I am of the generation of USAmericans who grew up in the world of post-9/11, post-”globalization,” post-American unipolarity, and post-digital consumerism. I find the obsession with generational categories to be inaccurate and typically a practice of drawing arbitrary lines in the sand. Yet, there are certain distinct tendencies I’ve noticed among my age group.
I am not always the most sociable person. Although I’m usually alone and silent while in public, I spend that time observing my peers. Having spent years as a part of this generation, wavering between engaging people and observing them from afar, between trying to teach my peers to care about anything and educating myself theoretically, I have reached a point of exhaustion and frustration. I am met by a wall of apathy and disengagement.
I don’t want to resign myself to the excessively generalizing misanthropy many others my age fall into. Rather, I want to express my understanding of these painful experiences. I hope this understanding will resonate with others.
I wish to diagnose these characteristics of my generation in an analysis of the present and the future. This is not a practice in “generational politics.” The point is not to understand myself and my peers in isolation. It is to engage our general society from our particularities. I want to understand our common experiences, and point to the beginnings of an alternative to pessimism, apathy, and isolation.
We will move from the most outside view to the most inside view. Importantly, segments are arranged according to the layers of intimacy in the perceptions of my generation. Once we reach the “heart,” the diagnosis of our sickness will have become clear.
Statistically Speaking
My generation is a deeply lonely one. According to a May 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 12% of Americans today have no close friends.¹ Overall, Americans with fewer friends report less satisfaction with the amount of friends they have.² Their friendships are primarily based around common sites of consumption and production, such as work, stores, restaurants, etc.³
Friendships outside of these spheres tend to be those made in childhood, especially those met in school.⁴ After school, it tends to be harder to make close friends, due to most social interactions being dominated by depersonalized market activities. It is also hard to maintain childhood friendships due to diverging social lives, brought on in particular by the contemporary norm of moving and commuting for work. These statistics sketch a picture of a lack of community outside of the nuclear family and sites of market activity (especially work). That is, Americans spend most of their time interacting with others as parts of a nuclear family unit, as consumers, or as employees.
We are growing up into a world where, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2021 report “Out of Reach,” Americans working full-time minimum-wage jobs cannot afford rent in most housing, and must spend a significant share of their earnings to pay rent.⁵ Real hourly wages for most Americans have stagnated.⁶ Productivity, on the other hand, has grown at a rate 4x that of compensation.⁷ In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, unemployment has skyrocketed by the millions as consumption and production contracted.⁸ The CDC’s temporary moratorium on evictions is set to end after this month, July 2021.⁹ 7 million tenants are behind on rent.¹⁰ Capitalists have begun to panic over disruptions to global supply chains, which point toward the global economy careening towards a severe depression.¹¹
Traditionally, going to college is expected to garner one a higher-paying, more secure career in America. However, the cost of going to college has skyrocketed to the point where the student loan debt has reached over $1.5 trillion.¹² These significant costs have their roots in the era of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, during which his administration shifted Federal policy towards higher education by focusing primarily on loans and a for-profit model rather than grants and an education-first model.¹³ Thus, universities are focused primarily on being successful businesses rather than education in America, in particular due to Federal and state budget-cutting. They force students to shoulder much of the cost. In the wake of the COVID-19 recession and the coming global economic catastrophe, the career prospects for college graduates will only become worse.¹⁴
The climate catastrophe which we are currently living through instills a sharply nihilistic mood into many of us. People within Generation Z, on average, consider climate change to be more important than older generations, and discuss it more frequently.¹⁵ If things continue as they have been, which is likely given the lukewarm approaches of the Biden administration, at least one billion people will be displaced or forced to live in nearly uninhabitable heat conditions in the next half century.¹⁶ Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica tracks with the worst-case scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).¹⁷ Many parts of the world, including significant chunks of the coastal US, will soon be flooded by rising sea levels.¹⁸
Despite the misanthropic messaging of many liberals who blame all of this on our consumption habits, it is not the fault of the average American that things are this way. We did not underfund the public transportation in this country. We did not build a system centering around freeways, around residency in tight clusters and long commutes to work. And most importantly, we are not the capitalists who have structured the global economy in this way and who knew quite early on what the effects would be.
In 2015, it was revealed that Exxon Corporation knew fully well that greenhouse gas emissions would have catastrophic effects half a century ago.¹⁸ They did not care. The American military emits more greenhouse gas than many industrialized countries.¹⁹ Only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions.²⁰ This is not an issue of “humanity,” but capital. We are not living in the anthropocene, but the capitalocene.
With the world in the state that it is, why would it be surprising that a growing share of American teenagers are suffering depression? 13.01% of children aged 12–17 were found to have suffered a depressive episode in 2020, according to a survey by Mental Health America.²¹ From 1999 to 2019, the “age-adjusted suicide rate increased 35% from 10.5 per 100,000 standard population in 1999 to 14.2 in 2018.”²² In that period, it was the second leading cause of death for Americans aged 10–34.²³
We seem to have no future. We have little intimate connection with others. We lack support networks outside of the nuclear family, which we have little escape from where it is abusive and smothering. We are in a world being killed in the name of capital. Whether we realize it or not, we are in agony because we are alone in a world which seems painfully hostile. Yet, it is not so simple as a world-weariness without a specific content. The way we engage with this reality is socially and historically specific.
The American Ideology: Then and Now
The ideology of Americans is fundamentally individualist. It is based in a form of liberalism which is more atomistic, more suspicious of “society,” and more vulgarly capitalist in its values than many others. From Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy of a society of small property-owners to Henry David Thoreau’s ideology of self-reliance and defection from the social world, there is a tendency toward worshipping “the individual” as the God of the American world.
