Applying Adorno and Marcuse

While back in Utah over the holidays I heard a remark about the Mormon church that I used to hear a lot when I was younger: “The Church is true (or good, perfect—there are several variations), but the people in it aren’t.” I remember a friend of mine reciting that same phrase and I answered by saying that I felt the exact opposite—“the Church isn’t good, but some of the people in it are”. He took offense. In other words, he found it okay for non-Mormons to dislike individual Mormons or even the entire Mormon community, but intolerable to critique the church itself—the institution. At the time, my friend’s reaction surprised me, but it shouldn't have. It makes sense that if you put your faith in systems rather than people—and if your sense of selfhood is contingent upon that faith—you’re bound to blame the latter when things go awry. (Other people are “other” but the system is part of you). Consequently, it’s deemed okay to insult your equals—the people—but an extreme act of hubris to take on your superiors—the system and its caretakers.

As a result, it’s PC to hate individual Muslims—I mean terrorists—but not okay to challenge Islam; the problem of obesity is linked obviously to lifestyle “choices” rather than systemic environmental manipulation; and every problem from illegal immigration to drug abuse can be solved with disciplinary police enforcement rather than structural reorganization. The problem isn’t with the machine; it’s just a few bad parts. Accordingly, we have hope. If we can just teach individuals to act a little more responsibly, the problems will go away; progress will continue unabated, and our potency, and thereby our autonomy, will be preserved. The belief that we truly can shape our own destinies and have all the things the system tells us we desire--and the belief that the system is capable of reform--is kept intact. Simultaneously, our authentic self is buried beneath a pile of false needs and false hopes, and the status quo is protected. The victim, not the system, is to blame.

This past summer, I saw a movie called The Secret, which touts an idea called “the law of attraction”. The law of attraction states that… dramatic music please … our thoughts influence reality (that’s the secret). Put another way, what you attract to yourself is a manifestation of what you think. Think about being rich, and you’ll be rich. Think about having sex with lots of alter boys, and you’ll have sex with lots of alter boys. It’s that simple. Another premise of The Secret is that you really can have it all; we live in a world of infinite possibilities, so there’s no limit to what you can achieve. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking mere millionaire thoughts when you could be thinking gazillionaire thoughts. Why limit your potential?

The implications of The Secret philosophy are that you can’t blame anyone but yourself for being poor or for being obese or for being depressed or for being an addict or for contracting aids. On one level, the idea has merit. Of course our thoughts and attitudes influence what happens to us and of course the individual has some responsibility for his/her condition. But to suggest that ONLY our thoughts influence what happens to us is absurd. For one thing, our thoughts are influenced by our environments—environments we didn’t create by ourselves. Moreover, we don’t live on an island. If I choose to rape an alter boy, it isn’t because the altar boy was thinking about being raped. It’s because I gave him no choice but to be raped. Likewise, I can’t very well visualize being a millionaire if another New Ager trumps my wish by visualizing ownership of all the money in the world. In an interdependent universe, we can’t have without taking; we can’t realize without limiting. We can’t have it all.

I know. That’s pretty obvious. Painfully obvious, in fact. Yet The Secret and the book that inspired it have made millions of dollars. Larry King and thousands of other non-retarded adults claim that it changed their lives for the better. Sequels abound. Certified teachers of The Secret’s doctrine are ubiquitous. The public, it seems, is eating this stuff up. Are people really this adolescent in their thinking?

I should be surprised. But I’m not. The law of attraction is no more ridiculous than the mythology endorsed by most religions, certainly no more absurd than the Joseph Smith story the Mormons tell, and it reiterates what all mainstream ideology is intended to reiterate: rebellion should always be personal and private rather than political; if you desire self-realization then distance yourself from social engagement and criticism.

Case in point number one: the obesity epidemic. Currently about one in four Americans is estimated to be obese and the number is rising at an alarming rate. Thanks to the Mass Media, we know exactly who to blame for the problem—ourselves. We eat too much fatty foods and we don’t exercise enough. And the solution is equally as simple: diet and exercise. That’s all there is to it. What we don’t hear about, though, are the studies linking obesity to metabolism changes brought on by industrial chemicals. Nor do we hear much about the limited dietary options available to Americans in poverty or the accelerated puberty brought about by steroids in meat and dairy products or the potentially adaptive value of extra weight in certain polluted environments or the multi-generational effects of a high-fat diet during pregnancy. And I’m not surprised that we don’t hear about it. We don’t hear this kind of information because it's unsettling. Hearing it might require that we take social action—that we develop our social selves and not merely our private reified selves.

There isn’t a calculated conspiracy to conceal the truth about obesity. The truth about obesity, like the truth about immigration (see last post) or the truth about Islam (that its doctrine advocates terrorism) or the truth about Mormonism (not too dissimilar from Islam) or the truth about addiction (that it’s inevitable as well as necessary in a consumer capitalistic world) or the truth about The Secret (that it endorses an obvious contradiction), is in plain sight if you want to see it. The truth is that obesity is a creation of the System as much as it’s a creation of the individual. And that’s not what people want to hear. If I were obese, I’d much rather hear that my problem can be solved through diet and exercise than acknowledge that I can’t solve the problem at all (my genes/hormones don’t allow it) or that I can’t solve the problem unilaterally—that I can’t be cured until the whole system is cured.

The media is a business, and, as such, they’re going to tell people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. To tell people what they need to hear, i.e. the truth, is, after all, an extreme act of arrogance. It isn’t arrogant to lay the blame for obesity and poverty on the victims—on those deemed lower than or equal to you on the social ladder—but to take on the system itself or its elite caretakers is the highest form of hubris imaginable. So we use the concept of accountability to brow beat victims but not to challenge the status quo. We, in essence, set up a substitute form of rebellion—escape—not to mention a substitute individual identity--so as to tolerate our lack of real freedom, thus preserving the existing social order. Naturally then, by challenging the social order, you set yourself above all those confined to its borders, when all you intended was to stand outside it.

And when it comes to liberation, the philosophy of The Secret ought to be embraced; we shouldn’t limit ourselves. There’s enough genuine freedom for everyone—not the freedom to do as you please, even if it includes the violation of others, but the freedom to self-actualize—to, as René Dubos has suggested, realize "actual biological necessities such as quiet, both interior and exterior private spaces, independence, and initiative". The current forms of liberation are limited to private forms of temporary escape—not to the betterment or the realization of the self but to the negation of conscious involvement.

So of course we find it arrogant beyond belief when someone challenges the system. When we challenge the system, we’re asserting our political selves, without which honest self actualization is impossible. Put another way, we’re asserting our greatness. As Desmond Tutu has said, “it isn’t inadequacy that we most fear but greatness—not the darkness but the light. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”; we fear that by claiming our full potential as individuals—our potential in the public as well as private spheres—we distance ourselves from the human race altogether. Since we’re unable, or afraid, to see humanity as anything more than the system that includes it—as anything more than a bounded and easy-to-comprehend concept—we fail to create an environment in which our better, more natural, mysterious, and genuine selves can exist. And so we use responsibility--the word responsibility, at least--to deny responsibility. We tout the doctrine of individual accountability while accusing the truly accountable--the ones who challenge the real source of the problem--of being arrogant and judmental. The last thing the system can tolerate is individuals asserting their power.

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It [the publicity of self actualization in Western culture] isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. Herbert Marcuse