IN BUT NOT OF

To paraphrase my spiritual mentor, George Orwell, I think everyone who has given any thought to the matter at all would agree that the world is in a bad way. It has arguably never been in a good way, but there are degrees of badness, and in my life I have seen some pretty low lows. I am old enough to remember the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, stagflation, Iran-Contra, a lengthy and terrifying resurgence of the Cold War, 9/11 and its aftermath, the Great Recession, Covid, and various other nerve-wracking and emotionally and financially agonizing periods. However, if I had to choose a single issue which caused me more agony and fright than all the others, it would be...everyday life.

On the surface, this is a ridiculous complaint. I am a heterosexual man of pure European descent, born in the United States to the suburban middle-middle class. In other words, I won the birth lottery. I will never be bitten by a rat in infancy, turned into a child soldier, sold to a mining company, die of sleeping sickness, or work in a sweatshop (unless Hollywood counts). I will never be subjected to Shaaria Law, forced to carry a baby to term, subjected to a clitorectomy or forced into an unwanted marriage, or get blown to bits by a missile paid for by the American taxpayer and fired by an Israeli jet. I probably won't die from drinking contaminated water, starve to death, or have to sleep in a cardboard box beneath an overpass amid the stench of exhaust and urine. I hate the word "privilege" nowadays, but I freely confess than I am privileged by circumstances of birth: a great many of the opportunities I've had (or squandered) were unearned or otherwise handed to me by God, accident, Fate, or heredity.

I nevertheless find everyday life to be an incredible trial. I do not merely mean adult responsibility, oh no. I mean that since first grade (I enjoyed Kindergarten, or at least I think I did), I found myself in an almost continual war both with society at large, and with myself, for being unable or unwilling to function as others seemed to do. It would be easy for me to say that hyperactive, attention-challenged kids with artistic natures naturally hate school and find it difficult to navigate in what we refer to as "the real world," and this is in fact true: but my rebellion goes somewhat deeper than this. Even as a small child, I found the world that I inherited not merely to be unfair and hypocritical, but nonsensical almost to the point of madness. Of course I could not articulate this as a small child; it presented me with difficultly even in high school, because I did not have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge necessary to codify what I couldn't stand about modern life without sounding like a whiny dreamer with lazy streak. And in fact I am 100% certain many people, including members of my own family, cataloged me this way, just as I am certain that I deserved at least some part of this approbrium: but I'm equally certain that the feelings that manifested as these characteristics were valid. Allow me to use one small example from school.

When I was growing up, and all the way into graduate school (the highest level of education I have completed), I saw that about 90% of the things I was being taught were taught by virtue of lectures: proof of comprehension was achieved by rote memorization followed by multiple choice tests. I knew, and it has subsequently been proven beyond any possible doubt, that this method of education does not work. In fact, it is an exact reversal of how children, how all humans, are scientifically proven to learn: by example. By doing. Getting their hands dirty. People remember dissecting a frog. They do not remember being lectured on the internal organs of a frog. Furthermore, while students generally hate essay tests, they are 100% guaranteed to expose whether the learner has actually absorbed the information and synthesized it properly, and studying for them requires by necessity a much higher level of subject mastery: you cannot guess, so you must know. Any time I was exposed to teaching which allowed me to do these things, I not only learned, I retained. Yet only 10% of my teachers did this. They had to know their methods did not work, but they either didn't care, or could not themselves deviate from the teaching formula their employers mandated they use.

I believe that I have always on some level understood the value of time. It is the most precious thing we have, and we never have enough of it, yet mine was being wasted as, year in and year out, I was forced to listen to teachers blather and drone; to memorize by rote a series of dates, places, names, formulas, equations; to fill in bubbles on a Scan Tron sheet with a No. 2 pencil; and then, to forget, with astonishing rapidity, every goddamn bit of what I had "learned." My bitterness grew as I went to college and began to pay vast sums for the privilege. By and large I learned very little, and I do not believe for a moment most of my teachers or the institutions they represented actually gave a damn. It was all, or very nearly all, complete nonsense: a dull, rigid, complex, drawn-out ritual which exists for reasons nobody really wants to admit if they even understand it at all.