The freedom of the individual is taken as the absolute value to be derived from this fundamental principle. This freedom is conceived of in a particular manner, however. John Locke, a liberal theorist influential to the American Founding Fathers, expressed it as:
“a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man[…]”²⁴
Freedom to do what one wants unless it infringes on the ability of others to follow this maxim.
In America, this way of thinking became widespread owing to the wide-spread ownership of commercial small property among citizens in the 1800s. Many Europeans moved here hoping to take part in the “shining city on a hill,” accumulating a fortune for themselves on their own properties. In the borderlands, they would enclose properties for themselves or for their family units. As these units, they developed a concept of freedom as freedom of the self-reliant “rugged individual,” seeing society, whether in the form of the government or other settlers, as a power that would limit their freedom to do what they want.
Karl Marx, the most famous critic of liberalism and capitalism, expressed the character of this concept of freedom thusly:
“Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself[…] But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself[…]”²⁵
This liberal thinking underlying American ideology ideologically destroys the fundamentally communal, social character of human life. Humans exist in a society, we are born into one and we die in one. Our language, our internal psychological life, our daily lives, everything, all of it is tied into the specific society we exist as a part of and its history. We are born into existing worlds with their own history, into historically produced families, cultures, governments, and so on. Language itself represents the basically social nature of our lives, as our language is the form of all the concepts and understandings in our daily lives.
Yet, liberalism obscures this. Instead of acknowledging it in a meaningful way, it develops an atomistic concept of the individual as implicitly separate from or the opposite of society. There is even an idea that there is an inherent antagonism between the individual and society. Liberty is the ability of the individual to enclose, to privatize, as much of the social world as they can, transforming it into the realm of “doing what I want.” Other people are the limit of this freedom, as they represent competitors enclosing their own property, or otherwise limitations on one’s ability to freely exercise their desire regardless of others.
This thinking directly mirrors the social life of the capitalists who developed liberalism. To obsess with enclosing things as property which one has full power of and excludes the power of society (government or other people) from is a mission at the base of their thinking. To view others as competitors, to view society as something which threatens the individual, is a capitalist way of thinking based on market activity.
It is highly atomistic, and it chips away at the social communal life by advising the enclosure of everything into property, and conceiving freedom as the freedom of this atomistic desire to run wild in one’s property. The boundaries of freedom, which show us its shape and character, run along the property lines dividing my territory from others. Freedom is the freedom to do whatever I want with my property, with the limitation being my trespassing on the property of others.
The individual is not actually self-reliant. Although it is not often acknowledged today, liberalism has always sanctioned that certain segments of society be excluded from the category of humanity. Not everyone is granted the right to do what they want as long as it does not “harm” others. John Locke defended the ownership of African slaves based on his concept of liberty. The settlers of the early American Republic forced their way past the Appalachian mountains into the Ohio River Valley to go to war with the many Indigenous nations thriving there, from the Shawnee to the Delaware. Genocide was committed in the name of this liberty. American settlers wanted their property, seeing it as the greatest expression of individual freedom, and participated in the designation of Africans and Indigenous peoples as outside of this liberated life to secure it. Freedom was to be bought through the unfreedom of others. So that the individual may play out their fantasy, some may be excluded from the category of individuality, and thus has the “right” to rugged individualistic freedom.
This implicit contradiction and exclusion is still present in the individualistic thinking of my generation, albeit in a new form. We may not be living in the Antebellum United States, but we still think of freedom from others, and we are still willing to exclude others from the status of freedom to secure freedom for ourselves. In a 2019 Pew Research Poll, only 11% of Americans aged 18–29 said that they have a high personal trust in others, while 46% said they have low trust.²⁶ They see others as potential competitors or enemies. With their growing defection from society and pessimism, they end up ignoring such things as migrant agricultural workers dying in record heat waves, the exploitation of slave labor by Nestlé, the use of slave labor in the mining of lithium (an important component in digital devices), American military occupation of the world, and so on. All of it is “not my problem,” or they do not even notice it exists. Our standards of consumption in America might be heavily subsidized by the exploitation of the Global South, but who cares?²⁷
This kind of thinking which sees consideration of others as oppressive has fed heavily into the failure of the American response to the COVID-19 crisis.²⁸ Americans see any limitation on “doing what I want” — going shopping, going to parties or the bar, as an intolerable oppression. Many Americans do not follow pandemic guidelines and simply do what they wanted. They do not care that the majority of COVID deaths by occupation were manual laborers and retail workers.²⁹ If they can passively consume and thereby exercise their freedom, who cares?
This bubbling to the surface of the misanthropic tendency in American individualism brings another aspect of our generations’ lives into question. If I ought to be free to do what I want, how do I know what I want? The material I work with to determine this does not come from nowhere. It comes from a society which I am a part of. And I live in a hyper-capitalist society dominated by big capitalist firms which engineer our lives on a massive scale, through our work cycles, consumption habits, forms of leisure, and identities. I am free to do what I want. But the material of what I want is not something emerging from within my heart, like a soul. It is the product of a capitalist institution.
The Culture Industry
In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer spent the chapter “The Culture Industry” describing the capitalist engineering of art and mass culture along the lines of factory mass production. At the center of their concern was the standardization and mechanization of culture, and the integration of culture into the circuit of capitalist society. Leisure was increasingly taking on the same standardized, homogenizing, co-opting, and mediocre character as capitalist wage labor. Thus, this mass-produced culture dominated by big capitalist combines captured the masses and integrated them into the rhythms and ideologies of capitalist society in an unprecedented manner.
