the authenticity ethos

Authenticity is a matter of genuineness, a hallmark of the unalienated original self. In his brilliant book Sincerity and Authenticity, literary critic Lionel Trilling identifies the ethos of authenticity, of individual impulses that are expressed freely and spontaneously without concern for propriety or others' reception. This value is associated with the 1960s—the generation to which many of today's college faculty belong—and the rejection of convention. It abounds in such mid-twentieth-century literary classics as The Catcher in the Rye, with its disparagement of "phoniness"; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with its search for "quality"; or On the Road, with its rejection of conformity and its celebration of spontaneity. A logic of authenticity seeks a singular self, a unique individuality that does not change or yield according to circumstances. The roots of this ethos can be traced through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and thought, from Emerson's notion of self-reliance back to the roots of Protestant Christianity, in which a person's history and family become irrelevant to the notion of the soul, and all that matters is individual faith, not ritual action.

The authentic self is often characterized by solitude. Groups are anathema to the authentic self, because participating in a group requires compromise, while authenticity requires consistent loyalty to one's own principles. As Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents, because we are members of society, individuals can never attain complete happiness, for we must always compromise our desires. The authentic self therefore celebrates separation of the person from society. It is distrustful of convention and even of success, since achieving worldly success means meeting the expectations and desires of the populace at large. Vincent van Gogh was the perfect authentic self: he had his own distinct, original style, suffered during his lifetime for his singularity, and was never commercially successful.

For authentic selves, the concepts of originality and authorship are critical. Since each self is unique, so are its words. In the celebration of authenticity that began in earnest in the eighteenth century, each text had to have a singular author. Authorship might have to be "authenticated" in order to ascertain precisely the identity of the originating individual.

Authentic individuals are especially prominent among the literary and musical geniuses whose oeuvre is perceived to have bubbled up spontaneously from their souls.' Unlike in earlier times, their inspiration was not thought to derive from a muse or from God; their creativity came from the internal inspiration of the writer or artist herself or himself. As these moments of inspiration "are increasingly credited to the writer's own genius," writes Martha Woodmansee, "they transform the writer into a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product. Wordsworth was the quintessential author, forever emphasizing his originality and creativity. And because authors are originators, they own rights to their work." Johann Gottfried von Herder's view, which guided this idea of authenticity, was that "one ought to be able to regard each book as the imprint of a living human soul. " Thus it is not just possible but essential to trace the book back to its originating soul.

- Susan Blum

God is dead, truth is dead. There are only multiple truths, depending on perspective. What is then important is our perception of reality. Because reality is determined ultimately by our mind.

Also, man is born without sin but is then corrupted by society and civilization. Parents, politicians, and preachers are hypocritical moral figures. Thus to be truly moral, one must look to nature and to one's heart for moral guidance and not to authorities such as the family, the state, and religion.

This I believe is the central essence of the authenticity ethos.

On a different note, let me say one thing. We can posit that objective standards of beauty and morality exist because biologically we are essentially built the same way. We are motivated and driven by the same desires. Gender roles are not socially constructed. They are a direct result of our biology and our genes. Our taste in art is not socially constructed. Humans tend to find similar things beautiful (a sunset vs. a pile of poop). Our moralities are similar (rules against incest, murder, and theft are found in all cultures). These things might not be "truths" to an alien species that come across our planet, but these are essentially truths for us, because we have been built to love, want, and desire the same things.

The reason why we have religion, family, and the state is because we need them. Communism forgot this. Communism was based on a false belief in human nature.

In an age of science, religion and myth are still relevant because science can not address the universal God-shaped hole in our hearts. We humans have evolved to seek fulfillment regarding questions of spirituality, meaning and purpose. But just because we have this need, does not mean that the object of this need exists. Nevertheless, we have this need and we have to address it, even materialists and atheists. Like their religious counterparts, they have their own mythic narratives that they believe in.

