THERE ARE THOSE SHITTY DAYS THAT FEEL LIKE A LOW-BUDGET HORROR MOVIE.
Like the one where the bubbly bimbo who usually gets offed first didn’t make it to the shoot that day. The disposable supporting cast has inherited the picture instead: the sullen cashier, the man coughing wetly into his fist, the woman arguing with a parking meter, the neighbor who seems to own seventeen identical tracksuits. The people ordinarily marked for early death have somehow become the protagonists.
And, watching them, you realize with bewilderment that they’ll die after you do.
This is offensive.
You would have preferred the starring role. You would be smashing the crunching skulls of street zombies beneath your boots while somebody’s synthesizer screamed heroically in the background. Legends would be told about you. Cheap legends, naturally, yet legends all the same. In them you would acquire some magnificent name like Monsieur Le Massacre and later survive civilization itself as a six-inch figurine made from clay, hair, spit, and oily rags.
It’s low-budget. Adjust your expectations.
Instead you have been cast as yourself. There are days when this seems an unforgivable production decision.
On such days, a person can sincerely believe that the place where he was born is rotten through. Streets, institutions, conversations, faces: everything appears assembled with some minute but fatal defect. You begin to suspect that reality passed quality control because the inspector had gone outside for a cigarette.
The world seems so badly constructed that you can hear, inside your own head, its joints, creaking. The universe itself becomes another ulcer on the greasy dick of existence.
Whether this perception is accurate scarcely matters at first. Misery does not need a philosophy before it begins manufacturing one. Given enough time, disgust starts looking for an explanation, then for culprits, then for a costume.
This is where monsters come from.
Unfortunately, life rarely enjoys the production values required for grand evil. History cannot furnish everybody with a black uniform, a secret bunker, and an orchestra playing Wagner while cities burn.
Most monsters must survive on smaller budgets.
Their raw materials are boredom, appetite, humiliation, envy, cowardice, vanity, and the terrible human talent for converting personal failure into a theory of the universe.
From these materials emerge three especially cheap species:
The first are the homunculi of routine, whose worldview runs about as deep as a page of classifieds. They do what was done yesterday because yesterday has already undergone the exhausting process of occurring. Habit saves them from the vulgar inconvenience of consciousness.
Their lives are assembled from ready-made units: employment, television, purchases, complaints, minor illnesses, weather, gossip, lunch. Ask them what they think and they tell you what happened. Ask them why and they look vaguely betrayed.
They are neither particularly vicious nor particularly stupid. Something stranger has happened. Their minds have become administrative departments devoted to maintaining existence at its current setting.
The homunculus wakes, performs the approved gestures, repeats the approved phrases, acquires the approved objects, and eventually dies surrounded by evidence that he was alive. His great philosophical achievement is avoiding the question of what any of it was for.
The second species are the pithecanthropi of pleasure. They have discovered that consciousness can be drowned in sensation and, having made this discovery, regard Archimedes as an amateur.
Their civilization is one enormous nerve ending. Food must drip. Music must pound. Screens must flash. Bodies must be available. Vacations must be photographed. Experiences must arrive pre-seasoned with enough stimulus to prevent the dangerous appearance of an interior life.
Their ideal condition is permanent interruption. Give such a creature five uninterrupted minutes in an empty room and he begins to suspect the existence of death.
Quickly: another drink. Another orgasm. Another glowing rectangle.
Soon enough the buzzing vibrators are jutting from every available hole while the creature writhes in perfect victory over thought.
The tragedy is not pleasure itself. Pleasure is innocent. The tragedy begins when pleasure becomes anesthesia and anesthesia becomes a metaphysics. A person who cannot bear silence eventually concludes that silence contains nothing.
The third species is worse.
These creatures frequently appoint themselves the elite, the intelligentsia, the educated class, or whichever title currently permits a mediocre person to experience his mediocrity as persecution.
If you attempted to draw one, you might begin with the thousand-headed serpent from a fairy tale and replace every head with a sphincter. Even this would flatter the subject by implying anatomical variety.