They expressed this process of integration thusly:
“The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers — producing, controlling, disciplining them; even withdrawing amusement altogether: here, no limits are set to cultural progress[…]
the original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society’s apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display.”³⁰
Adorno and Horkheimer were seen as excessively pessimistic for their time. In many respects, they were, as labor militancy in the United States did not die off, but expressed itself differently than it once did — particularly in the realm of racial liberation. Yet their description of a society hooked up to massive capitalist circuits and standardization, with spontaneity itself co-opted by this monstrous, mechanical body, resonates today. The culture industry has wavered at times in its domination by big capitalists and the stifling or taming of spontaneity. But we have reached a point close to the all-devouring beast that they described.
At the time of writing, Adorno and Horkheimer had Hollywood in mind. This old film industry produced and fed off of experiences which are nearly unrecognizable by the standard of how atomistic modern mass culture is. In the mid-20th century, communal forms of mass culture, such as gathering around with neighbors to listen to the radio or going to see the movie as an event, were still common. The rise of such things as the personal television set promoted a more individual form of consumption, being confined to the home in most cases. Today, with the rise of social media, streaming sites, and online stores, we have a far more isolated form of culture-consumption. The internet “restores” the community or dialogic aspect of culture that things like television seemed to negate, but on a basis where it is mediated by platforms owned by big capitalists and structured along alienating lines.
While the internet is praised as a means of social autonomy, it is dominated by big monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Sony, Disney, and others. While its forms are lauded for their apparent linking up of communities, they place these interactions on the basis of profitability for themselves and market logic among consumers. YouTube, for example, heavily incentivizes creators structuring their entire brand around mass production of content, competition, brand collaboration, and advertisements. Websites like Instagram and Twitter incentivize promoting and developing one’s personal “brand,” transforming even interactions with friends and acquaintances into competition on a market. It is a form of socializing which is dominated by the abstract logic of capital, privatizing it and transforming interpersonal relationships into products and sources of brand value.
Social media is quite important to my generation. Many of us grew up with parents who were paranoid about us being outside too often, having bought into the “stranger danger” panic of the 80s and 90s and serial killer media obsession. We tended to be isolated from the mediums which once linked children up in regular social lives outside of school. While our parents could spend time with friends outside of the house, most of us are monitored more closely. Many of us are also busier with school and other activities.³¹ With a lack of regular face-to-face interactions, we turn to social media as a way of accessing the social interaction we need.
Most Americans aged 18–29 spend time on these big capital-dominated platforms: 71% use Instagram, 65% Snapchat, 42% Twitter, 48% TikTok…³² We are spending time interacting with each other and with friends we meet through the Internet with capitalist interests looming over us all the while. In 2020, $41.5 billion was spent on social media advertising, making up 30% of all internet ad spending.³³ For many of us, interaction via this medium is the only social interaction we engage in outside of school, work, the nuclear family, etc. This culture industry is more pervasive than Adorno and Horkheimer could have ever dreamed.
Through the mediation of our interpersonal interactions and daily lives by the internet, the logic of capital can penetrate deeply into our lives. We become obsessed with our brand images, with appearing unique and distinct from everyone else — in the accepted and marketable ways, of course. We spend significant effort keeping on top of the trends produced by big clothing companies and promoted by influencers. Social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram promote influencers, and capitalist firms collaborate with them in order to advertise products and ideologies.³⁴ Particularly important is the ideology of self-marketing as empowering, as flaunting oneself in the face of others and realizing one’s freedom. Of course, the content of this self-empowerment is the material produced by big capitalist advertising firms and disseminated by influencers. All of it is part of the circuitry of capital. “Spontaneous” desires are integrated into business models, desire for uniqueness is appealed to by mass-produced products, and individualist ideology is reproduced through a homogenizing, monstrous “factory” of a culture industry.
In this context, our concepts of identification are bound directly up with this culture industry circuitry. How do we identify ourselves? By our consumer interests — media, fashion, aesthetics, food, etc. Practices like the aggregation and sale of personal data by social media sites to advertisers are both informed by these identifications, and inform them. They are reproduced by social media, becoming more pervasive than ever before.
Thus, our identification with others is based on common consumption. Either common sites of consumption, such as at a certain store or restaurant, or in common consumer products and consumer identities, such as in shows, Internet subcultures, fashion, etc. In most of human history, our relations with others were expressed person-person in various forms, whether as citizens of a common geographic-cultural community, as citizens of “Christendom,” as participants in a universal system of obligations between people, and so on. Under capitalism, our relations are mediated by objects — commodities. Social media’s penetration of capital logic into the very spine of social interactions solidifies this person-object-person form, intensifying the practice of identifying through common consumer products.
Our sense of self lacks autonomy from the market. The material we have to work with in self-identification and identification with others is commodity-material. When the market moves, our sense of self tends to go with it. Thus, the obsession with staying on top of trends, whether fashion or topics of discourse. As we cycle through these brands of identification, we lose our stable sense of self. Where a geographic-cultural identification is stable, being tied to a specific people-place (for example, to be a Chiricahua), brand-identification is volatile.
