I'm bored and listless. I didn't do much yesterday. I haven't done much today. I likely won't do very much tomorrow. I feel the energy seeping out of me with every passing moment. I'm finding it harder to maintain focus when it comes to the one passion I thought I had: reading. But if I can't even do that then there really is no hope left. Maybe I need a job. I applied for unemployment today, so if I don't want the state to utterly crush me, I will be forced to start looking. But that's a good thing. I was let go from my previous work about two weeks ago. I thought I had it in the bag because I have spent so much time handling phone calls and consumer inquiries in frenetic situations, spontaneous problems that needed solving have always given me more trouble than I let on, but the confidence retreated from me the moment those numbers lit up on the receiver. I did not perform admirably. I failed myself. I was sure I would fail even more. But fate intervened and I was let go before my shortcomings leapt the bounds of self-evidence and began to cause serious damage. We can thank God for that, at least.
Boredom, I find, can often be alleviated by exercises in self-flagellation. Boredom has been the primary motivator for most of the jobs I've taken on in the past 366 or so days since I graduated from college (with the exception of Rite Aid, to which I have my father's explosive rage to thank). Usually I end up regretting it within a few short days. The urge to quit strikes just as I find my bearings, but I have something of a complex about quitting. I don't mind it, but I haven't done it (yet). The only way forward is through, and so on. Besides, the shame would be too much to bear. Once you impress upon the world your inability to rise to the occasion, it becomes a permanent stamp on your own soul. In the battle between Plato's wax conception of memory and Plotinus's notion of an "active exercise", I find Plato to be the more aesthetically appealing. We like to think of our souls as lacerated by process and events, and I am no exception. Where is the demarcation between philosophy and theology? Allow me to substitute "psyche" for "soul". Those of us in the know can simply wink and nod.
Emotions are interesting because they are states of being, whatever else they might be. Or maybe states of becoming? What about states of affairs? Emotions are temporary, in flux, they shift and change with the world. How is it possible to "be" in a world of becoming? Are those feelings ever really there? Heraclitus had it easy to simply presume that no single thing can stay the same over time and change. He didn't have to grapple with the deductive power of Eleatic Truth. But this is just a restatement: is "it" being or becoming? There is no "it" in a world of becoming, at least not for long. Diogenes proposed solvitur ambulando. Sextus Empiricus distinguished between philosophical talk and ordinary speech about the same things. Those ephectics who find themselves unable to choose between arguments equipollent are better off eschewing any attempt, however valiant, to remain precise in their talk. It is simply impossible when our words are freighted with conceptual baggage. Hence the necessity of the Socratic method, which itself (in its Platonic formulation at least) often ends in aporia. We must be prepared to speak like others, but think differently. There is nothing therapeutic about ketman, but nor is there (as far as I can see) a way out of the rabbit hole. We're stuck, jammed up (at least I am) with nowhere to go. Caught between intuition and the trying formalities of rigorous thought. "All is vanity" is right. It is vain even to acknowledge that all is vain. How's that for the skeptic way?
I propose to speak like the common man, always keeping in mind the considerations that have led so many thinkers astray and into the thickets. I too have rolled around in the thickets some, and before I have even moved beyond ancient Greece I find myself wishing to leave. But I digress some ways away from my original intentions. I had intended to speak about boredom, and what it can tell us about the state of the world right now.
The answer? Much. But only if we look to see why it is that so many people aren't feeling it. A strange thing to say in uncertain times, I know. Much of the world is on lockdown. The plague is ravaging the world, you see. There is much ado about the "new order of things" and the "post pandemic" world. I was an early disbeliever in the apocalyptic prognostications that followed the Wuhan outbreak, if only because I had lived through the H1N1 pandemic to immense disappointment at its ultimate impact. I have been forced, in the face of hundreds of thousands of deaths and a severe (if self-inflicted) economic downturn, to revise my opinion somewhat. That is quite alright. I am glad to say my latest intellectual undertaking has been to extirpate all vestiges of vanity from within myself. An oxymoron indeed. Cathartic all the same.
But who has benefited from the world as it currently is, caught in this state of discordant suspension (and flux? The unity of opposites haunts us even on global scales)? Why, the progenitors of the outbreak itself. Our friends across the pond. No, not Europe. The other pond.
