It was such a clean-cut proposition, unlike anything he’d ever encountered before. Here were honest-to-God black and white, not at all like the muddy pastels he’d had to choose from while in industry. Having it put like that, Do as we say or get killed, had the same liberating effect as the drug of a few hours ago had had.
- Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
In January, I read a handful of seemingly unrelated books, and yet all of them, delightfully and by surprise, became a conversation with one another in my head, interconnecting thematically and experientially. They wove together ideas about mass movements, belief, self-definition, technology, industry, and identity. This piece is a coalescence of my thoughts.
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Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, written in a post-WWII landscape, is the author’s attempt to understand, both historically and practically, what creates mass movements, along with the psychology and temperaments of those who join. Hoffer proposes that people’s desire to belong to something bigger than themselves is not noble or heroic, but actually a more base desire to relinquish responsibility. Joining a cause and following instruction eases the burden of freedom and provides a welcome respite from the arduous labor of self-actualization. “The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself,” Hoffer writes. “The freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.” A mass movement “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” (Bolding is mine.)
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, published just one year after True Believer, was written in the same cultural and historical landscape as Hoffer’s and contains similar echoes of post-war malaise and man’s search for meaning. It’s about a world in which engineers are the highest social class, and technology and machines have become the ultimate authority, replacing much of the need for human labor, intellect, or individuality. This evolution is believed by many (the well-to-do, namely) to be a Good Thing: the playing field has been leveled. Human bias no longer plays a part in a person’s success when everyone is ranked according to their I.Q. and machines make decisions based on a person’s identifications. Everyone is quite comfortably afforded the exact same opportunities, livelihoods, homes and appliances, according to their predetermined stations, and for most, just as Hoffer thought, this comes as a welcomely anesthetizing respite from the otherwise chaotic and terrifying responsibility of a life.
Throughout the book, the main character, Paul, finds himself caught between two “movements”: the blind faith status quo of machine-led corporate progress, and the disgruntled proletariat rebels led by his disenfranchised friend Finnerty, who want to use Paul’s face and name for their own agenda. Paul longs for an existence outside of the divided parties, but the closest thing he can envision is farming, and after attempting this for a few days, finds himself ill-suited for the work and even more alone in his desire for a quiet yet individual life.
There’s a lovely bit in Player Piano where Paul reflects on how the very kind of life that allowed for the innovation to occur that created the inventions that now rule their lives will never be able to exist again, precisely because of the inventions themselves. A certain amount of messiness and rule-breaking is requisite for creativity, but society has reached a point where the inventions brought about by ingenuity have in themselves removed the possibility of further ingenuity. Invention, in this case, has siphoned off all further potential and capacity for discovery.
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Lewiston/Clarkston is a pairing of contemporary plays by Samuel D. Hunter, each propelled by entitled youth coming up against the limitations of their longing for discovery. In Clarkston, two young men from very different backgrounds (and classes) work at a Costco warehouse, doing the grunt work in a thankless supply chain of consumerism. It is not meaningful work. One of the young men is here out of necessity, while the other chooses it from naive idealism born of privilege: the idea that doing something with his hands will mean something real, in a way that academia, for instance, will not. He’s running from his own reality while obsessed with the idea of Lewiston and Clarkston as pioneering explorers of “the West,” though his coworker is quick to point out that those men were users and takers, arrogantly naming themselves and their work something it was not while ignoring the people already living in the lands they “discovered.” Caught in a self-absorbed spiral (albeit one stemming from actual pain), the character worries there’s nothing left to discover, all frontiers now being wastelands of Costco warehouses and chain diners, and that without the possibility for new horizons, his life is essentially over, or rather, meaningless and without purpose.
