False needs and an invitation to crisis

Thank you, oh Random Thousand readers, for stumbling across my blog. I hope that you will return and get something out of my future rants. Some of you, I have noticed, are young professionals. Maybe recently you started a career in law for Behemoth & Leviathan LLP or one of its ilk. Well, I have one thing to say to you:

You are a slave.

Oh, they give you a semblance of choice: the dog gets to choose his own leash, for instance. The Blackberry Pearl is slim, with a form factor similar to the nano's. But alas! it has a camera, so maybe you'll have to leave it home when you go to court. The 8700 is fine, but does it have a plan with your former cell phone provider? What will the firm pay for? Etc. And the firm may tell you not to worry about facetime - work wherever you want! Again, the choice is yours. Wanna personalize your office? The firm will give you a budget to do just that. They're here for you, and they don't mind coddling their young when it comes to tangential things.

You may be expecting me to commence the lambasting of our true currency, the billable hour. You would be wrong. Slavery goes even deeper than that. Sure, it's difficult to self-actualize when billing 2300 hours a year for the Fortune 250. Do the math: that's 47 hours a week billed, not including the time it takes to travel, go to meetings, trainings, and office functions, commute, and engage in caloric intake. But I want to comment on something more sinister than the daily milieu of the young professional. For it is what keeps us in this grind that really scares me.

What ensures that we will spend far too many years behind somebody else's desk are false needs, the bread and circuses of our day. In short, false needs are the means by which advanced capitalist cultures limit the revolutionary potential of their citizens. The Roman Empire used to pacify its people by ensuring that the poor had an unlimited supply of wheat and access to circus games. Our society has substituted a broader array of control devices, that can douse the individual flames of the true needs of the poor and wealthy alike (such as creativity, genuine happiness, and freedom) in a torrent of false needs: needs that can only be satisfied by advanced capitalism and did not exist before this mode of production began. Consuming the products of pop culture, which is generated by an oligopoly of media companies, makes us "content" and more sedate, despite the difficulties of our lives. It also keeps us beholden to a limited set of sources of the disposable incomes needed if we are to continue to partake in the spoils of the extensive prosperity in which we dwell.

As we content ourselves with the results, we lose our ability to spot how consolidated media plays not to our needs but those of the multinationals who control the means of production. Consolidated media helps to shape our world to suit the needs of multinational corporations, through the processes of standardization and commodification. They create "objects" that we want instead of "subjects" that we consider, that if applied would hold the potential for new social orderings and interactions. We are manipulated to desire objects that are produced rather than the subjects of true liberation. The subjects of liberation are those that lead us to question our beliefs and our ideologies, a process that is muted by consumption and accumulation.

Thus, in an advanced industrial society like ours, those whose struggles used to lead to revolutionary thought are increasingly integrated into the existing cycle of production and consumption by the tools of mass media, advertising, and industrial management. This is accomplished by the satisfaction of basic wants, wants that are derived from grotesque mixtures of our human desires with desires manufactured out of thin air. By satisfying these wants, people are distracted from argument, the culmination of critical observation and analysis. Marcuse described the process as "Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition" being "deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way it is organized." Technology and machines surpass individuals in their political clout, because they are far more capable of increasing production than we are, through the manufacture of false needs. And as we run around trying to satisfy them, our ability to think critically withers away.

And we forget that we went to law school for reasons other than the rush of the durable goods purchase, the supposed serenity that comes from sequestering ourselves in fenced fiefdoms with security gates and concierges, and the gentle caress of high thread count against our overfed fleshes.

Critics of Marcuse have asked how can the victims of false needs, those who are becoming "one-dimensional" in their modes of thinking, question their own condition? I believe that it takes an unexpected, external shock. A crisis. Something that you didn't expect to have happen to you, or didn't expect to hear or see. And it is through that crisis that a window on your condition can be opened, allowing you to question your life and renew your obligations to things other than yourself and your wants. Let me present you with a crisis right now.

What I want each of you to do is to click on the link below. You will hear and see a man on his death bed, so to speak. He is a great leader, and has infused the lives of millions with a revolutionary ideology. Watch his eyes change after he tells a crowd that they have some difficult days ahead. He knows that he is going to die. Death threats and attempts on his life are reaching a fevered pitch. But he is ready to be taken from this earth. He has connected his life with those of countless others, and through that connection, they are of a new mind and spirit. Hours after he utters the words that you are about to hear, he is dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZwIg0SMbs4

Ask yourself if the contentment that you feel every time you bill a thousand hours and then fritter it away on junk can in any way rival the convictions of the heart that you just witnessed, and that you have let wither away from your own life.

Now get up and plan your exit strategy.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence