Surface-Level Existence
“When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.”― Antonio Porchia, Voices
Neoliberalism transforms its subjects into hyper-alienated beings incapable of developing even the most rudimentary relationships.
In the United States, this phenomenon has played out in bizarre, sad, and dangerous ways over the past nine months. In the context of a global pandemic, hyper-individualism poses a grave threat to a functioning society. A country cannot properly operate when large segments of its citizens and residents refuse to adhere to basic public health guidelines and recommendations.
As John Barry writes in The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History:
So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.
Indeed, after nine months of pandemic hell, studies show that at least 40% of Americans have not changed their behaviors one bit since the pandemic started. Surveys also show that around 40–50% of Americans will participate in traditional Thanksgiving activities. Additionally, around 40–50% of Americans have said they will refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
At this point, it’s redundant to harp on their blatant ignorance. Plus, comedians such as Bill Burr have done a wonderful job rhetorically castrating the assholes in this country who refuse to follow safety protocol. Surely my scathing judgments wouldn’t add much to the conversation.
Of course, like any problem in a highly complex society, the primary blame should be laid at the feet of those in power. Every major institution in the U.S. has failed — the government, private sector, religious groups, and the corporate media. People have been left to fend for themselves, picking up helpful (and unhelpful) information here and there, mostly online. This is not how a functioning society operates.
There’s nothing more frightening than living in a kleptocracy during a pandemic. Our leaders are asleep at the wheel, while ordinary Americans actively undermine the effort to contain the pandemic. Meanwhile, capitalists rake in billions of dollars in profits. The ship of civilization is drifting toward an iceberg and no one seems too concerned.
While it’s true that Neoliberalism creates economic conditions that force people into increasingly precarious economic and hyper-alienating social situations, it’s equally true that Neoliberal subjects maintain agency, even within a hyper-alienating economic and social context.
That said, how someone responds to the conditions in which they find themselves will largely depend on their social environment and kinship networks. In other words, it’s not at all surprising that uneducated people who don’t take their social relations seriously and who consume garbage culture refuse to believe in the virus. What’s particularly troubling is their refusal to engage with family and friends who disagree.
I can’t even begin to imagine my father or mother listening to a cable news commentator’s advice over my own. In fact, it’s completely unimaginable. Why? Because we respect each other. We communicate. We disagree. Yet, we share values and principles, common decency, and understanding. Obviously that's not the case for most families in the U.S.
To be clear, strong relationships don’t happen by accident. They’re forged through intentional interactions and conversations that go beyond the weather, sports, TV shows, or the routine day-to-day bullshit Americans banter about during their surface-level social interactions.
The pandemic offers an opportunity to reexamine our lives, relationships, passions, expectations, desires, and much more. People should use this opportunity to radically change their perspectives on life, politics, death, family, friendship, and love. To do so requires taking yourself seriously. It requires taking life seriously. Americans take nothing seriously. In the U.S., everything is a joke or a meme.
From what I can tell, Americans are no more interested in participating in the political process than they were prior to the pandemic. Workers remain disorganized because they’re more concerned with college sports and video games than their wages. That’s on them, not the system. Someone should tell them to grow the fuck up.
I don’t know how to convince people to stand up for themselves because I’ve never been recruited to join a god damn thing. I joined sports leagues, karate, boxing, and jiu-jitsu because I was curious and wanted to challenge myself. I joined the Marine Corps for similar reasons, not because some recruiter came to my high school and talked me into it. And I got involved with political movements because the war shook me to the core and forced me to pick up some fucking books and spend more time thinking about the world and my place in it. No one recruited me with a one-on-one conversation or by convincing me that I should stand up and fight for my own material interests.
Then again, I was raised to stand up for myself. My parents raised me to never take shit from anyone, ever, under no circumstances. I thank my parents for raising me with good values and a strong will. I’ve never seen anyone take advantage of them. I’ve never seen anyone disrespect my mother or father without an equally disrespectful response.