Can we ever know and experience the true reality? We begin our search for meaning with this question. Once we have found a narrative that sufficiently addresses this question of reality, then we have found our reality. Is this the true reality? Probably not, but by then, we don't care.

hipster conformity

our colors match. be cool. conform.

why the shift to authenticity

What changed in the 1960’s in America is the collapse of a Christian moral framework, the erosion of belief that morality is derived from God. For the first time many people, especially young people, began to find the external rules arbitrary, senseless, and oppressive. The counterculture did not reject morality; it was passionately concerned with morality. But it substituted Rousseau’s conception of the inner compass for the old rules of obligation. Getting in touch with one's feelings and being true to oneself were now more important than conforming to the preexisting moral consensus of society. By embracing the new morality, the children of the 1960s became incomprehensible to their parents. And as this new generation inherited the reins of power, its ethos entered the mainstream. As a consequence of this change, America became a different country.

The magnitude of the change is evident when we consider the philosophical presuppositions of the "old morality" and the "new morality." The old morality was based on the premise that human nature is flawed. Since human beings are inclined to do bad things, consulting the inner self becomes a very misguided thing to do. The self is the enemy; the self is under the sway of the passions; the self must be overcome. The wayward passions must be ruled by the mind or brought to submission by the will. Through reason or revelation, human beings acquire knowledge of the external order. Conformity to that order is the measure of how good a person you are. And the institutions of society should be devised in such a way as to steer flawed or sinful human beings away from temptation and to keep them on the straight path.

Rousseau turns this paradigm upside down. For him, human nature is basically good. It is society that corrupts man. The means of this corruption is reason, which is deployed to enable one man to advance above another, to accumulate more than the other, to appear good in the eyes of everybody. Since reason has become an instrument of sordid calculation, it is the enemy of morality and truth. In order to discover what is good and true, we must set aside reason and be in touch with our feelings. This is the romantic element in Rousseau. According to him, feelings never lie because they speak with the voice of nature itself. By listening to that inner voice, and following it, we can rise above the corruptions and compromises that society seeks from us, and we can recover our natural goodness.

The triumph of Rousseau's worldview gives rise to a new set of problems that could not have arisen under the old order. In earlier eras people didn't have "identity crises" because their moral identity was supplied by the ethical framework that they all took for granted. This ethical framework might emphasize different virtues in different times or places—thus one society emphasizes the warrior ethic, another the ascetic life, a third the life of production and the family. The challenge that people faced was one of living up to the moral order. The Spartan soldier might have wondered whether he was courageous enough not to retreat in the face of certain death. The medieval Christian monk might have doubted his ability to live by the Benedictine Rule. Undoubtedly there were members of the "greatest generation" who struggled to conform to the demands imposed on them by the regnant code: to remain faithful to their wives, go to church on Sunday, show up for battle when drafted, and so on. But in each case some external framework remained in place and provided an unquestioned standard by which human action was judged.

In Rousseau's new world, however, the external framework ceases to be authoritative for the whole society. A person can, of course, join the marines and embrace the military code, or become a Muslim and follow the Islamic regimen. But now it is the individual's act of choosing that is important. No one sees it as obvious that the military life or the Islamic life is the best or highest calling. Most people's reaction is, "Well, if it works for you," and "Well, if you're happy." In other words, each person must select his or her priorities and moral commitments in a society where other people are sure to choose differently, and in which there are obvious trade-offs to be made.

In Rousseau's world, moral identity is a problem because it is not given: it is self-generated. Authenticity and self-fulfillment represent an ongoing pursuit, and there is constant anxiety from the knowledge that this pursuit can fail. A person who feels inwardly directed to be an artist might, for various reasons, take a job in banking and spend the rest of his life feeling that he has betrayed his true calling, that he has "sold out." Moreover, even commitments that are satisfying at a given time can lose their hold on us; when this happens to the whole moral outlook we have chosen, the result is utter confusion, a crisis of identity. An "identity crisis" is what happens to you when a set of commitments that once seemed right no longer makes sense to you: suddenly you are cut adrift, you have lost your horizon, you no longer know who you are. These problems are peculiar to a society that has adopted the ethic of authenticity: in other words, they are American problems.

