Erosion of the Will: Praise

It can be objectively said that American popular culture is godless.  That is, it is not generally agreed that our every action is being judged by a jealous and all-seeing God.  This does not mean we freely do as we please, however:  our every action is instead judged by jealous and all-seeing peers.  What don’t we do for the heaven of praise?

Particularly on the internet, nearly every statement seems to invite the approval of others, regardless of the author’s intent.  His will to truth is eroded when he finds himself writing only “likable” Facebook updates…

…publishing the kinds of YouTube videos that most viewers will find to be worthy of five stars….

…or even, if he’s a feature filmmaker, refraining from making the kind of bold, divisive film that will “average out” into apparent mediocrity:

Of course, the notion that one should act in the hope of winning praise predates the internet:

Negative criticism provokes reflection, anger, resistance, and growth.  It is praise that erodes the will.  If we find ourselves able to discount a critic’s fault-finding as under-informed and irrelevant, we should also, then, discount that critic’s praise on the same grounds.  Has your life been lured from its proper course by the voice of praise?  Just because the crowd laughed at your joke doesn’t mean you should have told it it:

Just because people said you rocked doesn’t mean you shouldn’t release an album of piano improvisations:

Just because someone said you were good at role playing a Senator in high school doesn’t mean you should enter politics:

We know these things, but if our will is eroded, can we really believe them?  Picture the once-beloved high school quarterback who seems slightly stilted and maladapted by the time of the ten year reunion.  His will was eroded at a crucial age by an excess of praise, which assured him, “This is whom you are.”  Throw the pigskin, get a biscuit.  One might call the accumulated effect of such praise “Pavlovian servitude.”  The character Frank the Tank in Old School was never living well – he simply received years praise from foolish people for his foolish behavior.

What, then, is a better standard for judging a person than the amount of praise he receives?  How can you know that you’re living well?  As a starting point, I would point you towards the work of any respected thinker from any place and any period of time other than the United States in 2010.

Erosion of the Will: Introduction

Erosion of the Will: Billboards

Erosion of the Will: Architecture

Erosion of the Will: Horoscopes

Erosion of the Will: Video Games

Erosion of the Will: Video Games

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

-Seneca, from “On the Shortness of Life”

I once had a profound, or at least a fanatical, appreciation for video games. My summer of 1994 was spent in pained anticipation of the Super Nintendo release of Mortal Kombat II, mowing lawns for cash and practicing every character’s special moves on an unplugged controller. By the time I could actually touch the game, I was deadly. I wept after beating Lavos in Chrono Trigger, as I watched the game’s generous ten-minute credit sequence unfold before me. In sixth grade, I gained notoriety for playing two days of hookie after the Nintendo 64 hit store shelves, but the truth of the matter was worse than that: I had willed myself into a genuine illness so I could stay home and explore Princess Peach’s 3D castle.

Today, I regard video games as a profound threat to the maturation process of my fellow young men.

Erosion of the Will: Horoscopes

Horoscopes:  They know you better than you know yourself – if you barely know yourself.  Let us peruse these two pages of horoscopes that I acquired directly from ladies’ magazines at the supermarket:

I was impressed to find some correspondence between each magazine’s advice.  Elle foresees the Taurus’ “social life ablaze,” while Marie Clare predicts that the Taurus will “catch up with friends whose unanswered e-mails have lingered far too long in [her] inbox.”  Similar enough.  However, my aim here is not to fritter away precious time challenging astrology’s veracity.  Anyone who read Carl Sagan in their formative years should have acquired that appreciation for astronomy, for the majesty of the heavenly bodies (dustlike suns entwined in swirling orbits, winking at us o’er millennia of unblinking blackness, etc.) which renders astrology artless and hopelessly inane by comparison.  If you don’t understand that astrology is untrue, you’re probably not ready to read this website or listen to my music.   But reading the daily horoscope is just innocent fun, right?

Erosion of the Will: Architecture

In this installment, I needn’t say much.  The following buildings are in walking distance from my apartment.  Some of them seem to say to the pedestrian, “Come in.  This is a place for you to think, love, and grow,” while others seem to say, “Get in here, you worthless little fragment of a human.”  Which of these buildings would lead to pride and accomplishment for the sensitive inhabitant, and which would lead to despair and an eroded will?  Your opinion is welcomed.

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

G.

H.

Nature has created our sense of beauty.  What does this sunset, shining past this cold building, tell you about your humanity?  Shouldn’t a building have much the same effect?

• Erosion of the Will: Introduction
• Erosion of the Will:  Billboards

Erosion of the Will: Billboards

For every stroll you take around the city, billboards are there providing commentary.   I recently toured Seattle’s Elliott Avenue West with a camera, documenting what the billboards around me were saying and how they were saying it.  Note the use of the imperative voice — the larger the organization behind the advertisement, the more brazenly the language orders the citizen to do something.  The smaller, locally-owned businesses tend to still use the language of salesmanship, which recognizes the autonomy of the city-dweller and tries to convince him that his life would be improved in some real way by using the product offered.  Less so with the billboards from publicly-traded companies, government agencies, and international foundations.

