The Failure of the Self in the Consumer World: American Culture Exposed

In the wishful spirit of Mother Jones, Ida B Wells, Emma Goldman, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Lolita Lebron; these are individuals we should ‘draw our sustenance from’, but we don’t. Who is the ‘we’? Specifically, those citizens residing in the lines of the globalized economic system accepted by most governments in the United Nations, regardless of free volition.

Politically, as in context, why do so many Americans still think that America was great under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidency? Just recently the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie claimed, “Let’s make America great again!”  Yet when was he believing America was great and for whom? The answer is Never, if greatness comes at the expense of so many: foreign and domestic. Intentional amnesia misses clear claims to US wealth: genocide to Native Americans, Slavery, atrocious working conditions before the Labor Movement domestically, and continually abroad, supportive dictators for oil, resources, and much more. Oh, but so many say it is not our problem what happens overseas, but it is our problem. We created those problems. How does it make Iraqi’s feel that we’ve already forgotten what our nation has collectively done to them?

Standing at a bar, I see the masquerade. I see it in our movies and on the streets. Our characters are empty, settling for image rather than depth. Herbert Marcuse was correct to note that the way the self exists in America is mostly one-dimensional. So how best can we create a sense of self, when it has been flattened of edges, waves, spirit, resistance, and sustenance?

Toni Cade Bambara, notes in her essay, ‘Deep Sight and Rescue Missions’ that “the less children know, the easier it’ll be for them to fit in and make their way, seemed to be the thinking of half the household. They lobbied for lobotomy, in other words, convinced that ignorance was the prime prerequisite for assimilation, and assimilation was the preferred path to progress” (Bambara). In contrast, while walking in Harlem the other day, I saw a shirt on an elder African-American woman that stated: “Danger: I am intelligent.” Why do so many people fear intelligence? Critical thinking skills are key for individuals when separating the self from a mindless existence of consumption.

Winona LaDuke believes in ‘Cyclical Thinking’, which is common to most indigenous groups or cultures, and is an understanding that “the world (time, and all parts of the natural order, including moon, tides, women, lives, and seasons) flows in cycles. Within this understanding is a clear sense of birth and rebirth and a knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future!” (LaDuke). This absence appears in the daily actions nurtured in contemporary postmodern America. Instead, our society nurtures that tomorrow doesn’t matter unless “I enjoy first, today for my self.”

The postmodern American Self does not think cyclically. The modern American surprisingly does not like to think, does not want to think, and is nurtured via technology and media to not. “Let somebody else solve the problems (why not vote for a janitor rather than a politician to clean up our mess).” This lack of thinking should not be confused with the teachings of Zen Buddhism, where the mind is ideally supposed to free itself in meditation. We are not all following the goals of Zen by zoning-out the world with headphones, cell phones, smart phones, and I-phones.

Though there is a scarcity of women recorded in classic Zen literature, as Grace Schireson notes in her book ‘Zen Women’; Moshan Liaoran, one of the earliest Zen women in historic Buddhism, taught that, “the Peak is not revealed … I am not pointing to myself, my position, or my ability. To understand the peak, the essence of my teaching, you need to penetrate your own confusion, and whatever has covered this peak from your view. I have no need to show off to you, to point to this, the peak, but you may uncover my teachings by seeing through your own delusions” (Schireson).

It is not even just delusions but the ability to get away from self-focused thoughts. The American culture has embraced the ‘virtue of selfishness’. This obedience to make the world revolve around the I rather than the reverse makes it extremely challenging for the material projected self of what-one-has and what-one-does-not- have-yet to think about other worlds and other I’s, adhering to each one’s own Napoleon complex.  This is a crisis, which is cyclical and will be short sighted. This is as close to a lobotomy from reality as one can get locked behind self-seeking technology. This will come back to us in unseen ways in the near future.

On the same front, one of the earliest French novelists, rarely acknowledged in the literary canon, was Francoise De Graffigny, who lived in 1747, and her novel ‘Letters from a Peruvian Woman’ represented an Incan princess kidnapped by the Spanish during the conquest of Peru. In an English translation, her confessions acknowledge, “When one single object draws all our thoughts, events only interest us through the relations we find them to have with the object … Time like Space is known only by its limits. Our ideas are equally lost when confronted with constant uniformity of one or the other.” If individuals today cannot associate objects, events, and history with their own personal self, they cannot comprehend meaning for them. When the self is intentionally limited to a consumer level, the expectations for them to bring far ranging details for a higher purpose outside of self-gain, is even lower.

Individuals are allowing the culture to funnel the choices for a subjective self rather than looking beyond to a higher Zen, cyclical self, or whatever deeper level one can name for that reference. The Hungarian Marxist Agnes Heller reflects on the idea of the self as well. “Kierkegaard once said that if you do not choose yourself, you let others choose for you.” Individuals born in the ‘consumer’ world are a ‘bundle of empty possibilities’. Heller reflects that the self is the ‘idiosyncrasy of the interpretation’ he or she has with the human world, and this world according to a narcissist is one of emptiness, which will remain empty as long as he or she is solely self-focused causing the ‘self’ to be merely on its own: useless.