The principles of Rousseau did not make their first appearance in the 1960s. One hears strong echoes of them in Emerson's ethic of self-reliance, and in Thoreau's quest for inner harmony through solitude. Rousseau is the guiding spirit of bohemia, and early in the twentieth century one could find bohemia on the Left Bank in Paris or in Greenwich Village in New York. But the bohemian spirit was confined to intellectual and artistic enclaves. It defined itself against the prevailing norms of society, which were mainly bourgeois and Christian. What changed in the late 1960s and 1970s is that the bohemian culture became part of the mainstream culture. It is not the only culture: One can still find, especially in the heartland, recalcitrant remnants of the old culture. Orthodox Jews, Catholics, and Protestants continue to affirm the existence of an independent moral hierarchy. But the bohemian culture now sets the tone for the society at large, and it commands a strong allegiance among the young.


Why did the ethic of authenticity win such widespread acceptance in America? Because the drive that sustained the generation of the 1930s and 1940s could no longer sustain its children. The people in the "greatest generation" worked hard to triumph over scarcity and to win the freedom to make their own life—exactly what powers immigrants to the United States today. For those who grew up during the Great Depression, the conquest of necessity was a moral imperative—to own a house, to put food on the table, to save for the children's college education—and when they succeeded in this they felt a profound sense of achievement and satisfaction.

But their children found themselves in a different situation. They took comfort and security and opportunity for granted, and sought something more—something to give uniqueness and significance to their lives. In this quest, they often viewed the dogmatic rules, social conformity, and materialistic preoccupations of their parents as soulless and alienating. At this point they became prime candidates for conversion to Rousseau's way of thinking. He offered them a way to find originality and moral purpose, yet in a way that did not compromise their freedom. The success of Rousseau reflects a failure on the part of the "greatest generation": it failed to replicate itself. The children of the World War II generation emphatically and often bitterly repudiated the moral code of their parents. They rebelled by defecting to Rousseau's camp.

Today we can see the triumph of authenticity in the enormous importance that American society grants to the "artist." I use the term to cover not just painters but also writers, sculptors, actors, musicians, even athletes. In our time a large number of Americans aspire to be artists. I can't tell you how many orthodontists, venture capitalists, housewives, and limousine drivers have greeted me with the sentence, "I too am writing a book." I sometimes find this annoying: when I meet a cardiologist at a cocktail party, I don't say, "I too am thinking about doing heart transplants."

But I cannot blame the aspiring authors: being an artist is cool. And rich people who cannot be artists frequently try to identify with artists in some way. Tom Wolfe has pointed out that in America today it is much more fashionable to donate a million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art than to give it to the Presbyterian Church. The CEO's wife would much rather sit on the museum board than on the parish committee. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that art has replaced religion as the leading cultural institution in America.

The reason that we admire artists is that they draw upon resources within themselves to express something that is distinctively their own. Think of such American originals as Ernest Hemingway, Elvis Presley, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicholson, and Oprah Winfrey. It is hard to see these people bearing a close resemblance to their parents. They seem to have sprung out of their own self-conception; they have created their own public identities. We cherish them as pure originals. Historically, of course, art was not seen as producing anything new or unique; indeed, the artist was viewed as an imitator—one who makes copies of nature. The Greeks had a story about an artist who was so skilled that when he painted grapes the birds would peck at them. But today art is not admired for its fidelity to nature but for its fidelity to "inner nature." Contemporary art is seen as a vehicle for self-discovery and self-expression.

Our society attaches great prestige to this quest for authenticity, even when it takes strange or controversial forms. For instance, who can deny that there is something bizarre and even repulsive about people like Dennis Rodman, Howard Stern, Madonna, and Prince? At the same time, most Americans find them fascinating. There is something vibrant, creative, and distinctive about them; they live their lives in italics. Moreover, their outrageousness marks them as nonconformists who refuse to change their ways in order to satisfy social convention. Their personality says to the world, "Whether you like it or not, this is the way I am." Americans recognize the voice of authenticity here, and this is why they are so tolerant of such extremities. Indeed, the United States gives more latitude than any other society to the claims of the loner, the dissenter, and the eccentric. In other countries these people are viewed as losers, malcontents, or crackpots. In America, however, they are seen as undaunted souls who are following their inner convictions even at the cost of social rejection.