When we are constantly conscious of the gaze of the market, and that gaze is constantly shifting at an increasingly rapid pace, how can we develop a coherent sense of self? We become hollow, shallow, superficial. Hand in hand with our misanthropic individualism, we become mediocre, interchangeable, standardized. In spite of our cultural emphasis on individuality and uniqueness, the very ideology of individualism is a form of extreme conformity. We even go as far as to pay thousands of dollars to destroy our flesh and rebuild our bodies along the lines of the images sold by the culture industry via influencers and advertisements. We invest in the negation of our own flesh and blood individuality in the very name of individualism.
To genuinely care, to desire a community, to be committed to a critique of society as it exists and to reject this logic of capital is to be too against the grain, and thus unacceptable. It is seen as weird, foolish.
This consumerist logic and the misanthropic individualism it springs from rusts our social life into one of apathy. We want the right to do what we want, and only what we want. To do things which are not instant gratification, such as reading historical or theoretical works or otherwise engaging in a transformative project, is a waste of time. If we are not being paid, why bother? We can derive pleasure which requires less effort by fully sinking into the commodity circuits, by allowing ourselves to be dragged along by the circuits of capitalism’s simulated social life.
Critical thinking involves too much effort in going against the grain, and it is not paid. We must be free not to care about anything if we do not desire to. Freedom is the freedom to disengage from the world, to disregard others as flesh and blood beings, to flee from any concrete responsibility to transform society. We might express political commitments here or there, but they are simply one brand among many which we label ourselves with. A certain kind of infographic here, a sticker there, and a smug or vague Tweet over there. We don’t care that much, so we don’t look into or think critically about the things we spread for our own brand image. We are prone to share “information” serving a certain agenda — such as, say regime change propaganda about Cuba.
Why should we learn if it takes so much effort and we aren’t rewarded with money, treats, toys, or attention for it? Why should we work to change anything? I can come home from work, sit down, and binge shows, shop for clothing, scroll through social media, and watch my favorite YouTuber. Who cares? The earth is dying, millions of flesh and blood people are sacrificed in the name of abstract capital, my food is harvested by debt slaves, the United States is beating the drums of war, and fascism is on the rise. But who cares? I don’t have time for that, and it isn’t fun, unlike [BRAND].
If the world comes and rudely disturbs me, such as when the clean drinking water starts being fought for, well then… I’ll just support whoever does what they must so that I can be free not to think about it. Even if it means atrocities and the military occupation of the world, who cares? It’s not my problem. I’m not that interested in politics. It just isn’t my [BRAND]. As long as things stay the way they are, the status quo, I’m neutral. I like the status quo. I don’t have to care about anything under it. I wouldn’t kill for it, but I would be willing to let others die for it as long as I don’t have to think about them. What’s a few million workers and farmers to my freedom to do whatever I want and buy whatever I can buy to do that?
My Heart Will Go On… The Market
Americans are quite distant people. Physically, emotionally, psychologically. It is very rare for them to hug, kiss, embrace, or caress each other, except in romantic or sexual contexts. In fact, they read all of these behaviors as inherently sexual in most contexts. The most physical contact Americans get in a social setting is typically in the form of a handshake. As a result, touch starvation is endemic in the US.
We remain physically distant from each other, we are fixated on keeping our emotions to ourselves and being “self-reliant,” we have little concept of caring for other people. If you are suffering, you must either keep it to yourself or keep your expectations for support low. After all, you aren’t someone else’s responsibility. Everyone’s responsibility is to themselves. Others are either a benefit or a burden, and they must be weighed between one or the other. Isn’t it true that our right to individual liberty, to self-determination, “is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself”? Isolation goes hand in hand with the anti-social individualism at the foundation of the American ideology.
In my generation, there is a turn towards a certain kind of thinking about interpersonal relationships. In past generations and in other forms of society, relationships were thought of in terms of obligations, reciprocity, or a combination of the two. A kind of individualistic obligation-thinking was more strong in America, with a significant focus being on abiding by the formal rules of familial and community relationships. Yet here, in the idea of the individual as an atom-unit of this community and as having that right to anti-social freedom, we see the roots of what was to come. On the other hand, reciprocity thinking is based on mutual support and engagement, often on an equal basis. We are friends, so we support each other when we need it. We understand that each of us has specific needs and desires based on us as individuals. We do not care about tallying this support up, or cost-benefit analysis, so much as reciprocity in our relations, regardless of “quantities” involved.
What we have among my peers is distinct from the two. Based on individualist thinking, a kind of transactional logic about relationships has bloomed. We do not recognize ourselves as nodes in a highly complex and dynamic web of social relations. We see ourselves as atomistic monads, isolated little units which form links between each other. These links, interpersonal relationships, take on the logic of commodity production and exchange — a capitalist logic. People are viewed as commodities on the market, to be purchased, passed by, sold, or “used up.” They are evaluated as investments, adding up to either assets or liabilities.
This commodification is seen as liberating, as dissolving stable social bonds with people apparently makes the individual more mobile, more free to act as they please. If our ties cannot be destroyed at a whim, through a sale for a sum in exchange for “emotional money” or an exchange for another tie, then we see them as oppressive. Just as the replacement of guild or artisanal labor by wage-laboring proletarians was seen as “liberating” by capitalists, the transformation of interpersonal relationships into exchangeable units is seen as such by the average young American.
As in the actual social process of commodification, the abstraction of real, concrete things with distinct characteristics into “values,” through which they can be measured against any other different concrete thing, is the foundational step in this commodity-logic. In the outset, “others” other than oneself are already flattened into a homogenous mass by individualist logic. If the world is the individual self vs. society, then everyone else is a part of the flattened category of “society.” They are not myself, so they are all interchangeable as part of the category of “others.” In order to abstract more specific “values” from this homogenous mass, we categorize people into archetypes in order to evaluate them.
