is really more like immodesty and incontinence. It makes it so that the public self is less of a work of craftsmanship, and more like a haphazard, improvisational explosion of color, like a Kandinsky painting.

This sort of rhetoric tends to be used by the carefully composed to enhance the credibility of their speech. What they do is speak very honestly about a particular, carefully-cultivated segment of their life experience.

It’s also a well-known gambit in sales and public speaking called the ‘damaging admission.’ Shortly after the introduction, the speaker recounts a short story in which they failed or were inadequate somehow. The typical one is “I was a broke loser, and one day, the electric company shut off the power… in January… and it was -10 degrees… and then my car broke down… and then my boss fired me.”

The gambit works better if the story is true. But it’s still a story, and stories tend to be shorn of context in the same way that a photo must be cropped.

The story then transitions into the method that the salesperson used to get themselves out of the difficulty, which is often conveniently for sale at the end of the talk. There’s nothing morally wrong with this gambit. Overly credulous people will tend to mistake how it works. The ‘damaging admission’ is not damaging at all to the speaker. It is only made in the context of a trust-building exercise with the audience, calculated to effect.

Emotional honesty and ‘intelligence’ tends to be praised, rather than personal composition. This occurs at the same time as manners in dress and speech have become more informal, both inside the home and outside of it. Rather than different members of the family being bound by roles and rules of etiquette, we instead have everyone being ‘honest’ and ‘authentic’ within the family, even when that routinely results in confused dramatic rancor rather than peace.

Composing your self for being useful and enjoyable for others is to be at least somewhat self-sacrificing. The left portrays this sort of calculated presentation as dishonest, repressed, and authoritarian, rather than what they consider to be spontaneous and free.

The benefit to self-composition is that other people absolutely love the effects. A beautiful woman who spends more than an hour a day preparing her face and hair makes it appear effortless, and people are happy to lie to themselves that she is so lovely in an effortless way, but everyone who sees her through the day benefits from her preparation and care. The people don’t care how many soaps, lotions, conditioners, and make-ups it took. They only see the final result, and are indifferent to all the inputs.

It should be the same way in private and public expressions of the self.

Self-control, discipline, manners, a careful management of emotion, and calculation are good things, not bad. Spontaneity is good when it serves a purpose — like kissing the girl without begging for permission, like in this award-winning ad from a French agency:

It’s not good when spontaneity becomes a sort of incontinence — when the person simply acts and acts and acts and speaks and speaks without thinking about what the effects are on other people. In reality, people hate what they call authenticity. It’s why what’s called reality television is, in fact, scripted by producers, usually performed by low-grade actors. People want the illusion of ‘authentic’ life, because the real thing is ugly and mockery-worthy.

People want to hear honest speech from people with authentically cultivated experience, but they despise the free-spontaneous person who is full of feelings and empty of knowledge or real thought.

Holden Caulfield, who has been forced upon the last couple generations of hapless Americans, is an avatar of this progressive attitude towards the personality. Holden is authentic, useless, and a burden on just about everyone around him. He hates ‘phonies,’ mainly for their cultivation and superiority. The hatred derives from envy of superiority. To be superior is to be ‘fake,’ to be verbally,  morally, and physically incontinent is to be ‘real.’

The free-spontaneous ideal also has egalitarian pretenses. Artists and other creative people who are, in reality, enormously cultivated, tend to downplay craftsmanship, and instead try to portray themselves as ordinary and identifiable. This is key to mass-culture — people have to see the figures raised high as almost interchangeable with themselves. They want to believe that they themselves could be just like the model or actor, that nothing really separates them, that their bodies and souls are interchangeable through the powers of the glowing screen.

The screen has no such powers: you are you and the actor is the actor. You can be moved, internally, perhaps transformed in outlook, but one can’t become the other from the act of watching.

You see this tendency especially with mediated young people whose lives revolve around the television set and the lines spoken by their favorite actors and actresses. They mimic the vocal tones and moral intuitions of the stories which move them, emotionally, and they tell themselves that this is to be a real person. They’re cultivated, but cultivated by other people, most of whom live in New York and Los Angeles, by farmers of minds rather than of crops.

That’s the fantasy, that to see something the person can come to possess that thing in some way. Spectator and voyeur culture is a palliative, as people without self-control or composition hope to gain those qualities through osmosis. It doesn’t work that way. It can only come from acts of will, reason, and self-construction.