It is practically a definition of the cultural mainstream to say that the idea of authenticity—of being "true to oneself"—is now the new morality. We see it in corporate advertising: "Just Do It." "Think Different." "The Greatest Risk Is Not Taking One." Rousseau's influence is also evident in the rise of "victimhood" and "compassion" as political principles. As Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov write, "It was Rousseau who taught us to think of ourselves as good and to blame our sufferings and crimes on society. As for the politics of compassion, Democrats have been displaying moist eyes in public for at least three decades, but now even the Bush administration proclaims its allegiance to "compassionate conservatism."

- Dinesh D'Souza


I think D'Souza is leaving out one important fact in why there was a shift from the old traditional moral order to internal authenticity in the sixties. Many in this movement saw the old order as corrupt and immoral. The racism, sexism, materialism, religious hypocrisy, and American military imperialism (Vietnam) delegitimized the traditional moral order of the fifties. 

   

he replaced Cool with kids

"To have a child is to give fate a hostage."

- John F. Kennedy

I'm through being cool. Or, more accurately, I'm through entertaining the notion that anybody could even consider the possibility of coolness emanating from or residing anywhere near me. As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn. The second you lean in for the action, see your baby's head make that first quarter-corkscrew turn toward you, well…you know you can and should throw your cherished black leather motorcycle jacket right in the nearest trash bin. Clock's ticking on the earring, too. It's somehow…undignified now.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention."

I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life In fact, that's a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But 1 figure I put in my time.

The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck.

And let's face it: I most definitely give a fuck now. I give a huge fuck. The hugest. Everything else—everything—pales. To pretend otherwise, by word or deed, would be a monstrous lie. There will be no more Dead Boys T-shirts. Whom would I be kidding? Their charmingly nihilistic worldview in no way mirrors my own. If Stiv Bators were still alive and put his filthy hands anywhere near my baby, I'd snap his neck—then thoroughly cleanse the area with baby wipes.

There is no hope of hipness.

As my friend A. A. Gill points out, after your daughter reaches a certain age—like five—the most excruciating and embarrassing thing she could possibly imagine is seeing her dad in any way threatening to rock. Your record collection may indeed be cooler than your daughter's will ever be, but this is a meaningless distinction now. She doesn't care. And nobody else will. If you're lucky, long after you're gone, a grandchild will rediscover your old copy of Fun House. But it will be way too late for you to bask in the glory of past coolness.

There is nothing cool about "used to be cool." 

- Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain, the rebel chef, the king of Cool, has turned in his Cool card for kids. I guess the game of Cool was no longer meaningful for him. Like I said before, replacing one framework of meaning for another... 

How to Address Conspicuous Consumption

The Problem:

The countercultural "critique" of consumerism insists on analyzing consumer consciousness as a form of manufactured conformity and in the process completely overlooks the role that positional goods and the search for distinction play in driving consumer capitalism. As a result, the proposed solution—individualistic sartorial and stylistic rebellion—simply feeds the flames, by creating a whole new set of positional goods for these new "rebel consumers" to compete for. The struggle for status is replaced by the quest for cool, but the basic structure of the competition remains unchanged.

One Solution:

The most conspicuous flaws in our society today are all unresolved collective action problems. As a result, an "arms control agreement" provides the most useful way of thinking about correcting them. These agreements naturally, require enforcement. Yet too often the left has shied away from such enforcement, on the grounds that it represents a form of repression. Here one can see the baleful influence of countercultural thinking. School uniforms, we have argued, serve as an arms control agreement in teenagers' battle of brands. More generally, economists have suggested that a more progressive income tax may serve as an arms control agreement in the competition for positional goods among adult consumers. We should follow France in adopting a legislated 35-hour workweek. Perhaps we might even consider controls in other areas, such as cosmetic surgery, the size of passenger vehicles or university tuition rates. Each would put the brakes on what are essentially antisocial forms of competition.