It erodes the will of the individual when a simple walk around the neighborhood means being ordered to do things — some impossible, some contradictory — by signs that can’t respond to protestations.  The conscious mind may say, “No thanks,” or “I’ll pass,” but the subconscious mind has still registered the command, and after several years in this environment, it becomes accustomed to receiving commands.  The lesson is:  “You are someone who is given orders.”  The will erodes.

First, billboards that respect the dignity of the citizen:

Masins:  Est. 1927; based in Seattle, WA.

Les Schwab Tire Center:  Est. 1952; based in Bend, OR.

Pacific Medical Centers:  Est.  1933; based in Seattle, WA.

Hawaiian Airlines.  Est. 1929; based in Honolulu, HI.

And now, billboards that hurl imperatives at the citizen:

“Run.” “Jump.” “Explore.” “Discover.” “Laugh.” “Howl.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:  Est. 1953; based in Washington, D.C.

“Change.”  ”Volunteer.”

The American Red Cross:  Est. 1881; based in Washington, D.C.

“Text.”

Crime Stoppers International Foundation:  Est. 1976; based in Ontario, Canada.

“Give.”  ”Change.”

Amazon.com:  Est. 1994; based in Seattle, WA.

“Anchor.”  ”Tether.”  ”Latch.”

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration:  Est. in 1970; based in Washington, D.C.

“Hope.”

Barack Obama:  Elected 2008; based in Washington, D.C.

Erosion of the Will

Entries tagged with “Erosion of the Will” will form an ongoing series of observations on the state of the American spirit.

American society writhes in place (in pain; in pleasure), expressing the first disturbing symptoms of a malady unique in its heretofore vibrant lifespan:  an erosion of the will.  More than at any time I have seen, this proud and capable people is not possessed with a sense of mission, of having a worthy destiny to enact.  The longer this continues, the less proud and less capable we become.

We see this in the lives of twenty-somethings, who, content as they may be in the emotion of the moment, remain, as a generation, defined by their decadence — the stasis, the decay that sets in when an organism ceases to grow.  The decadent twenty-something is not necessarily self-indulgent or guilty of any moral wrong; he is simply the late-stage incarnation of the modern man whom Lewis Mumford saw parading, “boasting his decapitation… like a figure by Dali, in a blasted landscape, kicking his own head before him,” back in 1951.

We lack a unifying mission, one genuinely felt in the breast of the citizen as he says, “I am an American.”  Our president has recently canceled the manned space program, perhaps forever.  The first nation to walk the moon is now grounded, mired in depression, handing off this scientific and psychic frontier to China and India.  There is no outcry.

We have eloped with different causes in the past decade:  both the War of Civilizations and the Global Warming Consensus have revealed themselves to be stinking frauds.  We are better than this; to pursue either course to its logical end would be suicide.  Fortunately, most Americans now know this.  We sense that our efforts are needed on a simpler but more personally demanding task of domestic reform.   We need to take out the aforementioned garbage and clear the air; only then can true nationwide self-assessment and improvement begin.  This process occurs in the individual.

A note on the title of this series:  I am aware of its resemblance to the title of the film by Leni Riefenstahl.  Yes, I am a musician whose band was “named after a movie about Hitler,” according to Crave magazine.  But no, I am not a crypto-Nazi.  I am aware of a Hitlerian element to my personality.  I stand mortally opposed, however, to the man’s deeds and beliefs.  I see Hitler as a talented artist who made the radical, disastrous, and probably unprecedented decision to treat Europe’s population as his paint and its land as his canvas.   In art, the tools are just means to an end.  A faulty paintbrush may be discarded.  To quote Ricky Gervais:  “You have to be a complete fascist in art.”  But human beings are not means to an end.  Beethoven admired Napoleon, and once remarked:  “It’s a shame that I do not understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music.  I would conquer him.”  Imagine the human misery that would have ensued had Beethoven really sought to conquer Napoleon and become Emperor of Europe (look at the way he fought for custody of his nephew Karl).  Imagine the blood that would have been spared had another indomitable Viennese artist had the wisdom to remain simply that: an artist.

This series should help the attentive reader understand how Nazism succeeded in supplanting the will of the people.  Germany suffered under the triumph of one man’s will.  Before this happened, it, like the United States today, underwent a gradual and catastrophic erosion of the will of its people.  Hitler accelerated this process and offered his solution, his surrogate will, to desperate Germans.  The key difference between Americanism and the Nazism it so deservedly blew to bits is that our strength comes from the autonomous will of every one of us.  This vigor, which is centered in the individual, is what has been eroded; it is what we must restore.