Episode #189 - Transcript
So whenever you hear people talking about dystopian futures, or a digital panopticons…one of the ones that’s ALWAYS gonna get brought up… is George Orwell’s 1984. It’s a classic. It’s like the Casablanca of dystopian futures, I mean I’d like to DIE in it… if I could…it talks about a surveillance state that is ALL encompassing; not unlike the one we just referenced on the freedom vs security episode we did.
But to the philosopher we’re talking about today, Byung Chul Han… 1984 for a LOT of people out there TALKING about this stuff… MAY actually end up BEING a bit of a red herring. See to HIM… there’s a LOT of different TYPES of dystopian futures that could happen out there…and if you’re only looking for ONE of them…you may end up MISSING the one you’re actually LIVING in. To Han, The FAR MORE ACCURATE literary example of a dystopian future that resembles the world we’re in is NOT Orwell’s 1984, but Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book called Brave New World.
See IN Brave New World…it’s a whole different VIBE than 1984…First of all, the people in the book live under a single, unified, GLOBAL world state. Everybody…is ONE, in the book. And when someone dies, there aren’t people having BABIES to be able to REPLACE them…the GOVERNMENT replaces them… by growing a NEW human inside of a hatchery. Far less messy. Then, this new person, from birth is psychologically conditioned and engineered by the government for a particular ROLE in the society, depending on what’s NEEDED.
After a certain point…once people come of age…the government GIVES everybody a hallucinogenic drug called “soma”.... that they TAKE every day. Now, it’s not MANDATORY to take soma in the book…but BASICALLY EVERYBODY in the society DOES. It makes you calm, it makes you compliant, it makes you FREE of ANY SORT of negative EMOTIONS that might OTHERWISE come up and mess with the stability of the society, and to Byung Chul Han, this is a FAR BETTER METAPHOR of how OUR digital panopticon is operating…because it’s not a matter of GUILTING people by pointing CAMERAS at them all day FORCING them to fall in line…you just make people DEPENDENT upon a drug… and then WATCH as they continue to take that drug VOLUNTARILY day after day after day.
It’s funny a LOT of people ENJOYED last episode of the show. LOT of comments. Some people didn’t like Han so much, LOT of people did. But one interesting comment that was recurring from the people that LIKED what he had to say was simply: WHY haven’t I heard of this guy before? I mean, it’s strange he has such a powerful message WHERE IS HE in the news media?
Well there’s a FEW reasons for that. For one, his work hasn’t been translated into English until fairly recently. But maybe the MAIN reason that an INFORMED person like yourself wouldn’t have HEARD about Han before this…is that his ideas don’t really fit NEATLY… into the often oversimplified political narrative that dominates western media.
I mean if Byung Chul Han’s work could be REDUCED into something that was 100% conservative or 100% progressive…he’d be a SUPERSTAR.
The PROBLEM is: his WORK isn’t that SIMPLE…and if your work isn’t that simple…it’s tough for media that’s DRIVEN by ideology to know where to even PLACE you. It’s tough for them to know whether you’re ACTUALLY an ally…like are you fully committed, son…to agreeing with us on literally everything that ever comes out of our mouth…are you gonna PLAY BALL? They don’t like his ANSWER…. to that question.
The GOOD news though is that for a show like this…we’re driven by an ideology of curiosity if anything. We’re just trying to entertain ideas without necessarily accepting them, right. So in THAT context… he fits in PERFECTLY here!
Now I have an OBVIOUS statement to LEAD this episode with, but it NEEDS to be said. BECAUSE Han is a guy that’s doing his work in TODAY’S world…he is often COMMENTING on things that are going ON… in today’s world. So over the course of this episode…there’s gonna be several things we’re talking about that NO DOUBT, you’re ALREADY gonna have heard about…and more than likely…you’re ALREADY going to have intelligent explanations for WHY these things are occurring.
That’s FINE. But just KNOW that Byung Chul Han SEES many of these things through a totally different lens than OTHER people in the media landscape…he sees them THROUGH the lens of his work that we STARTED talking about LAST episode. So whether it’s the crisis of democracy, conspiracy theories, fake news, rites of passage…there’s going to be SEVERAL things we TALK about in this episode… just KNOW that Byung Chul Han sees all these things as manifestations of that ethos that we talked about on the last episode…and that in THIS episode… we’re talking about the actual examples, the actual POINTS OF CONTACT he sees in HOW society is changing.
