Pacification

“Truths that are no longer amusing become lies.”

Is the collapse of a civilization really happening right under our noses? Have the collapses of previous civilizations always come unexpectedly, drawn out so that in a single lifetime nothing major happens until one thinks back? Truly, we are all more interested in the name of Kim Kardashian’s baby than the fact that the US government has been tracking the phone records of most Americans. We are all so easily pacified, there is nothing we can do.

“What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything. Once again, morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.”

None of these news stories move us like we claim they do. The destruction of the Occupy movement by militarized police can now go neatly hand in hand with the 1968 Chicago police riots in our history books; the conflagration of Ferguson looks like Birmingham circa 1963. No one wonders why the recent wave of mass shootings has spread throughout America, just how to stop it. Nonetheless, every few years, an entire insurrection breaks out against a different government, from West to East. Just in our most recent memory: France in 2005, Greece in 2008, the UK in 2010, the Arab Spring in 2011, Turkey in 2014.

It’s becoming apparent that the severe economic wealth of the Western world isn’t doing anything for us but spreading a massive social and cultural depression. The general populace has demonstrated time and time again that they are not happy with the mere guarantee of survival -- they want something more. Tax breaks, public education, and increases in wages are demands of the past. From now on, we will demand a radical change to our everyday lives through concrete means.

The pacification of the populace -- as we all might think -- isn’t done solely, or even mostly, in the political theater, with its continually decreasing voter turnout, and its general lack of awareness or political engagement. Instead, the people of the West are much more pacified in the economic theater, and that is to say, in relation to their everyday lives as workers or managers. There is never even a thought of protesting what a boss demands, what money demands, no matter how unreasonable. There is never an action to truly change life, never a gesture to fight against the monotony of work as a whole (and what is work, today, but the majority of everyday life for the average citizen?). When will people realize that they have no agency, joy, or true companionship at work? Or really the question should be: When will they move to do something about it? When will they destroy what they have already realized to be an irredeemable system? One day, enough people will stop to wonder, “What am I doing?”

They’ll be able to name the tasks of their job, but really, what are they doing?

However, although this general pacification is largely economic, it is not solely limited to the productive sphere of the economy: the constant distractions; the increasing standards of technology, hygiene, and health; reality TV shows; the nonstop merging of real life and fake images. These acts of consumption hit us like artillery bombardments, crippling any continuation in thought, or at the very least, crippling any organized line of thought. After all, how can a person think straight when they constantly have the feeling that they are being watched (this feeling comes from the fact that the idea of images has completely taken over our society’s way of being; this obsession with images blurs the line between reality and fantasy, such that the average individual feels that he or she is at the center of attention, just as his or her favorite celebrities are). This might give reason for contemporary philosophy’s inability to find even a tiny piece of truth, and therefore its degradation into the most cowardly, cynical relativism. Alternatively, it gives reason for the general populace’s ignorance and apathy to their own exploitation.

Production and consumption: the twin edges of the blade of capitalism. When combined, it is not even the economic that prevails in pacifying us. After all, even if we’re exploited economically, it is of little relevance anymore: we have most of what we want in a material sense. When speaking about production and consumption, we must give up Marx’s materialist conceptions: they have proven true, but capitalism has worked its way around them. That is to say, by elevating the economic, by alleviating the materialist contradictions that Marx spent so much time analyzing, capitalism has completely degraded the social.

Work isn’t terrible because of the extraction of surplus value, it is terrible because of its effects on individuals, and, more importantly, its control over a person’s being.

Similarly, consumption isn’t a problem because of the scarcity of goods or even their overproduction, but because we have lost the ability to experience objects as objects or people as people. From the pettiest trinket to the most sacred form of life, everything has been commodified.

Any type of resistance when the populace is stuck in a dream is difficult; however, this society’s extremely high rates of anxiety and depression might counteract that. After all, what does it matter if people are sleepwalking if they know they are unhappy for some reason? Since contemporary philosophy professionally neutralizes all of our holds on reality, that reason, although quite obvious, seems difficult for most to grasp. Nevertheless, we will attempt to initiate a disturbing awareness of our everyday constrictions, to jolt awake anyone who cares enough to read a few truths that are still amusing.