The working world was no different. Studies have proven over and over (and over) again that the eight-hour workday is pointless, that early start times are deleterious to health and productivity, that happy employees work much harder of their own volition than unhappy ones, that a three-day weekend would work wonders for employers and employees both, and that things like working remote, hybrid employment, nontraditional office spaces, longer lunches, pets in the workplace, later start times, etc., etc. actually make workers much more efficient. And yet, with the exception of a few employers I encountered in the entertainment industry, every business, public or private, I've been involved with sticks mindlessly, ruthlessly, and self-destructively to the same outdated, inefficient, misery-inducing model that has existed since industrialism or before. Resistance to change is ferocious; sometimes it takes on the character of active hostility, even hatred, toward the employed. ("This is the way we do it here and if you don't like it, quit.") And this creates a negative cycle in which the employee adopts the Office Space mentality of viewing his employer as the enemy rather than a benefactor or an ally and doing only the bare-ass minimum necessary to avoid being fired. The cycle completes itself with the employer marveling in sincere if misplaced outrage that they cannot get any good people; or getting them, cannot keep them.

Society, at least in my own country, also confused and disgusted me mightily from about the age of twelve onward. I was told my country drew its philosophical roots from the Puritans and their ethic of ascetisicm, faith and hard work, but all around me what I saw was gross commercialism replacing religious belief, and a snobbery that maintained inherited wealth was more virtuous than working for a living. Like Orwell, I saw cruelty and sadism rewarded; intellect and curiosity derided; morals and decency regarded as sniveling weakness; and any actual belief systems or personal honor regarded as naivete to be exploited. I was told that military service was noble, but saw veterans treated like condom wrappers; that "freedom isn't free" but also that "middle class boys don't go into the army -- that's for poor kids." (Evidently freedom still wasn't free, but it was only the poor kids who had to pay for it.)

Some of this, of course, was simply the ordinary discrepancy that exists between ideals and reality, but more of it came from feeling as if this discrepancy was intolerable to me as a human being. Me, Miles Watson, personally. In other words, it might suit, or at least prove acceptable, to others, but I was not built for it. I couldn't go along to get along. I had to point out the absurdity, the inefficiency, the stupidity of the world around me, for the sake of my own sanity; yet this sort of talk was far from welcome to most of those around me. It was either ignored, ridiculed or actively punished; the few who agreed usually placed a caveat at the end of their agreement to the effect that, "Yeah, it's nuts, but you've got to accept it: it's the way things are." My trouble stemmed from the fact I could not accept it. To me, the choice was between swallowing the hypocrisy of society, and pointing out that virtue and money were not only unsynonymous but usually incompatible, that systems designed to help us had not only hurt us but become our masters, was not initially a choice. I felt that I had to rebel.

By now you probably think this entire essay is a form of boasting, and you'd be right to deduce this: but here comes the twist. My rebellion was a complete failure and served only to cause myself and many of those close to me great pain. I will not describe it here, except to say that I most resembled Gordon Comstock, the laughable protagonist of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who makes a "war on money" in the deluded belief that poverty and rejection of societal norms constitutes virtue. In fact, all rebels equate failure with virtue: the whole history of the punk rock movement is testament to this. It is a doomed attempt to invert the rules of society, and render the poet starving to death in his garret more noble than the upper middle class kid who thinks having to pump his own gas is "roughing it."

Of course millions of people feel as I did at any given moment. It is supreme egotism to assume that one's inner world, one's inner landscape as it were, is unique or even special; but prior to the existence of the internet there was no way for people like myself to grasp that we were, and are, far from unusual. The hermetically sealed world I grew up in did not allow for the sort of "online communities" which are a normal part of life today. Anyone who deviated from the norm too far in any direction was bound to face ridicule and hostility from his peers, his parents, his teachers, and society as a whole. Indeed, society is defined as "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community." One cannot have an ordered community, more or less, if too many people stray too far from the norms. This is pathetically obvious, but it took me decades to grasp its full meaning: individual rebellion allows a person to egoistically attack what he dislikes in his community, while still benefitting from the advantages a community offers. Too many rebels = destruction of "the system," which sounds great until the power goes out. I had always been drawn to fictional characters who were "in but not of," because I could relate to them, but I was very slow in understanding that these characters inevitably served the same system or society which rejected or marginalized them. These characters had to work within their envrionment despite their deep philosophical disagreements with how it was managed, and their persistent feelings of emotional isolation.