I was also raised in a house with two parents who went through catastrophic injuries. When I was ten years old, my father fell off a scaffolding and as a result broke his neck, back, shoulder, arms, hip, and legs, crushed his eardrums, leaving him hospitalized, in a halo, or using a cane for almost six years. Then, when I was 20 years old, my mother had a brain aneurysm that almost left her paralyzed. I got that message while deployed to Iraq during the war. But by all means, do tell your sob story. I’m listening…
Most of the people who were raised in this country have no fighting spirit, no balls — they’re pushovers, and it shows, not only in the political realm but also in their personal lives.
Furthermore, left-wing culture is not conducive to addressing these problems. Leftwing culture has produced the most petulant, uninteresting, and socially insufferable people ever assembled, with the possible exception of Trump supporters. I’m embarrassed to consider myself a leftist, and to the degree that I still do, it’s in spite of the left, not because of it.
The left doesn’t challenge people. The left makes excuses for people. We don’t ask much of anyone and it shows in our relationships and failed political projects, campaigns, and movements. What in the world gives left-wing Americans the idea that radical social change is possible in a country occupied by people who can’t even make menial changes in their individual lives?
Leftists must be confused. They seem to think we’re still living in the 1930s or 1960s when communities and socially adapted human beings existed. Oh, are they sorrily mistaken!
The people you see walking around today are half-humans. Hell, they might as well be dead. Just take a look at ’em, wandering the streets with eyes glued to their cell phones — digital zombies. If they’re not addicted to their iPhones, they’re addicted to opiates, alcohol, or pills. What you’re watching in the U.S. is the slow and painful death of a society that gave up years ago.
What gives leftists the idea that it’s possible to organize human beings who don’t even know what it means to be a human being? And what gives leftists the idea that anyone would want to join the existing left?
After all, most of what passes for ‘left politics’ today is a strange mix of entertainment and charity. On the one hand, leftists invoke a left that doesn’t exist. They consume leftwing media, but do nothing in the real world. They don’t organize, nor do they create. They provide half-baked analysis, most of which is shit, and spend the rest of their time tearing down anyone who’s actually making a difference — Bernie Sanders, AOC, union organizers, community organizers, etc.
On the other hand, leftists make excuses for poor and working-class people. Leftists in the U.S. act like they’re doing these people a favor by fighting on their behalf. They’re not. Here, I think it’s very important for people to fight for their own interests. Yes, we should go beyond that, but it’s very unhelpful to have leftists fighting for issues that don’t impact them directly.
Simply speaking to most Americans, at this point, is the most dreadful experience imaginable. Were people always this dumb and uninteresting? I don’t know. I didn’t live 100 years ago. I didn’t live 1,000 years ago. I was born in 1984. What I do remember, however, is that people used to sit around and talk for hours. They used to party. They used to have friends.
Today, we’re dealing with a population of people who quite literally do not know how to behave like human beings. They pick up social cues from TV shows, social media posts, and garbage entertainment — surface-level bullshit. Again, it shows.
Most Americans can’t even maintain decent friendships or intimate relationships. They have no personal discipline. They have no sense of loyalty. They’re accountable to no one. And dominant liberal pop-culture has created an umbrella of excuses to shelter them from ever taking the time to seriously reflect on their personal faults.
Here, the left could use a heavy dose of discipline and personal-responsibility. That doesn’t mean shaming people for living in poverty due to the ills of capitalism. It means encouraging people to grow the fuck up. It means encouraging people to take their lives seriously.
Left-wing intellectuals and professional-class activists and organizers can sit around and ponder all they want about the sort of intricate ways in which we can convince Americans not to act like a bunch of fucking cowards, but they’ll end up disappointed if they don’t directly address the problem of sociability. That’s a promise.
Americans like it when people talk to them like assholes. Otherwise, they wouldn’t keep voting for politicians and buying products from people who treat them like assholes. And they wouldn’t keep attending churches and supporting friends who treat them like assholes.
