Hard Left

I’ve been watching Adam Curtis docs. Well done, though on looking through them once I’m not yet convinced of the sweeping connections made, or the credit he gives politicians for being naïfs, corruptible by ideologues and the supposed will of the people.

Something stood out to me, though, because I’ve been thinking about it for a while. In “The Century of Self,” he talks about how the hippie movement, defeated by a powerful state, gave up on changing the world through direct action — thinking they could either lead solely by example, change it from the inside, or just delude themselves into being happy with the status quo — finally gave up and turned to “inner contentment.”

People got into seminars, experimental therapies, alternative bullshit, etc., while corporate America scrambled to pigeon hole these new suckers into buying shit like they ought to. They discovered they could appeal to the urge to “express one’s individuality” by offering Pepsi in six different collectible cans, and having preppies scamper around on the beach to show how darn free Blumper and Son’s 15 SPF hypoallergenic sunscreen makes them feel. Boom — problem solved.

By the time they dollied out Reagan for his speeches, they’d fed enough American “individuality” into computers to make a disheartening sum of people think the TV was speaking directly to them and their inane vanities. He won that era’s “going rogue” vote, and the rest was catastrophe.

The Demacratic/Labor parties wanted in on this new “lifestyle marketing” approach to fucking people over, and decided to adopt the same asinine language about individual empowerment (the freedom to fuck off and die). Problem was, they ended up following the same failed policies of their moronic conservative counterparts, and created a de-facto one party system. Now, thanks to decades of uninterrupted corruption by the ideologues, corrupt politicos, and corporate scumbags who backed them, the — now sufficiently “small” — government no longer has the power to reign in the corporations they’d unleashed, giving us all de facto corporatist states.

The lesson to me was this: In ideology, selling to the lowest common denominator is a race to the bottom. If we adopt the venal language of our opponents, we’ll inspire venal people. We must be different inside, but we also have to act directly, “expressing ourselves” through whatever means appropriate.