All of this will involve further restrictions of individual liberty. Yet so long as individuals are willing to give up their own liberty in return for a guarantee that others will do the same, there is nothing wrong with this. In the end, civilization is built upon our willingness to accept rules and to curtail the pursuit of our individual interest out of deference to the needs and interests of others. It is deeply distressing to find that a misguided commitment to the ideals of the counterculture has led to the political left to abandon its faith in this--the bedrock of civilization--just at a point in history when it has become more important than ever.

- Joseph Heath

quotes on Cool

Cool as defense mechanism:

In the days of slavery, Cool was part of a "survival mentality", a defense mechanism invented to cope with continuous exploitation, discrimination, and disadvantage: it deployed ironic detachment and emotional impassivity to enable its bearer to withstand the domineering orders, abuse and insults of the overseer without succumbing either to depression or to a rage that might incur flogging or even execution.

Also:

The psychological essence of Cool is self-invention, coupled to a hyper-acute awareness of such self-invention in other people; it amounts to the creation of a calm psychic mask to hide inner disturbance.

But Cool also as inherently competitive (reject one hierarchy for another):

On one level, the idea of Cool appears to be the antithesis of competition - a nonchalant, unruffled refusal to play by the man's rules - this is in fact a shallow pose that conceals ferociously competitive instincts.

Cool as a tactic to boost one's attractiveness (based on new hierarchy of cool):

Cool has always been, and always will be a male stratagem, an important aim of which is to maximize sexual conquest and personal freedom while minimizing commitment.

- Dick Pountain

cool as a defense mechanism

Social psychologists have long studied the ways in which people maintain self esteem: by comparing themselves socially against their peers, ranking their peers and situating themselves within that ranking, they maintain an equilibrium by discounting the fact that some are better off than themselves against the fact that others are worse off. However, our ever more intrusive mass media and the cult of celebrity they promote threaten to disrupt this delicate mechanism. We are face every day with images of the richest, most beautiful and most fulfilled people on the planet and compared to them, everyone feels like a loser.

Cool is then one mechanism that people use to short-circuit maladaptive comparisons and relative deprivation. Sociological theories such as "strain" theory support the idea that school students who feel that they are failing in the classroom, or who do not 'fit in' socially, adopt a strategy of disengagement from school activities, and develop anti-academic cliques, or subcultures, that provide an alternative route to self-esteem.

By acting Cool you declare yourself to be a non-participant in the bigger race, for if you don't share 'straight' society's values then you can stop comparing yourself to them. Cool cannot abolish social comparisons entirely, but it can restrict their scope to your immediate peer group. Mods, rockers, skinheads, punks, hippies, crusties, goths: for several successive generations of marginalized and disaffected young people these subcultures, with their own rules, rituals and obligations, have provided a magical alternative to being written off as a hopeless loser in the rat race. In the language of youth subcultures, 'I'm cool' equates to 'I'm in control.'

- Dick Pountain

im a victim!

"Enlightenment or truth is not the goal or issue for Cool. Instead the focus is authenticity. When all truth is subjective, only feelings are authentic, and only the subject can know whether his or her feelings are true or false." This observation fits well with our view of a Cool which equally seeks the authentic, in order to set itself apart from the inauthentic. A particular form that authenticity can take is intensity of feeling or suffering: in effect one is saying, 'I feel more intensely than you, I have suffered more than you, you are all complacent nobodies.'

This victimized or therapeutic attitude is not just a different kind of Cool mask, one that pretends to care a lot. The real difference lies not in the emotional temperature, but in the fact that this sentimentalizing tendency lacks all trace of the irony that we see as being an essential component of Cool.

Reject Authority, I'm Cool

Cool tactic: dissatisfaction with the world --> the world is bullshit--> be cool, don't be part of the system, reject the system.

Religious tactic: dissatisfaction with the world --> the world is immoral --> focus on the immaterial world, the spiritual world, don't be part of the system, reject the system.