Around the age of 30 I tumbled to the works of Ernst Jünger, the brilliant writer, novelist, metaphysician and philosopher, who often tackled what he saw as the problems of the modern world through abstruse novels like "The Glass Bees," "Aladdin's Problem," "On the Marble Cliffs" and others. It was in his novel "Eumeswil" that I encountered the character of Manuel Venator, whose struggles (like those of Gordon Comstock, or other Orwellian characters such as George "Fatty" Bowling or even Winston Smith) seemed to resonate with me. If you will excuse me quoting from Wikipedia, "The key theme in the novel is the figure of the Anarch, the inwardly-free individual who lives quietly and dispassionately within but not of society and the world. The Anarch is a metaphysical ideal figure of a sovereign individual, [as] conceived by Jünger."

The idea of the soverign individual is worthy of study in another blog (as is the concept of self-ownership), but the point I'm driving at here is that Jünger, who was born in 1895 and died in 1998 (at the age of 102), lived through a variety of political systems: the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Allied occupation, West Germany, and finally the re-unified Germany of today. He commented that he had seen "flags fall like leaves on the ground in November" and at some point in his life seems to have made a conscious effort toward internal exile, a state in which the individual lives peacably within society but holds allegiances and moral codes inside himself which may be quite different from those of his fellows. In public, he goes along to get along; in private, he exists within his own nation-state with himself at the head.

Now, if this sounds more or less like how everyone lives once they come home from work and lock the door, it's important to stress that the condition of the anarch is merely a progression of the idea that "a man's home is his castle" and that we are, or ought to be, entirely free within our own homes. Where the anarch differs is that he takes the concept of freedom further: he creates for himself a kind of ideal plane which is transportable anywhere, including the street or the workplace. He builds an exterior which conforms to the grooves and tracks of society but he does not allow these grooves and tracks to mark his inner self. In other words, he does not internalize the values and norms of society as most people do whether they want to or not. He lives in a state of active, conscious rejection, without appearing in almost any way rebelious.

Why does this matter? Is it just a distinction without a difference, or even worse, a justification for a cowardly refusal to fight against societal injustice? Well, to start with, for those like myself, it is actually necessary for sanity and for self-respect. When you are "in but not of," society has explicity rejected you already: the question is merely whether you shatter yourself trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, or you develop a proper coping mechanism, which allows you to retain your sense of individuality and personal sovereignty. The distinction has a difference, because you are not simply "being yourself behind closed doors" -- you are "being yourself within your own mind" and refusing to let what you see as lunacy, or villainy, or stupidity seep inside of you. Is that cowardice? Many would say so. They would say that one must rebel against that which one perceives to be evil or unjust: but as I have noted above, there are some rebellions which are not only doomed to failure, they do not even achieve moral victory because they have no resonance, no impact on the larger world. Gordon Comstock's war on money achieves nothing but misery for himself and unhappiness for his friends and family: the pain ceases the moment he abandons it. Winston Smith's internal rebellion is crushed the moment it becomes external, and he himself is crushed into conformity with Oceanic society without achieving anything whatsoever. Fatty Bowling, on the other hand, realizes society is a swindle, but is willing to play the game provided he can escape through books and a few intellectual friendships. He of the three characters is closest to the anarch as Jünger envisioned him. He is, or becomes, "in but not of."

Again, all of this may seem like so much self-aggrandizing hair-splitting to the reader, or even a form of self-delsion. Perhaps it is, but I don't think so. The world we live in is insane and seems to be becoming moreso with the passage of years, and insanity, like a spill, tends to spread, and to stain. We have replaced religion with money, philosophy with psychiatry, patriotism with identity politics (or nationalism), common sense with ideology, morals with professional ethics. The consequences are inescapable if one adopts a passive internal state. Without active, conscious efforts to maintain one's own inner sense of sanity and integrity, we will, like Winston Smith, ending up loving Big Brother.