And BECAUSE there’s gonna be SEVERAL of these if I HAD to sum it up and put it into a thesis for the sake of giving this episode some initial structure…I’d say this:
That the RISE of narcissism. The rise of AUTHENTICITY as a neoliberal slogan everyone should be AIMING for. The rise of this TECHNOLOGY that EVERYBODY USES that makes EVERYONE’S EXPERIENCE of reality far more shallow…ALL of these things combined, to byung chul han, are making several, VERY IMPORTANT THINGS that bind and connect society…completely disappear.
In philosophical terms WHAT he says is disappearing…are CONSTRUCTIVE forms of negativity…and each one of these things that is disappearing is going to have a different book that he writes that is dedicated to it.
Now we’ll KNOW what he MEANS by constructive negativity by the end of the episode. Point is: to say that everything that binds or connects people is being destroyed by the structure of society…that’s a pretty BIG statement.
So I want to START with that big statement…and I wanna take some time here to give a few examples of what he’s talking about and just so we don’t SKIP anything… I want to START from the place that we ENDED LAST episode on.
Seems PRETTY uncontroversial to START by saying…that what HAPPENS when you give people this MESSAGE that they’re a project to be optimized… that they’re a commodity that needs to IMPROVE their market value by constantly learning and growing… that THEY ARE the SOLE person that should be determining who they are… and that if anybody ever tries to tell them who or what they should be, to not LISTEN to that person…when you divvy out that message to people in mass…Byung Chul Han would say it should NOT be SURPRISING… if what EMERGES from that is a society where people generally just consider the existence and opinions of other people LESS, because they’re focused on themselves,… and are more SKEPTICAL towards community bonds that try to tell them what to do, because THEY decide what to do.
And IF these INWARDLY FOCUSED people are more SKEPTICAL of things that BOND communities together…then one of the COMMON THINGS in the world this type of person is gonna NATURALLY be antagonistic towards… are the very rituals, and traditions, that communities often participate in.
Put another way, to Byung chul Han: a TRAP that’s common for a narcissistic person to fall into…is that they will REJECT, social norms, morays, customs and politeness…and they will reject these things simply on the BASIS…of WHO ARE ANY of these people… to TELL me HOW I should be acting anyway?
If you want a good example of the KIND of thing he’s talking about…think of something like not using swear words in public. Alright.
On the one hand: not SWEARING in public…at bottom… is a COMPLETELY ARBITRARY thing to just IMPOSE upon people from the outside. Oh you got your little list of FORBIDDEN WORDS I’m not supposed to say? What do they make the OLD people uncomfortable? Tell grandma to go eat her lemon drops do her crossword puzzle and let the adults talk the way we’re gonna talk. I’m not just gonna grovel at your feet because you have certain SOUNDS your parents told you were BAD and it makes you feel uncomfortable. That’s nonsense.
But on the OTHER hand Byung Chul Han might say…ARBITRARY as it may SEEM…NOT USING swear words in public…is actually a token of respect, to a collective social agreement we all have… that BINDS us all TOGETHER in some way.
I mean what are we REALLY doing when we have an unwritten agreement that we’re not gonna DO something, ANYTHING? In PART what we’re saying is look: we’re ALL OUT HERE okay? We’re all STILL ALIVE. We’re all waking up every day, taking a shower and going to work to try to make this whole thing operate. This whole THING by the way…that we ALL recognize when it comes down to it is a pretty FRAGILE experiment we’re running on a RAZORS EDGE that in many ways RELIES on the cooperation of everyone continuing to play along.
Not using SWEAR words in public… in SOME societies… this is an EXAMPLE of one SMALL THING we all DO… that’s part of the GLUE that HOLDS that society together. In other words, the function of the ritual in this case….is that it BINDS and CONNECTS people together in some way.