This can take the form of astrology, the Myers-Briggs personality test, subcultural “personalities,” the incel/pick-up artist hierarchy of men from alpha to omega to “sigma,” and so on. We talk about how we need a Leo friend, or an ENFP friend. Rather than the concrete particularity of a person being emphasized, and one’s specific relationship with them, we fixate on what archetype they fit into. We care more about the abstract category or archetype than the specific person. If they are an “inferior” version of a particular archetype, we can exchange them for another who performs the role more successfully. The point is not our specific relations with specific people, but our ownership of commodity-people who are the greatest fit for a value-archetype.
When we evaluate people in this way, we end up enclosing our social relations in a certain way. Others must follow the transactional logic, otherwise they are “failing.” The standard of evaluation is the commodity logic, and the possibility of another logic, like reciprocity, is foreclosed. Just as capitalists see non-money production, i.e. in peasant communities, as “unproductive” for failing to produce significant exchange-values, we see non-transactional relationships as unproductive or even exploitative. If we aren’t exchanged an equivalent to our input, then we are being “underpaid” and exploited. The system must be absolute. We must follow the commodity-logic, or else we are making a mistake or being harmful. The abstract dominates the concrete, the archetype dominates the people.
Thus, people become disposable, exchangeable for superior products. They are to be extracted from, and if they do not perform this function satisfactorily within the exchange logic, then they must be gotten rid of. We lose any sense of loyalty or commitment to specific people, any sense of community or personal ties. Community is dissolved, we become atoms. Our sense of self becomes superficial, we do not recognize ourselves as nodes in a social web, as parts of a society, but as monads. All we have to draw on is the culture industry, the commodity-logic. We are isolated and we isolate ourselves. And we believe this is freedom.
The commodity-logic stifles our sense of others into abstract qualities, and thus becomes non-dynamic. We see them not as flesh and blood people, who change and develop, but as archetypes. This abstract thinking extends to our moral evaluation of people. People are either Good or Bad. Good people cannot engage in conflict, because conflict is not enjoyable and anything which is not enjoyable is Bad. Confrontation about issues we have with others, with an eye toward improving or strengthening relationships, makes no sense to us. Why would we put such a big investment into Bad products? We can just exchange them. Why put effort into reciprocal work of improvement? I don’t owe my effort to anyone. Either I can extract from them as Good commodities, or they are Bad commodities and must be expelled from my life.
There cannot be nuance between the categories, or a concept of people changing. Evaluation must be quick, easy, simple. The coding of people must be highly efficient, rational, hard-and-fast, as it ensures the velocity of the commodity-exchanges. Either people are Bad and somehow interfere with our ability to act as autonomous “free” individuals who can do whatever we want, or they are Good by allowing us to passively extract from them. Transformation is impossible, because once a commodity has been damaged, it must be marked down. Bad people cannot become Good people, because people cannot change. We don’t owe anyone anything. If they are Bad, that’s their problem. They must be excised from my life, as they have become irredeemable trash to me. Any Badness is a threat, and must be purged. I have a right to be a monad, and improvement of interpersonal relations reminds me that I am not an atom but a node on a web. I don’t like it, therefore it is Bad. Because it is Bad, I have to toss out the Bad people without a second thought.
Hand in hand with this absolutist moralism goes a view that to be influenced by others is oppressive. After all, we have a right to do whatever we want, and others suggesting what we do is trying to limit that ability. Our desires simply come from within our hearts! Never mind the billions of dollars spent to produce and reproduce the material of our desires. I want what I want. Influences from the culture industry are neutral. Influences from interpersonal interactions are oppressive. Other people are either commodities or competitors on a market. If they aren’t the former, especially if they don’t shut up and let me extract from them, then they must be the latter. If you don’t loyally perform as a commodity and let me do what I want, if you try to “speak” (an excessively concrete action) instead of being a “silent” abstraction, then you are oppressing me. If you are not a commodity, you are a threat. The closer we get to people, the more we believe we are at risk of sabotage by a secret competitor. So we fear getting close to anyone, as such bonds of dependency threaten our ability to act as market monads. We maintain distance. To be too attached, too affectionate, too reciprocal, is foolish and naive. The individualist ethic means that we must be perpetually terrified of others.
With this outlook, and with this lack of closeness to others, we box people in as disposable commodities. There is little practice of loyalty, of dialogue, of deep emotional engagement with others, as to do so is to make oneself too vulnerable or to violate the “common sense” of commodity logic. We see community as oppressive. Instead of a world of reciprocity, where interpersonal bonds are tighter and more stable, we dissolve everything into commodity-units. The restructuring of society in ways which destroy the ability to maintain long-term, stable relationships, the development of the highly mobile and unstable gig economy, the mediation of social interactions via capital-dominated and market-principled social media… all of it produces and reproduces these attitudes.
The negative effects of loneliness on the health of elderly people are well-observed.³⁵ The same applies for isolation among people our age. Is it any surprise that so many of us feel depressed, experience suicidal ideation, and are deeply pessimistic when our social interactions are confined to this? Our interactions with others are so stiff, so distanced. It hurts us, yet we engage in the logic anyway.
Sexual Liberation or Sexual Commodification?
Although sexuality involves interpersonal relationships, we grant it a status as a more “intimate” layer than others. It is no surprise that sexuality is accorded a certain significance above and beyond sexless platonic relationships. Regardless of the navel-gazing, “apolitical” tendency of many of us, sexuality is nevertheless the site of significant social struggle for control.