Their distinction lies in having discovered a more sophisticated refuge from reality than routine or pleasure. They retreat into superiority.
They cannot alter the world to their liking, because normal people an dlife itself resents them, so they demote it. They cannot command respect, so they invent a tribunal in which respect is beneath them. They cannot persuade ordinary people, so ordinary people become vulgar.
Every defeat is promoted into evidence of refinement. Every exclusion becomes proof of specialness. Every unanswered invitation becomes an indictment of civilization.
At this point the creature acquires opinions. Many opinions. Opinions breed particularly well in captivity.
A fox caught a chick to eat.
It squealed and said, ‘Let me go. I’ll show you where my mother, my father, and all my siblings live. Eat them all, but spare me!
The fox considered this, thought it a good trade, and let the chick go.
The bird flew up into a tree and called down, ‘GET FUCKED – I WAS HATCHED IN AN INCUBATOR!’
Our self-appointed elite shares the chick’s genius for discovering a lofty principle immediately after reaching a safe branch.
They call themselves superior because superiority requires no admission committee. The title is wonderfully economical. It turns incapacity into distinction.
A person need accomplish almost nothing once she/he has learned to interpret her/his distance from ordinary life as evidence that ordinary life is beneath her/him.
She/He can dislike popular art without understanding difficult art. She/He can despise commerce while living entirely through its products. She/He can condemn provincialism from inside a social circle consisting of the same six people repeating the same twelve opinions.
She/He can spend three hours watching an incomprehensible film about spiritual desolation in post-industrial Belgium, understand none of it, and leave the cinema convinced that the confused expression on his face is proof of refinement.
Eventually she/he develops an interior kingdom. Inside this kingdom everything is tasteful, intelligent, properly arranged. Outside lies the barbarian world.
The exterior world eats the wrong food, watches the wrong films, uses the wrong words, wants the wrong things, laughs too loudly, votes inconveniently, breeds excessively, decorates badly, and insists on existing without first requesting cultural permission.
This is experienced as aggression. Reality itself becomes personally insulting. The self-appointed aristocrat therefore develops a curious erotic relationship with power. She/He dreams constantly of rebellion while secretly craving submission to an authority grand enough to relieve her/him of responsibility.
Someone must arrive who finally understands she/him. Preferably somebody dramatic. Preferably somebody carrying historical grievances, ideological credentials, or at least sufficiently impressive boots.
This figure will recognize his exquisite moral delicacy, place a firm hand around his throat, bend her/him over and fuck absolve her/him of the exhausting necessity of being an adult. She/He will surrender gratefully.
Until that happy day, she/he writes. Opinions. Articles. Essays. Manifestos nobody requested.
Writing becomes revenge upon the audience that failed to assemble.
The whole enterprise rests on a private grievance disguised as public concern: why has the world failed to become worthy of me?
And when the world answers with silence, resentment acquires another paragraph.“What can I really do?” she/he sighs.
The question sounds humble. It contains an emperor.
She/He surveys reality and finds it offensive, bigoted, vulgar, ungrateful. Meanwhile, she/he remains benevolent by self-certification. Tolerant under laboratory conditions. Heroically compassionate toward populations she/he will never have to share a kitchen with.
Actual people present difficulties. They smell. They interrupt. They possess desires that did not emerge from approved books. Worse, they sometimes disagree.
So she/he withdraws.
Back to the tasteful neighborhood. Back to the carefully chosen house. Back to the West Elm sanctuary where history is permitted entry only in hardcover.
There, among mid-century furniture and three vodka-addled friends, she/he can preserve the most precious possession of all: the belief that her/his estrangement from humanity represents a judgment upon humanity.
Responsibility would spoil everything. Responsibility would require touching the machinery. It would require discovering how compromises are made, why ordinary people choose badly, why institutions decay, why ideals become ridiculous when translated into daily life.
It might even require admitting that the vulgar world outside the window contains people who understand certain things better than she/he does.
Far safer to hate it.
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