Now, from the perspective of the narcissist…they don’t SEE it that way. Or at least it’s HARD for them to. From THEIR perspective this is just something that is being IMPOSED upon them from the outside…this is people TELLING me what I can and cannot do. NOBODY should be doing THAT. And because they SEE everything ONLY in terms of that immediate, transactable VALUE to them…it’s harder for them to see the VALUE this has to the GROUP, more broadly.
And OBVIOUSLY…this extends FAR BEYOND just the use of swear words in public. Take ANOTHER example in the realm of being polite to each other.
You’re walking through the grocery store, little to fast with your cart. You come to an intersection, someone else from another aisle comes to that exact same intersection. You almost hit each other, but you don’t. You guys both give the wave, pardon me, sorry about that. The smile and you move on. Why do we DO that? WHY waste your time DOING that?
From a narcissistic point of view…THAT person doesn’t OWN the GROCERY AISLE. I have every right to be there just as much as them. Why SHOULD I…pay deference to any other person on this planet? I didn’t ASK them to be in the store. Who are THEY to have a problem with ME? If THEY have a problem with ME then THEY never have to see me AGAIN! This INWARD obsession.
You could SEE it this way… but rituals, customs, norms to Byung Chul Han…these are things that have served an absolutely CRUCIAL social function all throughout human history… and again the prevalence of this sort of narcissistic rejection of them AMPLIFIED BY TECHNOLOGY…is leading to their disappearance.
So let’s get DOWN to it: what is a RITUAL…to Han? Cause the EXAMPLES I’ve given so far have just been in the domain of politeness, but as you can imagine: Rituals fall under a much broader class of definition. In his book called The disappearance of Rituals…Han says he thinks a good way to describe the function of a ritual is to call it a TEMPORAL TECHNOLOGY…for HOUSING oneself.
Now on the surface… to some that can sound overly philosophical, like CRINGE levels of effort are going on here to try to sound smart…like JOB interview level cringe…but it actually makes a lot of sense if you take a second to break it down. If a technology… is something we often make that provides some sort of use for us as PEOPLE...then a TEMPORAL technology...temporal meaning related to TIME...a TEMPORAL technology, a ritual… is something that does something USEFUL for us when it comes to the progression of time.
To get CLOSER to what he means Han says: Rituals are in time… as THINGS are in space. Let's think about what he means by that. Imagine being in physical space…with no physical things around you. What would that be like? Well it would be like being in parts of outer space, you’d just be floating in whatever direction you were. There would BE nothing to walk on. There’d BE nothing to reach towards, there’d be no STRUCTURE to any of it at all.
Well so too with rituals when it comes to the passage of time, for Han. A society without rituals…or an individual LIFE without rituals…is one where EVERY SINGLE MOMENT BLURS into the NEXT. There’s nothing to mark the end of ONE activity or period in life and the beginning of another. There’s no CLOSURE for han. Think of the common complaint that you’ll hear in modern society from people who say there’s no such thing as a rite of passage anymore.
They’ll say that there’s no RITUAL or no specific MOMENT that graduates someone from BEING a child into an adult for example.
Well WHEN that’s a possibility for someone…the RESULT of this sometimes is that it becomes possible, to just sort of SIT in adolescence for a decade of your life… until you become so embarrassed by your life that you finally move into the next stage. It’s a bad look. But more IMPORTANTLY… it’s a TRAGIC look to Han because this is just one example of hundreds in the modern world where people don’t ever get CLOSURE of ONE period of their life anymore…SO THAT they can be fully immersed, and present in the NEXT period of their life. They just get stuck in purgatory in a lot of ways now.
The reason these transitions between different moments in life and moments in our day are important…is because at a deep, deep level…we are narrative creatures to Han. We make sense of our lives… we get meaning from things that are going on in the world around us when they fit INTO some larger, structured story that we have.
To Byung Chul Han: RITUALS PROVIDE that structure. They are THE THINGS that give MEANING to time…and turn time into anything other than just an endless succession of separate moments that are all unrelated to each other. How does any MOMENT come together into a meaningful PLOT point in the story of your life? When han says a ritual is a temporal technology for housing oneself, this is what he MEANS by it.
Which is ALSO to say in more philosophical terms: that they provide a certain amount of what Han calls CONSTRUCTIVE…negativity. They SLOW TIME DOWN in a way…to Han, things that bind or connect communities together: things like trust, integrity, commitment, faithfulness…these are NOT INSTANTANEOUS things.