The expression of the monadic, individualist thinking in sexuality is in part a reaction to this struggle for control. Capitalist society seeks to regulate sexuality closely and efficiently in order to ensure the reproduction of society as it exists. In particular, capitalists are concerned with regulating the size of the labor-market and recipients of social assistance. After all, they need optimal conditions in the former in order to maximize their profits, and to reduce the cost of the latter, so that they may keep as much social wealth as possible to sacrifice to the great god of Capital.
American sexuality is heavily dominated by Protestant Christianity, such as in the battles over reproductive rights and by the nuclear family. To be “sexually loose” is heavily stigmatized, and sexuality is accorded a special status associated with marriage. Americans are highly puritanical towards nudity, physical affection, expressions of love, and so on. Since the backlash to the feminist and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s, prudish moralizing over sexuality has become a major fixation of the American mainstream. In the early 2010s, debates over homosexuality raged, and today, debates over gender identity are the hot topic. Ironically, because we are obsessed with regulating and monitoring sexuality, the prudish fixation produces its own opposite in the form of “perversion” by making sexuality a significant preoccupation.³⁶
In this system of obsessively coding sexuality, coding by sex/gender is a key institution. People are categorized in a dichotomous, absolutist way. You are either a Man or a Woman, and you are categorized as such at birth according to your genitalia. Although other characteristics, such as the pairings of XX-XY chromosomes, are considered to be hard-and-fast indicators of “common sense” sex categories as well, genitalia is the main focus. Genitalia are the means of biological reproduction, so it is no surprise that these social categorizations would have them in the center of its vision. Men must be Masculine, they must be athletic, self-reliant, emotionless, dominant, bread winners, public etc. Women must be Feminine, they must be soft, supportive, emotionally and sexually available, passive, consumers, and private. The two must be fixed in their spheres, and engagement between them must be guided by strict rituals of decency.
There are two ways of thinking about this in the mainstream of my generation. For one, sex and gender are assumed to be the same. The gender categorizations of Men and Women are taken as valid to an absolute extent, and are often seen as emanating inherently from biology. For the other, sex and gender are separate, and the latter can change and vary. The basic logic behind sex categorization is not challenged, but a distinction is made between falling under a category of “biological sex” and one’s gender identity.
Although proponents of the latter see themselves as more progressive and inclusive, they have the exact same naturalizing logic about sex categorization as the former. It is simply a given. This thinking means that we think of gender, and by extension or sexuality, in an individualist way. We do not recognize the social relations and histories behind our concepts and categorizations.
Genital-based sex categorization falls apart in the face of the phenomenon of intersex people.³⁷ Our skeletal structures do not fall between a hard and fast dichotomy of “male” and “female.”³⁸ Sex-related chromosomes do not fall along a simple male-female dichotomy.³⁹ We can’t simply say that dichotomous sex-categorization is “good enough” in the face of these variances. The fact that we overlook them means that there are certain things we take as a given, and subject concrete reality to the rule rather than the other way around. That is, history, social relations, and the struggle over the structure of society are at play in this mediation of categories.
As we lack an awareness of these categories as social and historical in gender, the way the progressives in our generation approaches the liberation of sexuality from conservatism and Puritanism falls into the same “common sense” faults. Younger Americans are more likely to accept sex outside of marriage and casual sex than older Americans, and to otherwise be more accepting of a variety of sexual practices.⁴⁰ We are not as committed to stigmatizing casual sex, having multiple partners, slut-shaming, etc. as older generations.
We are more sexually “open,” yet, are we really sexually liberated? We think in the same concepts and terms as the Puritanical mainstream, especially in our obsession with responding to it and making sexuality a fixation. We have the same monadic commodity-logic in our sexuality as in other interpersonal relationships, and it works with the historical material of this country’s attitudes towards sexuality. We want to free ourselves from traditionalist, prudish bonds, yet we craft new ones out of the material of the old, in many ways preserving the same basic characteristics.
We confine intimacy to a sexual form of intimacy, seeing both of them as above and beyond platonic interpersonal relationships. There is a distinguishing between platonic and sexual or romantic (in our eyes, potentially sexual) relationships. Even those who try to present themselves as the most sexually liberated, who say that sex is just as casual and meaningless as breathing, implicitly place an elevated value on it by obsessing with proving this. It is simply “common sense” to our society that sexuality is more intimate than friendship. This thinking about intimacy is essentially an ideological vestige of the patriarchal nuclear family, even while marriage declines among younger Americans. It serves as the foundation for the spread of commodity-logic in sexuality. Sexuality is contested to the degree that it is because it is so socially important, because it is singled out.
Increasingly, we approach sexuality in a way distinct from the old, obligation-based thinking which heavily emphasizes marriage as the center of sexuality. In the place of the old, stilted form, we have in our generation an emergent commodity-form. If marriage treats sexuality like the inheritance of a family plot, where the sexuality of partners (especially women) becomes the exclusive property of the patriarchal marriage, which is not to be sold, then the commodity-logic treats sexuality as the property of capital. The new sexuality is more mobile, more individuated, it is “liberated” from the bonds of the old form. Instead of being tied to dour, strict institutions like the Church, the nuclear family, and so on, it is tied to the depersonalized, faceless market.