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“Loss of life”: a phrase that puts your own being in terms of property relations. The sad fact of the matter is that most of the people who inhabit this environment already seem dead. They look like zombies out there, hoards of them gathering for a feast on Black Friday, although none of them seem interested in brains. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, when a teenager holding a Wii remote is shot to death by the police. The cops must defend themselves against such ruthless man-eaters, and the rest of the living dead.

If anything, they must provide even more of the most reliable security nowadays, because of how intense the proliferation of things has become. After all, as commodity society continues to expand and colonize, the police -- so casually militarized now -- must grow stronger. This is because of the boredom and monotony that commoditism naturally creates, just as much as it is the inequality and socio-economic contradictions. The Arizona Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office's recent deployment of the “TechnoCop,” with his blackout shades and AR-15, is enough to prove the direct relationship between capital and the police. The MCSO is not only a force that defends against the relentless, invisible theft that has spread throughout the county, but also a machine that administers the daily dose of hopelessness that keeps people working at entirely superfluous occupations. With the arrival of chain gangs a few decades back, the infamous Joe Arpaio defended such barbarism by quoting an anonymous inmate: “It sure beats being in a cell all day. I’d rather be busy than locked up.” And this generally sums up the choice that the police apparatus presents to the modern citizen: redundant, payless “busy-work” or a jail cell. Even if we find something exhilarating to do with the free time we are so generously given, it is immediately suppressed or covered up by an ever more omnipresent yet “progressive” police force. “The male chain gang, and the world’s first-ever female and juvenile chain gangs, even paint over graffiti!”

But for those who have already realized this predicament, for those who have settled into the routine of work (and we cannot deny the fact that most of us fall into this camp), there requires a plethora of security measures -- the undercover officers, the mass surveillance operations, the deportations -- all which exist to defend our freedom. And that is to say, our freedom to work, the most pathetic freedom, the freedom of slaves. Most recently in Arizona, actual legislation has been passed to “defend” this humiliating form of liberty: SB1070, a senate bill which allows for the most blatant racial profiling (a tactic which was already in effect de facto). This bill gave police the power to create an effective reign of terror in the latino communities, splitting up families on a daily basis all to “protect our jobs.”

Our freedom to work, our freedom to get to and from work, our freedom to pursue work: this is what the police must protect. Many argue that the police have other, much more primary duties, like the duty to protect our civil liberties and political rights. But if the Occupy Movement taught us anything, it is that even the most basic, and most sacred, rights can be taken away if the flow of production is disturbed. When a thousand or so protesters decided to clog up some streets around the New York Stock Exchange, their assembly was immediately deemed illegal and violently suppressed. It doesn't even have to be about the First Amendment or any other legal debacle. The streets were drowned in tear gas, but no one seemed to care.

More critically though, the police are here to defend the modern citizen’s freedom to consume. There is a reason why electronics stores are consistently put on high alert when a minority or a teenager walks in -- and it is not so much the threat of theft as it is the right for others to consume in the most comfortable circumstances. Under semiocracy, if commodities gain their value from being visible to others, then shopping probably follows a similar pattern. One behavioral economist reflects on this peculiarity by drawing from her own experience as a Latina:

"I would never go shopping without makeup, hair done, and dressed really well -- I have to do that to get any respect. And it costs people of color more, just in life in general."

The freedom to consume -- and consume beautifully -- must be defended at all costs to keep capitalism alive, and not only literally. In another sense, the benefits of this freedom must also be defended more vehemently than anything. This is because any criticism of this society can be totally defeated by a simple reference to this freedom. When Shin Dong-hyuk -- the only known escapee of a North Korean prison camp -- was “discovered,” apparently in the same way that a celebrity is, the US seized the opportunity. Only by pointing out our dismal abundance could such ubiquitous social degradation be justified: in one of his many interviews with the elites of the financial world, Shin even stated that he “still think[s] of freedom as roasted chicken.” How heartwarming.

“You have a smartphone, a laptop, a flat screen TV, and you’re trying to tell me you’re not free?” cries the defender of capital incredulously. What he fails to understand is that we can imagine new forms of desire, we can envision a landscape that laughs and screams, instead of one that noisily creaks like the network of machinery that covers the world today.

In the final analysis, the ultimate paradox of the police apparatus lies in the fact that it uses mass surveillance, rubber bullets, sound cannons, silent cameras, plain clothes security guards, and so many other invisible forms of coercion all to defend freedom and democracy.

“Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word ‘security.’”