These are things that take TIME to develop. Which then allows deeper connections WITHIN the group as a WHOLE to develop. To Han, Life loses ALL STABILITY…when everything in it… is short term. Rituals provide that more long term structure.
So again…from a narcissistic perspective when you’re just wrapped up in your own life…it’s SO EASY to be a critic of a ritual that is not immediately benefitting you in a transactional way. It’s so easy to make fun of these morons doing a flash mob. Really…did THAT make you feel special there? Waving your hands around messing with people’s day?
Or these sheep doing the 10 millionth gender reveal party this year. Oh I WONDER if it’s gonna be BLUE!
On one hand it’s so easy to make fun of em…but on the OTHER HAND… if you’re somebody whose life is practically devoid of rituals…Go do a flash mob…tell me how you feel afterwards. Laugh at the sheep that are all going off to university for example, but on the other hand GO to a university, immerse yourself in that ritual completely…and tell me how you feel afterwards. To Byung Chul Han: we NEED daily, and life long rituals to help BRING that narrative STRUCTURE into our lives…in a world that’s making it INCREASINGLY HARD to be able to get those things by default.
Now, since we’re at this point in the discussion…I want to pivot to ANOTHER one of these things Han thinks is disappearing from society…something ELSE that HISTORICALLY has provided narrative structure and bound and unified people in the process…and what I’m talking about… is TRUTH…the ability for people to arrive at truth or KNOWLEDGE is starting to disappear. He writes about it in his book called The Information Society.
First of all it should be said: truth and knowledge…these are ALSO not things to Byung Chul Han that can get INSTANTLY INJECTED into your head with a tiktok or a youtube video…you know, THE SAME WAY when it comes to rituals…where life would otherwise be an endless sea of moments that are unrelated to each other if rituals didn’t give them context as part of the narrative of your life…when it comes to developing a cohesive narrative about how reality works…looking down at your phone…and being fed an endless stream of these fragmented bits of information. News stories, social media posts, videos…NONE of this stuff is presented to you in a way… that even ATTEMPTS to link it to any CONTEXT that makes it enduring. That’s a PROBLEM…to byung chul han.
You know in former societies…you’d GET a piece of information about reality.
And then you’d HAVE a while to SIT with it…you would contemplate it, you’d consider what it means within a larger narrative framework, you’d weigh those ideas up against the narrative framework of other people and come out the other side of that process with something that was actually ILLUMINATING about reality. But in TODAY’S world he says…with this constant STREAM of information… The STREAM of information… RUSHES PAST the truth.
There is NO TIME for anyone to truly THINK anymore, there’s no constructive negativity…because by the time someone gets done reading ONE of these self-referential news stories…it’s now time to read the NEXT news story so that they can stay up to date. Your LIFE really becomes like a Mr. Beast video where three seconds can’t go by without EXPLOSIONS. Oh look NOW it’s a treasure chest full of money! Oh look now they’re shooting at each other in an apache helicopter!
Byung Chul Han would say you know just try to appreciate how truly DIFFERENT that IS from the way almost every other human being has ever lived. If you were a peasant living in the middle ages for example…the content that you consumed…if you HAD any the external information that you consumed that was gonna potentially influence you…you LITERALLY thought it was the word of God. Your news anchor…was the CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE in your eyes.
But now…now that we live in the AGE of information…now we just have CNN and Fox…now we have fake news. Now all we have is an endless stream of unverified, contingent, surface level information that doesn’t really illuminate ANYTHING about reality.
In fact it does the OPPOSITE, to Han. It further DISORIENTS people.
It just produces anxiety. It fragments perception. It relies on SURPRISING people. If you were the weirdo that read a news story in today’s day and age and sat on it for a week contemplating it, deliberating…by the TIME you got back to the news cycle you would be so far behind the story wouldn’t even MATTER anymore…and you’d REALIZE in that moment that these stories are not some hard hitting journalism that’s going on… they REALLY ARE just surface level information so the news outlet could have something to put up there on the screen to surprise people and get them clicking.