In a literal sense, we can see this with the rise of the markets in sexuality in the normalization of such platforms as OnlyFans (OF). OF exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming a source of income for many people, primarily women, who had lost their jobs or otherwise wanted an extra form of making money.⁴¹ It is seen as liberating the individual, as it enables one to bring in revenue from one’s sexuality and to be ostensibly self-employed. Yet it does not produce individuals who act autonomously from everything and accumulate wealth, as advertisements claim. Rather, it ties producers to the market, extending commodity-logic into sexuality. Producers are at the mercy of the mass of consumers, whether in the purchasing of the commodified form of their sexuality, or in being stalked, harassed, blackmailed, and having content leaked.
This operation of the real market both produces, reproduces, and is reproduced by commodity-logic in sexuality generally. In our sexuality, we engage in the same abstraction process as that of our other interpersonal relationships. We abstract the qualities of people into interchangeable values — penis size, breast size, fetish-performances, body count, etc. That way of thinking in categorization, where we evaluate people according to abstract archetypes and measurements, directly informs the production and pricing of content by producers of commodified sexual content — porn. And that porn reproduces those social attitudes as well, in a reciprocal cycle. These ways of thinking and categorizing are solidified into “common sense.”
Previously, we described how interpersonal commodity-logic mimics the enclosure of common property by desiring to extend itself to a universal principle, and evaluating other ways of thinking and acting negatively by making itself the absolute standard. Sexuality is no exception. Sexuality must be governed according to the logic of exchanging equivalents, or else it is low-quality. These values must be interchangeable with other products. You might settle down with one commodity and use it for life, but that relationship is still governed by the commodity-logic of evaluation.
We demand that sexuality not be a concern of social regulation, whether by being governed through the obligation-logic of marriage or a logic of reciprocity and community, but be a site of free market activity. In this market, we compete with others in order to present the highest-quality products and be more likely to be purchased. Both reactionaries, such as incels, and progressives, such as the liberal segment of the feminist movement, think in these terms. If someone is performing as a lesser product, they can be exchanged for a higher-quality equivalent. We must compete in order to be purchased by the partner we desire, developing our appearances, mannerisms, and language to that end. Once again, we reject the stiff logic of traditionalism, yet we bind ourselves to the market. Our sexuality becomes extractive, depersonalized, distanced, and isolating.
In contemporary America, capitalism is dissolving the very institutions it depends upon for reproduction. Financial insecurity is the main factor behind hesitancy in couples to marry.⁴² People also avoid long-term relationships for this reason. Birth rates among younger Americans have been declining for years, owing significantly to excessive costs of raising children.⁴³ After all, America is completely lacking in any meaningful form of social assistance for parents — we don’t even have parental leave.⁴⁴ This outcome is produced by the destruction of communities, usually the sources of relationships and marriages, and the development of even more atomistic structures for wage-labor, such as the gig economy. Sexual activity has declined significantly among young Americans.⁴⁵ We are very isolated, and so all forms of relationships are declining, especially those considered as intimate as sexuality. We are becoming perfectly closed off laborer-units, at the expense of the long-term stability of patriarchal capitalist society.
With this decline in traditional patriarchal institutions, there has emerged a more progressive bent towards gender among my generation. Institutions like marriage strongly reinforce dichotomous thinking about gender, having strict rituals according to what Men and Women are and must do. Their decline represents an opening. A majority of younger Americans are supportive of transgender people’s rights to be recognized as their gender.⁴⁶ Yet our thinking about gender, and with it, sexuality is mediated by the individualist ideology.
In the ideology of a clear separation between “biological sex” and gender, there is an assumption that the latter is an expression of the “soul,” the authentic self. This authenticity concept is based on an assumption that our concepts of self emerge from within, from ourselves as atom-units. We do not recognize the historical formation of genders or these forms of categorization. Although this thinking is motivated by the intent of liberation from social oppression, it falls into the same idea that freedom is the freedom of the individual from others. This tendency is understandable, but it places us in a limitation. When we turn toward the freedom of the individual to, withdrawn into themselves, produces definitions and categories, we cede ground on challenges to the very structure of society. In fact, the materials that the individual works with, including in their desire to escape dysphoria and transphobic violence, are the materials of historically-produced social norms.
Rather than focusing on this individualistic concept of freedom, why not focus on the transformation of society in order to abolish the very institutions that produce dividing lines between cisgender and transgender? Man and Woman are not “natural” categories, but are produced and reproduced by a given social arrangement, and they vary historically with these arrangements.Their boundaries are maintained by forcible institutions like the Church and the law. The fixation on categorizing “woman” as a role of biological and social reproduction is the force behind both misogyny and opposition to gender variance. We ought to turn to social criticism, and social transformation, as liberation. Not a plethora of categories, but the abolition of these categories. Commodity-logic individualism poses no potential for liberation here.
Finally, we must question our approach to sexual liberation at its fundamental philosophical basis. Is doing whatever I want inherently liberating, when what I desire is produced and reproduced by big capitalist firms? When the material I work with in my desire is engineered by advertisers? When the ideological material of my sexuality is the residue of centuries of colonialism, slavery, and genocide? Why should we reject social critique of sexuality, as an infringement on the right of the individual to act without critical thought or social intervention? We can reject prudishness and moralizing without rejecting an understanding of sexuality as a component part of society. When fetishes mimic the bondage of slavery, the exploitation of workers by capitalists, and the molestation of children by adults, why should we not reflect on the meaning of this? Why is asking “why” prohibited? And why should our reflection not produce a partisan position? If we wish to truly liberate our sexuality, we must turn to a social rather than atomistic outlook.
Is There a Doctor On Board?