Cool's mechanism of social cohesion, the counterbalance to its distancing effect, involves sharing knowledge of some secret that is denied to members of respectable or mainstream society. This was the original meaning of that synonym for Cool, 'hip', which was used as in 'I'm hip to that.' The content of this shared secret may be many different things, from the appreciation of a certain style of music, to predilection for a particular illegal drug, participation in crime, or some forbidden sexual practice. However, in the background there is always the hint of a bigger, seldom-verbalized, more abstract secret, namely the perceived hypocrisy of 'straight' society. Cool people share a belief that society's taboos have no moral force for them, and that these taboos are in any case regularly broken by even its most supposedly respectable members.

This big secret has many facets which encompass all the most important aspects of existence. Sex: even the President of the USA, even your preacher, even your parents do it. Family: 'They flick you up, your mum and dad.' Money: everyone has their price, they'll all try to rip you off. Politics: the good guys never win, all politicians are liars. Crime: the only real crime is getting caught. Drugs: they tell us drugs are nasty, but drugs feel good, so 'they' are either liars or hypocrites. Death: we're all going to die, so what's the use of worrying. This quality of worldly knowingness is absolutely central to the Cool personality, which always wants to know everything and loathes secrecy, concealment and duplicity. In essence then the psychological core of Cool is self-invention coupled to a hyper-acute awareness of such self-invention by other people. It amounts to the creation of a calm psychic mask to hide inner disturbance, whether rage at racist mistreatment, anxiety in the face of competition or merely a furious urge for sexual conquest. It's no coincidence that Cool became the dominant attitude in a Hollywood where self-invention is a way of life, and this supplies us with a plausible mechanism for the reproduction and dissemination of Cool. Celebrities invent an unattainably attractive Cool personality, an image which makes insecure teenage fans feel so inadequate that adopting the Cool pose is in turn their only way of coping with their enhanced anxiety. Repeat ad infinitum.

The self-invented nature of Cool also explains its profound distrust of authority, which can often amount to a unilateral declaration of independence from social responsibility. All society's major institutions: government, the courts, the police, schools, hospitals etc. - require that their agents be accorded a degree of professional dignity in order to function. This involves a certain 'suspension of disbelief'. You know, for example, that a high-court judge is a human being like yourself, who eats, sleeps, excretes and copulates, but that knowledge is to be put aside when you stand before the court. The Cool persona refuses to suspend disbelief, seeing authority figures as just mask-wearers like itself, and the result is a loss of respect for authority figures that has been a notable feature of most democratic societies over the past decade (and is the source of much disquiet among social conservatives). As an example, one could cite the weakening of deference toward the royal family and House of Lords in the UK.

This inability to suspend disbelief along with an insistence on uncovering all of the world's sins also constitute Cool's Achilles heel as a strategy. Anxiety may be deflected by refusing to play the game, but insisting on uncovering all the most gruesome aspects of reality merely breeds new anxieties - which are often more virulent and less rooted in the everyday, and hence less tractable. The results can be frankly pathological, and this is where we should look for explanations of the love affair between Cool and violence, which reaches its creepy consummation in high-school massacres and flirtations with satanism and neo-Nazism. On the other hand it is possible to relearn how to suspend disbelief, to eschew irony and repudiate hedonism, hence the world-wide resurgence of religious and political fundamentalisms which offer various forms of faith, in place of detachment, as the required psychic shield. From the Islamic Taliban to the Christian 'right to life' movements, these are the sworn enemies of Cool.

- Dick Pountain

the cool and the authentic as conspicuous consumption

Cool as an ethic is exquisitely suited to a life of consumption rather than production because the competitive spirit that we see hiding beneath the detached surface presented by Cool can drive new, adventurous and more discriminating modes of consumption, while simultaneously offering a handle by which Cool advertisers can steer the consumer in the desired direction. To characterize the way this new Cool consumer individualism operates, perhaps we could be forgiven for coining a new phrase: the 'competitive consumption of experience'. Everyone is a rebel now, no-one is ordinary, no-one wants to be a face in the crowd, everyone wants intense experiences: indeed everyone wants more intense experiences than their friends and neighbours. People have a mental checklist of intense experiences that need to be collected: climb the mountain; watch a volcano erupt; swim with the dolphins; have multiple orgasms.