And it’s BECAUSE of this reality of this age of INFORMATION rather than knowledge…that people are just more SUSCEPTIBLE to things like fake news than they’ve ever BEEN before. 200 years ago… fake news could NEVER have been this effective. But BECAUSE people don’t even have the time to VERIFY the LAST story and connect it to a larger narrative before needing to be BACK on their news app being informed about the NEXT story…that SPEED, that ACCESS, that EXCESS POSITIVITY to Han… creates the environment where fake news is not only possible but proliferating.
This ALSO creates the environment he thinks, where the rise of CONSPIRACY theories in recent years starts to make a lot more sense. BECAUSE people are LACKING that binding, connecting narrative of TRUTH that has always existed before this, now people become so DESPERATE to ACTUALLY have a narrative, that they EVEN start creating their OWN narratives, or latching onto others that aren’t necessarily very sound, but their followers will never realize it ANYWAY as long as we keep FEE DING them so much information they stay in a FRENZY of whatever’s being talked about right this second.
If RITUALS are the constructive negativity that slows down time enough to create trust and integrity and other necessary social bonds…then in THIS world where we’re fed just cursory, raw information…CONTEMPLATION is gonna be the thing that slows things down enough to allow for truth and knowledge to be possible.
Once again for han…what’s disappearing from society is at bottom, constructive negativity.
"Not all negativity is destructive. Not infrequently, forms of negativity such as hesitation, pausing, boredom, waiting, or rage prove constructive, though they are threatened with disappearance in the course of society's increasing positivization"
And to move on to ANOTHER area of human life that Han thinks is being disintegrated…the removal of negativity… has actually started to undermine culture…and the places where people in the PAST have gotten their sense of identity altogether.
So IF anyone in recent years has made the claim that we’re in a period where people feel like they’re in a CRISIS of meaning and a CRISIS of identity all at the same time…if that’s said to be a HALLMARK of our age…here is where Byung Chul Han’s work can start to explain why HE thinks that’s occurring.
Because WHEN this neoliberal ethos of questioning outside rituals and norms, when THAT gets applied at the level of CULTURE…what you get to Han…is what we COMMONLY call normal everyday conversation: Globalization.
You get an attitude by people of HEY MAN. What’s with all these arbitrary LINES IN THE SAND MAN? What’s with all these BORDERS between people? We gotta open these UP! We gotta stop PRETENDING like these races and nationalities MEAN anything. WE’RE ALL ONE THING, we’re ALL THE SAME!
Now it SEEMS like a very inclusive sentiment there… but the SUBTEXT of saying that none of these BOUNDARIES between people are real…is that you’re saying: YOUR PERCEIVED individual CULTURE…the kind of thing that historically people have used for THOUSANDS of YEARS to get BIG pieces of their sense of identity and meaning…the subtext is that, yeah THAT isn’t real EITHER. You have to just GET OVER all these arbitrary DIFFERENCES you’re seeing.
And NOTICE the connection to LAST episode when Han was talking about the terror of the SAME… and how this attitude eventually SMOOTHS everything out and takes away the rough edges so that NOBODIES disagreeing and everything can keep on being economically productive and efficient.
The ENDGAME of a neoliberal ethos of authenticity to Han, is not a bunch of different groups that are coexisting…but seven and a half billion narcissists… all with their own worldviews… COMPETING with each other in complete PEACE.
But one thing should be clear: this is not UNITING everyone… to Byung Chul Han. This is HOMOGENIZING everyone.
When you push for globalization…by turning EVERYTHING into the same thing…you’re not DEALING with the actual DIFFERENCES between you and the other…you’re just making it so that you never have to ENCOUNTER the other ever again, because now EVERYBODY’s the same.
But to Han, this is a BAD MOVE…because there’s such a thing he says as HEALTHY BOUNDARIES between truly DIFFERENT cultures. THAT’S what we should be aiming for. What we NEED, Han says…is MORE what he calls Eros.
Now Eros is a term that has been used at several points throughout human history, first introduced in Ancient Greek mythology, Eros represented the forces of love and desire at that time.