In this overarching context, my generation suffers significant psychological strife. We seem to have no future in a dying world. We are alone, we have an unstable sense of self, we are stuck in a market competition for relationships, and we as particular individuals are unimportant to others. Where do we turn? We cannot lean on others, as to do so is to limit their capacity to do what they want and to act as autonomous monads.
So, we turn to the institution of the clinic. Underlying the modern clinic is a certain ideology. The standard of normality is the ability to function as a wage-laborer and public-citizen. If we cannot perform regular, standardized wage-labor, we are mentally ill.⁴⁷ Mental illness is not the product of an environment or society, but an individual characteristic. It is simply an outgrowth of one’s chemistry, or of one’s personal choices.
Just as a doctor does not consider whether someone lives next to a waste-processing plant when they are sick, a psychiatrist does not consider whether our society is structurally isolating and psychologically destructive. Our mental illness can be curable or incurable, but either way, it must be treated. How is it supposed to be treated? Not by developing means of community support, much less transforming the society that produces such psychological strife on a massive level. Rather, either by confining someone in a clinic, changing their habits via a system of rational control, or giving them medication to chemically alter their psychological functions.
The unit of treatment is the individual. The solution is always individual, extending at furthest out to the nuclear family unit. One is “cured” once one can satisfactorily function as a component part of capitalist circuitries. That is the limit of health. If the individual cannot be molded into a proper wage-laborer citizen, then they are deprived of personhood and confined to the clinic. Here, they are often abused by the staff of the clinics.⁴⁸ After all, they are a non-person. Mental illness marks one as incapable of agency, incapable of legitimate ideas, as a fool who must be molded into a rational wage-laborer citizen or removed from society. Is it any surprise that people who are discounted as being capable of producing any valid thoughts or accounts are so often abused by the very people who are supposedly “curing” them?
With an inability to imagine that health could be collective, a social endeavor, this isolated thinking and dismissal resonates out to the popular conceptions of my peers. To be healthy is to be self-reliant, and to be dependent on the affection and support of others is to be deficient. If you are unhappy and lonely, if you feel crushed by a world-weariness, simply talk to a therapist or get an antidepressant prescription. If you depend on others too much, you are exploiting them, you are limiting their freedom by obstructing their right to be monads. You are trespassing on their property. Community is toxic and oppressive. If you are unwell, help yourself. We owe you nothing. Your thoughts and feelings about the structural isolation and hostility of the world are simply a product of your pathology. You only think that because you are sick. You are incapable of rational thought. If you were rational and sane, you would perform as a proper market actor. Because you are not, you are simply babbling worthless nonsense.
In a world where approaches to psychological strife are dismissive, condescending, and isolating, is it any surprise that so many people lose hope and commit suicide? Our subjectivities are confined within the peripheries of our flesh by capital, the clinic, and the commodity-logic of the world around us. We are stuck in person-object-person relations, we can never reach through to people in a direct way. Social isolation is built into the system of capitalism and its production of the atomistic individual as a market actor.
We can only treat this strife by recognizing society as a unit of psychological life, and recognizing the individual as a node on the web. Why shouldn’t health be a collective, transformative endeavor? While working as a psychiatrist treating the residents of colonial Algeria, Frantz Fanon came to a realization. A clinician can do little to treat pathologies when pathologies are in reality manifestations of oppressive social relations. The pathologies of his patients were undeniably tied to the colonial situation of Algerian society. In “The North African Syndrome,” he remarked that:
“Without a family, without love, without human relations, without communion with the group, the first encounter with himself will occur in a neurotic mode, in a pathological mode; he will feel himself emptied, without life, in a bodily struggle with death, a death on this side of death, a death in life.”⁴⁹
The colonial situation produced pathologies on a society-wide level. Yet, these pathologies were simply blamed on the “nature” of Algerians. Their social situation was naturalized into their bodies by colonial French psychiatry. Fanon, on the other hand, recognized these pathologies as socially produced. This indicated the need for a change in society in order for pathologies to be treated. So, what did Fanon do? He joined the Algerian Revolution.
Diagnosis: Terminal Illness
I’m sorry, but the results of the examinations are quite severe. We are dying. Our earth is being killed. Our subjectivities are engineered by capital through the pervasive culture industry. We are hooked up to market circuitry. We are isolated and alone, even when we are physically among other people. Commodity-logic distances us from each other. We are lonely little atoms, yet we stand fast to this status. It is the only from of “freedom” that we can imagine. We must hold on tight to our right to consume, our right not to care about anything, our right to disregard others…
Although the situation is dire, there are signs of my peers waking up. Generation Z stands out in its concern for the climate catastrophe, for sexual liberation, for racial oppression, and other issues.⁵⁰ Although there is little interest in international politics, younger Americans aged 18–34 are much more likely to support Palestine than older generations.⁵¹ This would be unthinkable for older Americans who were raised with pervasive imperialist pro-Israeli propaganda. Most Americans aged 18–29 have a negative view of capitalism, and wish to replace our existing system with something else.⁵² However, their concept of “socialism” is for the most part simply social welfare.⁵³
Nevertheless, this turn is significant. Will people wake up from the suffocating apathy churned out by our dying society? If we wish to survive, rather than allow capitalists to destroy the concrete world in the name of abstract capital, they must. Our options are either extinction or the phoenix-rebirth of social revolution. It’s up to us to act and make our own history with the conditions given to us. Either way, it is clear that we cannot keep living like this.
“Finale. — The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects — this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite.
But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.
The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”⁵⁴
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