The media understand this greed for the superlative, and their hyperbolic coverage of each newly fashionable leisure activity veers toward the condition of pornography, giving us food-porn, travel-porn, garden-porn, car-porn, and decor-porn.

- Dick Pountain

counterculture says give up

Great synthesis of ideas gleaned from Marxism, Christianity, and postmodern ideas from the movie, the Matrix. All of these belief-systems argue that to see reality, one must reject the false illusions of the "system." Ultimately, these belief-systems imply that a revolution in human consciousness and awareness is necessary--reform only moves the chairs on a sinking ship so to speak. Revolution, not evolution.

However, as Potter argues, taking this sort of stance throws the baby out with the bath water. Genuine reform has worked (workers' rights, progressive taxes, environment regulation, minimum wage laws, social security, welfare, and unemployment insurance have all improved the situation of the working class and poor. In fact, regulated capitalism has produced in excess the greatest level of prosperity for its participants than any other political-economic system (ie: South Korea vs North Korea, China vs Soviet Union, West Germany vs East Germany). However, regulation is key because free-market capitalism often leads to extreme inequality and financial instability.

Counterculturalism is giving up. Do drugs, don't work, meditate, don't desire, give your life to God--these are short-term and unsustainable solutions. Be the change you want in the world. Reform the system, don't reject the system:



The world that we live in is not real. Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, trans­formed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertising and the mass media. Thus every part of human life has been drawn into "the spectacle," which itself is nothing but a sys­tem of symbols and representations, governed by its own internal logic. "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image," Debord wrote. Thus we live in a world of total ideology, in which we are completely alienated from our essential nature. The spectacle is a dream that has become neces­sary, "the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ulti­mately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep."

In such a world, the old-fashioned concern for social justice and the abolition of class-based society becomes outmoded. In the society of the spectacle, the new revolutionary must seek two things: "consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness." In other words, we must try to discover our own sources of pleas­ure, independent of the needs that are imposed upon us by the sys­tem, and we must try to wake up from the nightmare of "the spectacle."

In other words, when it comes to rebellion and political activ­ism, there is no point trying to change little details in the system. What does it matter who is rich and who is poor? Or who has the right to vote and who doesn't? Or who has access to jobs and opportunities? These are all just ephemera, illusions. If commodi­ties are just images, who cares if some people have more of them, others less? What we need to do is recognize that the entire cul­ture, the entire society, is a waking dream—one we must reject in its entirety.

Of course, this idea is hardly original. It is one of the oldest themes in Western civilization. In The Republic, Plato compared life on earth to a cave, in which prisoners are shackled to the floor, seeing only shadows flickering across the wall from the light of a fire. When one prisoner escapes and makes his way to the surface, he discovers that the world he had been living in was nothing but a web of illusions. He returns to the cave bearing the news, yet finds that his former companions are still embroiled in petty disputes and bickering. He finds it difficult to take these "politics" seriously.

Centuries later, early Christians would appeal to this story as a way of explaining away the execution of Jesus by the Romans. Prior to this event, it had been assumed that the arrival of the Messiah would herald the creation of the kingdom of God here on earth. The death of Jesus obviously put an end to these expecta­tions. Some of his followers therefore chose to reinterpret these events as a sign that the real kingdom of God would be not on this earth, but in the afterlife. They claimed that Jesus had been resur­rected in order to convey this news-- like Plato's prisoner returning to the cave.

Thus the idea that the world we live in is a veil of illusion is not new. What does change, however, is the popular understanding of what it takes to throw off this illusion. For Plato, there was no ques­tion that breaking free would require decades of disciplined study and philosophical reflection. Christians thought that it would be even harder—that death was the only way to gain access to the "real" world beyond. For Debord and the Situationists, on the other hand, the veil of illusion could be pierced much more easily. All that it takes is some slight cognitive dissonance, a sign that something's not right in the world around us. This can be provoked by a work of art, an act of protest or even an article of clothing. In Debord's view, "disturbances with the lowliest and most ephemeral of origins have eventually disrupted the order of the world."