It was used by Freud, Jung, we talked about it in our Frankfurt School series, the important point here so that we don’t get too far off track is that it represents ANOTHER one of these things that bind and connect us together in human relationships…that’s disappearing to Byung Chul Han. Han doesn’t define Eros as love and desire…he writes about it in his book called The Agony of Eros and he calls it at one point “the relation to the wholly other” Not HOLY like in a Biblical sense, but the ENTIRELY other is what he means. We’ve obviously TOUCHED on this piece of his work last episode when we talked about trying to listen to someone AS they are NOT just in terms of how they transactionally benefit you or COMPARE to you…but in their TOTAL difference from you, FEELING, sitting with how uncomfortable that makes you and not trying to get away from it…EROS is the formal name that he gives to it.
And notice how EASILY something that historically embodied love… QUICKLY turns into something that TRULY ACKNOWLEDGES real DIFFERENCES in other groups, as they are. If you’re a poetic sort of person you really can start to see how the two terms overlap with each other.
Differences, to Han, are ABSOLUTELY crucial for any kind of HEALTHY human relationship that you’re going to try to have. On a personal level…if you’re hanging out with a bunch of people that you have ZERO real differences with…that’s probably not a good thing.
Well, in the SAME way when a society doesn’t have EROS…a society without counter-weighting voices that truly QUESTIONS itself…a society that has nothing to shake it OUT of its narcissistic inwardness…THAT is an unhealthy society as well. It is horrible…for the IMMUNE system… of a society… for everything to be EXACTLY the SAME he says. We NEED that immunological response…we NEED uncomfortable differences to exist between groups if we want things to remain balanced. Again what we DON’T want…is just just 7.5 billion narcissists all screaming their own personal religions at each other.
Another, more POLITICAL, part of the reason it’s important to PRESERVE the differences that make communities possible to Han… is because just from a historical perspective…if there was ever a group that was being treated badly throughout history…and the people IN those groups wanted to DO something to try to change their situation…in the PAST it was possible for them to organize, band together and RISE UP to try to make their circumstances better. But as he says, if we get to a place in the world where there is no “we” to be able to rise up…in a world where people feel like all they do is PLAY and if anything seems WRONG with their life it is THEIR INDIVIDUAL fault for it BEING that way…that is a form of positive power where it becomes confusing how to even get out of it. We NEED communities for people to have that leverage point.
And to combine THIS idea with what we were just talking about with the rise of information and decline of truth and knowledge…these are going to be two CORNERSTONES of what is ABSOLUTELY necessary if you EVER want to have a functioning democracy.
So if we’re experiencing anything in today’s world that anybody out there may REFER to as a CRISIS of DEMOCRACY. Byung Chul Han is going to point to THIS as part of the reason why.
Because the POSSIBILITY, of a democracy EVER working…PRESUPPOSES the idea that people can be reasonably informed about the world and then can have reasonable amounts of intelligent conversation with other citizens so that the PEOPLE, can decide where the society goes next.
But that’s practically IMPOSSIBLE anymore to Byung Chul Han.
We already talked about the absolute dumpster fire of a situation when it comes to staying informed…well most of our COMMUNICATION with each other within modern democracies these days, GOES ON over the bandwidth of social media. In other words…in a place where NOBODY REALLY even TRIES to communicate effectively EVER. Social media doesn’t incentivize REAL communication. There CERTAINLY are no real COMMUNITIES being developed on there.
He says it’s interesting…communities of people used to exist historically and the VERY THING that bonded them together were things that nobody in the community really needed to speak about because everybody KNEW what connected them. He says we USED to have communities without communication. NOWADAYS we have communication without community.
Once again it’s ALL so OVERLY POSITIVE in today’s climate. It’s all just TALKING, and RANTING and ACCESS to INFORMATION and NONE of the constructive NEGATIVITY that slows things down and leads to productive discussion or actual consensus.
As you’re no doubt seeing by this point: to Byung Chul Han… there are just AREAS of human life that are DIFFERENT… when the world is dominated by positive power and this shallow kind of technology. And the EFFECTS of this spread into practically EVERY CORNER of society that you can possibly imagine.
In his book The Transparency Society he talks about how society sees TRANSPARENCY as this UNDENIABLE GOOD. How everyone should have NO SECRETS, if they DO then they must be HIDING something. How access to information should be UBIQUITOUS, and how could anybody really argue otherwise, again… there’s this obvious EXCESS of positivity that he thinks symbolizes this age we’re living in.