In the first essay of The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (“The Awareness Movement and the Social Invasion of the Self”), written in the 1970’s by Christopher Lasch, the author criticizes our short-sighted search for meaning. Rather than joining movements out of a desire to escape the self, Lasch insists there's been a shift, and now people join causes in order to have an identity in the first place — to “find oneself.” He references Tom Wolfe, noting that people of today—and especially citizens of the United States—live only for themselves, whereas we used to live with a connection to past and present; to our families, to those who came before us, to future generations to come.1 We had a sense of history, and our place in it. We at least attempted things like foresight and longevity. We valued awareness of how we would affect not only our own singular lives, but the lives of our community and family lineage. We were able to take the long view—not unlike the way builders of cathedrals sometimes understood they wouldn’t see the fruits of their labor or the completion of a project in their lifetimes, but still believed it was worth building.
We have no sense of that now, and we’re left feeling empty, disconnected, and purposeless. Which makes mass movements — whether religious, political, or cultural — so appealing. Part of this, Lasch says, comes from the peculiar makeup of America’s population: a country of immigrants and slave-descendants who’ve been cut off from lineage, tradition, and culture, and forced to assimilate. “The break with Europe, the abolition of primogeniture, and the looseness of family ties gave substance to their belief (even if it was an illusion) that Americans, alone among the people of the world, could escape the entangling influence of the past,” he writes. “They imagined, according to Tocqueville, that ‘their whole destiny is in their own hands.’”
It’s a particularly American hubris, and lies at the heart and ethos of the American Dream. It’s what makes us such good capitalists/entrepreneurs/worker-bees/machines, and also what contributes to our obsession with self-identification, meaning, and purpose, making us hungry for success (which in America equals belonging, to a certain degree) and something to believe in, if only ourselves. The culture of narcissism is only ever as strong as the isolation, loneliness, and rage of its people.
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“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said Paul, “not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
- Player Piano
On the new moon in Aquarius, I attended a session of Ariana Reines’ outside-the-establishment project, Invisible College, and one of the topics discussed (in honor of Aquarius, purveyor of technology and innovation), was the new ChatGPT AI, which can write a college essay as well as any student. One of the ideas presented in the session was a curiosity around whether our fascination for technology/AI/machines represents our need for certainty. We hate our messiness (read: our humanity, and the unpredictability of life) just as we desire and envy it, such as when we see someone act without inhibitions or self-consciousness, or when we witness a great artist’s work, which cannot be bought or copied. In the creation of ChatGPT (or other AI art-generators), Reines suggested that perhaps engineers envy the artists. For all their precision, they long for that spontaneous aliveness that only poets and madmen seem to be in touch with anymore. “Of all the places they could be pointing that intelligence,” she noted, “they point it at us.”
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It is an act not merely of rebellion but of hard work, focus, and rigor, to live outside the machine. To embrace our humanity fully, facing the wild uncertainty of a life with willingness and resolve, rolling up our sleeves in lieu of the easy belonging of movements and identities, mechanical responses clung to out of fear or desperation. In the past few years, I’ve seen people jump from one political extreme to another, announce new selfs and shifting loyalties, renounce one ideology only to cling ever-harder to another prescribed notion of truth and belief. Creating meaning outside of that noise is lonely work, and difficult. To choose actively to exist in the grayness of our lives, and in that, to cultivate community and connection with intention yet without the surrendering of autonomy or self-respect, is not at all a small task. I imagine it’s what Reines means when she talks about “committing to a fidelity of my own experience.”
The artist survives, if only as a champion of this humanity. A humanity that inevitably contains the same paradoxical imperfection trumpeted in the mission statement of the rebellious Ghost Shirt Society in Vonnegut’s Player Piano:
That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be a virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God.
The Ghost Shirt Society is a subversive movement, but still a movement, and thus filled with all the fallacies of any other, including the fact that most of its members are, yes, looking simply for escape, belonging, identity or immediate gratification much more than the careful work and longsighted vision of an actual changed future. From one lens, the movement is a failure: the mission is lost to low-minded mass mayhem, more loyalty remains with the standing authorities than not, and Paul doesn’t find his peace. From another lens, though, it might be a success, if only because for a few people—or perhaps only for Paul himself—there was at least an attempt to reach beyond all that, to create something of one’s own, to imagine a life unhooked from both the masses and the machines.
The Tom Wolfe quote: “Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives…”