Agnes Heller emphasizes in her essay, ‘Can Everyday Life be Endangered?’ that “the Newborn is certainly not like a tabula rasa … everyone is thrown into a concrete network of social regulations by the accident of birth. Culture takes care of transforming this accident, perceived as organic embedded-ness, into fate or providence. Both social regulations and genetic uniqueness are therefore prior to human experience”(Heller). If this bundle of empty possibilities does not go beyond the self in the consumer world regardless of class, race, or gender, he or she will remain empty (and not in the Zen way).

In the globalized world of economic dependencies and interconnected markets, ‘Why is it essential that the American remain self-reliant?’ The Laguna Pueblo activist, Paula Gunn Allen, answers her own question regarding why the American self can go on being community-less, without a place to belong, without a past to remember, or indifferent to all of the above. The American culture was built upon a separation of the self from the circle of nature clinging to a loneliness that reasserts man’s power over nature. Why do we cling to loneliness? Gunn Allen notes, “there is something that can be done, there is a way around the destruction” that perpetuates more destruction foreign and domestic, “but it requires giving up America’s real love: loneliness.” Such chants of affluent children to exemplify this loneliness are ‘I want my own car’, ‘I want my own room’, ‘I want my own cell phone,’ and ‘I want my own way to block out the rest of the world.” I am not aware that I am connected to the rest of the world.

Paula Gunn Allen notes that we are ‘idolized for singular determination’ and overall  “American society substitutes love of the family, comrade, village, community, and tribe for the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual.” Many have taken the messages of 19^th Century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau far beyond their original intent. In Gunn Allen’s book ‘Off the Reservation’ she projects that the real reason American corporate elite feared and still fear socialism and communism is because it requires cooperating with others, and sharing … “It seems fairly obvious from this that a society intent on eradicating theft in all its forms must eradicate ‘civilization’. Cooperativeness, the willingness to share goods and land, is not possible in a basically selfish framework” (Gunn Allen). 

In parallel to Paula Gun Allen’s awareness of the American self, the philosopher Julia Kristeva pulls to the forefront that now beyond the US border and within, “21^st Century Globalization hopes that passions will be reduced under the two fold effect of Nasdaq economic well-being and Prozac’s biological well-being” (Kristeva). This leads to a stunted-self of ‘consumption’, economics, and pharmaceutical bliss. When reduced to this sort of universal, true individual potential is sacrificed to emptiness and buffed up with egotistical cosmetic and psychological cover-up. Democracy under these conditions will not lead to communalism but ignorant pawns voting for puppets that benefit the few elite.

Outside of the privileged and outside much of the lobotomized masses, one sees America as an “imposed financial, economic, and cultural oligarchy that is liberal in its inspiration but risks excluding an important dimension of human liberty. Other civilizations have other visions of human freedom. They also need to be heard in this globalized world and to be allowed to add their own corrections, through diversity, to this new global vision.” … At present, instead of this liberty, humanity is betraying itself in a process of increasing technical and robotically uniformitarianism (Julia Kristeva, ‘Hatred and Forgiveness’). Limiting humanities opportunity to be more whole, more complex, and more multi-dimensional stunts sustenance and ignores cyclical growth. This fragile system is in danger of progressing to a more violent conflict foreign and domestic. Can the ‘self’ afford to remain shallow, or must it find an outlet to go deeper and beyond what pays the bills and feeds the greedy?

Susan George tries to practically answer this question economically and structurally in her book ‘Whose Crisis, Whose Future’. She lays out how the regime of neoliberal globalization keeps the public in prison without the needs of actual prison walls but through financial spheres of coercion both politically and socially. Those with power use the tools to divide the selves. They give wealth to a status group and occasionally gift a few lucky individuals with affluence. They feed the status quo with patriotic election confetti so that the masses can one-dimensionally decide which puppet on the ballot will target interests for the next four years to divert attention or simply to build up public apathy.

Susan George cannot see a big bang, a ‘once-for-all end to our present economic system’, or a revolution. Instead, she sees an “ongoing process of transformation fuelled by constant public pressure” with constant voicing from larger selves who go beyond the individual self for a cooperative social context. She doesn’t believe that “violence can provide a lasting solution or advance human emancipation, but” she fears it could overtake us unless we act quickly enough to reduce the glaring injustices in the present global and national interrelated conditions.

After voices like Julia Kristeva, Susan George, Paula Allen Gunn, Winona LaDuke and Agnes Heller, et al, make empowering analysis, specifically female intelligence that is stronger than the reflections of the male leadership that overrides government and executive boards; why are such voices dangerously being ignored? The ‘virtue of the selfish’ is not qualitative. It is an obedient emptiness. The flaw so apparent at this time of those who control the economic, political, and subjective landscape is that they are running out of ideas fast and they don’t want to hear from intelligent voices beyond their capacity and who state the obvious future that they have no power in. The corporate elites are running out of ideas, this is evident with the current global stagnation and unrest. They are also aware that there are less areas of the globe to bully. They are shortsighted and fail to use natural cyclical knowledge.  The self must seek sustenance from the healthier teachers that nurture a higher personal growth not one of emptiness, limited politics, and economic malnutrition.