But to Han he’s ALWAYS trying to ask the question: what is taken AWAY from a human life when we VALUE these positive virtues so much more today? In the case of transparency…how about the very need to TRUST another person? Does THAT become obsolete…in a society of TOTAL transparency?
To give an example along the lines of our digital panopticon…let’s say you were going to parent your kids and the way you decided to DO that is just to put a security camera up in their play room and make them know that they’re being WATCHED all the time. Giant POSTER of you on the wall as the fuhrer of the house that you got on Etsy.
Well that SOLVES the PROBLEM right? They’re BEHAVING now. But DOES it solve the problem? Are you really being a parent there? Or does the security camera DESTROY something that’s more VITAL to the whole process of BECOMING a young adult?
This excessively POSITIVE attitude as Han would call it…that EVERYTHING…is supposed to be available to EVERYONE…ALL the TIME…and that is SEEN as an undeniable GOOD that there can BE no DOWNSIDE to. Some of my FAVORITE parts of Han’s work he talks about how there is JUST SOMETHING DEEPER that is going missing when that worldview ACTUALLY becomes a reality.
Public SPACES are starting to disappear he says. You know in FORMER societies there were physical places where you HAD to go to if there were PARTICULAR THINGS that you had to get done…for example…if you wanted to get a rare piece of information… you had to go to the library or to the school or to the bookstore. These were PLACES that embodied that learning, spirit.
But in a world where every piece of information in the world is available to you all the time on your phone…that’s WONDERFUL and all…but there is something DIFFERENT about your experience of the world… when there is some sort of negative FRICTION worked into the equation of GETTING a piece of knowledge…where you’re looking for a book that HAS this piece of information that you want…you go down to the library…but they don’t HAVE the book…oh but a branch twenty miles away has it, so you take three buses to get down there only to find out they just rented out the last copy, and then on your way home you stop at a random bookstore and find the book there. There’s something to the LOSS of that negativity…that loss of FRICTION…and how it CHANGES the subjective experience of being a person in the modern digital world.
Anyway…one of my favorite things that Han says about ANY of this stuff is what he thinks YOU should do about it PERSONALLY if you recognize that it’s going on and don’t want to participate in it. Part of his ADVICE to you would be: to be an idiot.
Be an IDIOT! Though he doesn’t mean it like you should just be stupid. In fact the pejorative use of the word idiot is actually a fairly new thing in human history. Back in Ancient Greece for example the equivalent of the word we now use as idiot… really just meant someone who was a common person who didn’t really participate in public affairs or aspire to hold public office. It didn’t mean they were STUPID.
But nonetheless more recently being called an IDIOT means that you are seen as dumb by the conventional wisdom of the society that you’re living in. But if the WISDOM of the society you’re living in… is one where people are these self-obsessed achievement hunters that get fed an endless stream of surface level information and then instantly swap over to social media to scream their half-baked, narcissistic take on it at other people that are all doing the same thing…if THAT’S the conventional wisdom of the world we’re living in. Be an idiot, in that society.
Be the MORON…that is going to slow down, and truly CONTEMPLATE things and how they connect to a larger world picture. Be the idiot who is OKAY with NOT being ENTIRELY SURE about how you FEEL about an issue, EVEN if it’s an issue that’s super IMPORTANT to you. Be the idiot that’s okay with being BORED sometimes for a while, instead of just being ENTERTAINED all the time. In a society that tells you that you CONSTANTLY need to be optimizing and improving your mind…be the idiot that is OKAY with ACCEPTING your own mental limitations at times. Be OKAY with not being the SMARTEST PERSON who has ever LIVED. Be the idiot that can allow yourself to FEEL negative emotions sometimes like sadness or rage or fear, in a society that tells you all those are things that need to be FIXED. Be the idiot that can experience real struggle and uncomfortable moments in life, without having to always RUN from them so that you can be at ONE with this society of comfort and instant gratification.
Because if that’s what an IDIOT is in this society…then maybe someone calling you an idiot is actually a pretty big compliment.
Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