Much has been made about the west's dependence on Chinese imports. Less so on China's cunning and keen sense of what it is that people in the west want, how the populations in the west approach the problem of social time and just what it is that might stave off boredom when we find ourselves out of bars to crawl and parties to throw. In the throes of quarantine, and certainly before it as well, our virtuous citizenry has taken to shaking their hips suggestively on the latest video-sharing app to reach stratospheric heights of popularity: TikTok. Why? Because it's fun. Because life without it would be oh so boring without choreographed group-dances to the latest explicit song lyrics. The site was enormously popular before the pandemic. Now? Forget it. It's fun for everyone, fun for all ages. The little blonde Australian can get her start at the supple age of twelve or thirteen and amass millions of followers with a little flash of the midriff and a thrust of the rear. Why not? It's all in good fun. Nobody has anything better to do anyway.
Those older than twelve might remember that TikTok has served as the virtual replacement for the previous video-sharing champion - Vine. Vine, at least, was an American company. TikTok belongs to those same innovators who gifted the world their zoonotic pathology. Yes, much has been made about these national security concerns as well. Much like Huawei, TikTok has raised red flags for its ability to gather the digital information it receives from its users unimpeded. Given that it is a Chinese company that owns it, the concerns are obvious. The government of Xi Jinping must have few qualms about compelling the owners of TikTok to surrender that data.
But let us imagine for a moment what might happen if the central decision making apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party were to gather around in what I imagine is a very large circular table. Let us say, for argument's sake, that they were suddenly privy to all of those several-second videos that come streaming through cyberspace for all the world to see. What would they see, if they were to investigate to what use and to what ends the users of TikTok have made of the app?
They would find an enemy that has already defeated itself. Forget war, that's passe. The good peoples of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and all the rest have done the Chinese job for them. They're an addicted culture - weaned on the latest shiny object imported from abroad, they debase themselves regularly and at younger ages too, they have no historical, literary, or scientific sensibilities beyond the vaguest notions they have picked up from passing headlines and classroom lessons half-listened to. Arrogant, haughty, but sensitive and secure in their insecurity. The latest fads - typically mimetic images borrowed from unsavory places that differ only in form and not substance - are the dominant means of communication, creating an unbridgeable divide between age cohorts that are and are not technologically savvy. But that's just fine. Populations that can't understand how they're being beaten cannot fight back. And when they subdue themselves, well, why not just roll out the red carpet? Wave the white flag?
We've paved the road to our own cultural devolution and the Chinese provided us the means by which to commit suicide faster. We are a nation of philistines and that is never more evident than when confronted by those who claim they are not. The enemy understands us better than we understand ourselves, and our ignorance has made ourselves our own enemy. They can play us against ourselves forever. And if it ever comes to armed conflict? This is not a culture that produces warriors. That's Pax Sinica for you. Give it a century and America will be revealed for the paper tiger it is. It's almost inevitable. There is too much that can go wrong. Two decades into the twenty first century and already we are straining under our second economic collapse. Any future war will not be like the USSR against the Nazi State. It will be the Empire of Japan against the Russian Tsardom.
Gore Vidal once remarked that America is a nation of amnesiacs. The corollary to that is that a nation that cannot understand itself will not survive. Already we are riven by internecine partisan warfare over issues that would not only force past generations to scratch their heads but compel contemporary foreigners to look on with morbid astonishment. We cannot understand our own breakdown. The cottage industry of books dedicated to explaining every election, not merely 2016, is a testament to that. Do the hillbillies need an elegy? Is America alienated? Why do we bowl alone? Something is happening out there beyond the Hudson and the Seine. Something is happening closer to "home" as well.
It is not merely incumbent upon us to strike the puppeteer that moves us about on strings. It is necessary to turn inward and exorcise the impulses, passions and indulgences that keep us tethered - willingly - to those strings. Those who snub their noses down at the lower classes - those members of the disenchanted masses who have continued to elect their own candidates and movements to positions of power - are frightened by what they are seeing because disinterest in their own causes offends their sensibilities. Those who have wearily made common cause with them feel the same. They cannot understand a world beyond their pet concerns. Anything and everything must be tied back to the central conflict - the war on and for free speech, the war on and for the environment, the war on and for the right to bear arms, to get an abortion, to get married, to mutilate your genitals, to dictate the terms of culture.
But the seeds of culture have been germinating for far longer than that. The results, finally, are in. Sex, drugs, violence, death, and the pursuit of happiness. Only happiness eventually circles back to the satisfaction of one of those four passions (might we add in profit as well?). Make it five then. China did not have to liberalize to find success. Nor did we, really, but we chose to do it anyway. What illiberal movement might be capable of taking on the challenges of the moment? A creative one. A movement that taps into passions hidden and locked away, turns the key, and unleashes them. A movement that looks at memory as the antidote to amnesia, vice as a path to virtue, and crisis as opportunity. Everything must go, or we will.
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