This is the origin of the idea of culture jamming. Traditional political activism is useless. It's like trying to reform political insti­tutions inside the Matrix. What's the point? What we really need to do is wake people up, unplug them, free them from the grip of the spectacle. And the way to do that is by producing cognitive dis­sonance, through symbolic acts of resistance to suggest that some­thing is not right in the world.

Since the entire culture is nothing but a system of ideology, the only way to liberate oneself and others is to resist the culture in its entirety. This is where the idea of counterculture comes from. The inhabitants of Zion, in The Matrix, are a concrete embodi­ment of how countercultural rebels since the '6os have conceived of themselves. They are the ones who have been awakened, the ones who are free from the tyranny of the machines. And the enemy, in this view, is those who refuse to be awakened, those who insist on conforming to the culture. The enemy, in other words, is mainstream society.

Morpheus sums up the countercultural analysis perfectly when describing the Matrix: "The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

In the '6os, the baby boomers declared their implacable opposition to "the system." They renounced materialism and greed, rejected the discipline and uniformity of the McCarthy era, and set out to build a new world based on individual freedom. Whatever hap­pened to this project? Forty years later, "the system" does not appear to have changed very much. If anything, consumer capital­ism has emerged from decades of countercultural rebellion much stronger than it was before. If Debord thought that the world was saturated with advertising and media in the early '60s, what would he have made of the 21st century?

In this book, we argue that decades of countercultural rebellion have failed to change anything because the theory of society on which the countercultural idea rests is false. We do not live in the Matrix, nor do we live in the spectacle. The world that we live in is in fact much more prosaic. It consists of billions of human beings, each pursuing some more or less plausible conception of the good, trying to cooperate with one another, and doing so with varying degrees of success. There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as "the culture" or "the system." There is only a hodge­podge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that sometimes we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort away from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.

According to the countercultural theory, "the system" achieves order only through the repression of the individual. Pleasure is inherently anarchic, unruly, wild. To keep the workers wider con­trol, the system must instill manufactured needs and mass-produced desires, which can in turn be satisfied within the framework of the technocratic order. Order is achieved, but at the expense of promoting widespread unhappiness, alienation and neurosis. The solution must therefore lie in reclaiming our capacity for sponta­neous pleasure—through polymorphous perversity, or perform­ance art, or modern primitivism, or mind-expanding drugs, or whatever else turns your crank. In the countercultural analysis, simply having fun comes to be seen as the ultimate subversive act. Hedonism is transformed into a revolutionary doctrine.

Is it any wonder then that this sort of countercultual rebellion has reinvigorated consumer capitalism? It's time for a reality check. Having fun is not subversive, and it doesn't undermine any system. In fact, widespread hedonism makes it more difficult to organize social movements, and much more difficult to persuade anyone to make a sacrifice in the name of social justice. In our view, what the progressive left needs to do is disentangle the concern over ques­tions of social justice from the countercultural critique—and to jet­tison the latter, while continuing to pursue the former.

From the standpoint of social justice, the big gains that have been achieved in our society over the past half-century have all come from measured reform within the system. The civil rights movement and the feminist movement have both achieved tan­gible gains in the welfare of disadvantaged groups, while the social safety net provided by the welfare state has vastly improved the condition' of all citizens. But these gains have not been achieved by "unplugging" people from the web of illusions that governs their lives. They have been achieved through the laborious process of democratic political action—through people making arguments, conducting studies, assembling coalitions and legislating change. We would like to see more of this.

Less fun perhaps, but potentially much more useful.

- Andrew Potter

Cool by its nature can not be a force for reform because by definition, Cool is to not care:

Cool is never directly political, and politics, almost by definition, can never be Cool. To get anywhere in politics you need to care passionately about something, whether it is a cause or merely the achievement of personal power, and you need to sacrifice present pleasures to the long and tedious process of campaigning and party organization. Nor has any party yet, outside of the lunatic fringe, proclaimed the pursuit of Cool as its election platform - such a platform would presumably have to include legalizing all drugs, abolishing all taxes and yet simultaneously paying generous unemployment benefits, which might make life tricky for the first Cool treasurer.

- Dick Pountain