If poor and working-class Americans can’t find the will to fight back, they should expect to suffer in misery and poverty. Americans can distract themselves with all the Amazon Prime purchases their empty little heart's desire, but it won’t change the fact that their lives are dog shit. Their coping mechanisms, the sort of destructive behaviors leftists and bleeding heart liberals excuse, only add to the problem. It’s a vicious cycle that will continue until there’s a fundamental break and right now, there’s no reason to think that break is coming.
When the pandemic started, I assumed people would reach out with ideas or questions about how they could get more politically engaged. At first, that happened. I spoke to people I hadn’t spoken to in years, however, their phone calls and texts stopped after a couple of months. They weren’t serious about doing anything. They got distracted with weddings, birthday parties, summer holidays, high school graduation ceremonies, and various other bullshit Americans busy themselves with to avoid reality.
Perhaps my friends were simply looking for some emotional comfort? Maybe so, but I’m not the person to comfort them, not at this point. Whatever sympathetic feelings I once held are now long gone. Most of these people deserve what’s coming, honestly. They have no one to blame but themselves. And now, they’ll pay a severe price for their ignorance and inaction.
I’ve been trying to get some of these people involved with political organizing for years. They could care less. They’re still going to Disneyworld and local sports bars. They’re too busy remodeling their homes or sucking back chicken wings. They, like so many Americans, are living superficial lives devoid of meaning or purpose.
At the end of the day, I guess you could say that I’m disgusted with the whole fucking scene in this country. To be honest, it’s been a long time coming, but my time as a permanent U.S. citizen might be coming to an end. I’ve long meditated and reflected on the possibility of living in a different country.
These thoughts started after being sent to fight and die in a bullshit war that my country knowingly sent me to and my fellow countrymen cheered on. When I got home, it was clear that only a small percentage of Americans were actually fighting the war and that most peoples’ lives hadn’t changed. We were making serious sacrifices while Americans tied yellow ribbons to their oak trees and watched Monday Night Football.
Perhaps I feel a sense of national betrayal that I’ll never get over. Maybe that’s on me. If so, I accept my inability to forget the atrocities I witnessed and experienced. But I will keep speaking the truth as I see it. As Judith Lewis Herman writes:
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
If history provides any insight, people in this country will likely choose to forget the pandemic ever happened. I imagine millions of Americans partying their asses off, going to sports games, and attending concerts in a post-pandemic bliss. Meanwhile, Neoliberalism will reign supreme, the empire will march on, and the planet will be destroyed.
Experiencing such a thing would break me as an individual. Already I have very little to no hope this country is capable of digging itself out of the hole it dug. Any potential hope, as with anything, is directly tied to the material evidence on the ground. If I saw tens of millions of people organizing, my views would be much different.
Right now, however, I expect this country will continue its descent into madness and depravity. And before the ship goes down permanently, I’m looking for an escape raft. In the past, I felt bad about considering such options. I no longer do. For the past eighteen years, I’ve given more to this country than 99.99% of Americans — both through military service and civil service. In the meantime, most Americans, including most of my family and friends, have taken the opposite approach: they continue to live highly insular and selfish lifestyles totally detached from the common good like good Neoliberal subjects. As a result, they’ll be treated like Neoliberal subjects.
In the end, I don’t have a unique love for this country or its people. Americans are no more or less valuable, special, or creative than any other people living on this planet, and often times much less so.
Hell, I’d rather not be able to communicate with locals because I can’t speak the native language instead of not communicating because I’d rather choke on a chicken bone than listen to another anxiety-riddled American mumble about their introverted ways or some other superficial bullshit that occupies their time. At this point, Americans are permanent victims. They act like victims. They talk like victims. And they’re treated like victims. How’s that victimhood feel, America?
I’ve had my fill of the surface-level existence that permeates the American Experience. To hell with it. And to hell with this shithole country.
Vincent Emanuele is a writer, antiwar veteran, and podcaster. He is the co-founder of PARC | Politics Art Roots Culture Media and the PARC Community-Cultural Center located in Michigan City, Indiana. Vincent is a member of Veterans For Peace and OURMC | Organized & United Residents of Michigan City. He is also a member of Collective 20. He can be reached at vincent.emanuele333@gmail.com