Sexism and the Horror of Sex

Standup comedians make much of their living by poking fun at the battle between the sexes. The audience laughs in lieu of thanking the comedian for providing an excuse to disavow the liberal convention of overlooking the manifest cultural differences between the sexes. The comedy often becomes sexist in that the comedian exaggerates the differences between the social roles of men and women, but those differences are real.

The Mystery of Sexism

Nevertheless, the battle of the sexes is mysterious. Sure, some individuals are worse than others, but a collective demonization of women by men and then a counter-demonization of men by women, after feminism, can hardly be justified. There’s a cold war between heterosexual men and women, so that each group has stereotypes of the other, driving each to oppress the other or at least to fantasize about doing so. To be sure, I’m not saying this culture war is entirely inexplicable. Historically, men have tended to oppress women, because men are more aggressive or arrogant; at any rate, men have had more control over the levers of culture and so their stereotypes of women became more widespread, which created a vicious cycle in which men used those stereotypes to justify keeping women as slaves, and women internalized the prejudice, adapted to that cultural environment, and played such degrading conventional roles as the virgin, whore, or crone. But after the modern revolutions, women could define themselves as persons having an equal status with men, which gave women the rights to be educated and to enter the workforce. Now, partly for economic reasons (specifically globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs due to increasing competition with machines), but also because modern women have more influence over the dissemination of cultural myths, it’s masculine men who are persona non grata in Western, liberal cultures; whereas women were once universally objectified by men, men are now being feminized, emasculated, and duncified in popular culture so that the effeminate gay male has almost replaced the traditional masculine hero.

Again, power and cultural influence explain much of this demonization. But there’s a mystery here, too, which is that we should expect heterosexual men and women to have bonded over what’s typically regarded as the greatest experience in life, that being romantic love culminating in sexual intercourse. How could men or women stand to see each other collectively belittled when sexual tension underlies virtually all of their dealings with each other? Shouldn’t the memory or the prospect of sex make those in power ashamed of demonizing the weaker sex, whichever either happens to be? After all, if heterosexual men rule, tend to look down on women, and yet want to have sex with them, what does that make those men? And if women rule, buy products popularized by ads that portray men as buffoons, and yet women are sexually attracted to competent, masculine men, what does that say about women? Why do men and women sabotage themselves by denigrating the object of their greatest affection? Sexism seems self-defeating, as is strikingly apparent in the ultra-conservative Middle East in which many women are so brutally objectified that they become asexual, such as when they’re forced to wear burkas. In that case, archaic religious memes explain why men with the same sexual lusts as anyone else would repress them and prevent women from tempting them by displaying their enticing body parts. Still, this only pushes the mystery back a step, since then we must ask what drove Muslim men to accept such a sexist religion in the first place in spite of their shared sexual experience with women. How could they have been convinced to condemn their sexuality with such thoroughness, overriding their powerful sexual instinct?

This is the mystery of the war between the sexes. How could heterosexual men and women be made to openly loathe each other in general, despite their bonding over what’s supposed to be the greatest experience, the fulfillment of the meaning of life, and so on, namely the experience of romantic love as expressed especially in the sex act? The solution is that the sexual experience is the source of the conflict, because sex is misrepresented by the cultural happy-talk about it. Of course, sex is exciting and fun and physically pleasurable; just about everyone desires sex more than anything else. But sex is also an existential horror which forces us to confront our embodiment, mortality, animalism, and underlying impersonality, not to mention nature’s mindlessness and thus the subversive implications of atheistic naturalism. The sex instinct is so powerful that we can’t help but celebrate sex in popular culture. But we do so only by showcasing sex in the abstract or meaningless sex between objectified or glorified actors. Our personal sex lives are shameful things that must be kept secret. If you deny this, back up your denial by posting to the internet the details of your sex acts, including your real identity and recordings of your deeds so the public can judge for itself. No, the bond between romantic partners is very much like that between partners in crime: only the sexual partner knows the humiliating nonsense the pair of them gets up to in the bedroom, even if it’s just the look of the person’s face during orgasm, and each partner holds the power of blackmail over the other. I’ve discussed this at length here, here, and here, so I won’t belabor the point.

Rush Limbaugh blasts Pope Francis and the Jesus he rode in on

Responding to Pope Francis’s warning that the “idolatry of money” leads to a “new tyranny,” the conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh spoke on behalf of the demonic powers that govern the material world and that only genuine followers of Jesus can detect.

Just seven or eight such followers currently reside in the United States and when they listen to Limbaugh speak on the radio they report hearing “the howling of the damned” in the background.

The rest of us have only Limbaugh’s words to confirm his satanic allegiance. After calling the pope’s warning “pure Marxism,” Limbaugh said “The value of anything is established in the private sector,” thus testifying to the very idolatry of money of which the pope spoke in his Evangelii.

Limbaugh later contradicted himself by saying that the reason America is the greatest nation in the universe is that its founding documents enshrine “the notion that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, meaning nobody can take 'em away, and that is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those rights come from our creator, God” (sic).

So those rights derive not from the market but directly from God. Here, Limbaugh proves himself to be a polytheist since he evidently worships not just money but his country. This speaks, in fact, to the American conservative’s definition of “patriotism”: you’ve got to believe your country is infallible and sacred or else you’re a traitor.

After centuries of selectively quoting from the Bible to achieve his purposes, the Devil has turned to cunningly interpreting the intentions of America’s founding fathers, thus distracting many Americans with a xenophobic civic religion that substitutes for the Christian one to which most Americans say they adhere, according to the lying polls.

Whereas Jesus said people should care more about the afterlife than about the present, fallen world, which is governed by demonic forces until Judgment Day when the hidden Father will reveal himself and establish his perfect kingdom, two-faced “conservatives” like Limbaugh insist that we should be consumed with secular priorities, such as amassing wealth and enjoying our freedom to do whatever we want as long as we don’t hurt anyone else—as if our wants should be respected, given what Christians call our sinful nature.

Jesus said people should give away their possessions and leave their families to demonstrate their commitment to the spiritual world that transcends the material one. Speaking for the Devil who enjoys misleading gullible Christians, Limbaugh said that “Wherever socialists have gained power, they have done nothing but spread poverty. They cannot and do not produce wealth”—as if a talent for producing material wealth in a fallen world that’s red in tooth and claw were an indicator of spiritual greatness and should impress a genuine Christian for even a single moment.   

Stoicism and Cosmic Horror

The stranger the postmodern Western world becomes, the more we might hear plaintive calls for a return to Stoic level-headedness. Jon Stewart’s centrist political rally expressed a similar sentiment. Centrists want our leaders to be at least halfway competent so they can “get stuff done,” and that requires a rational set of priorities. Indeed, there are intriguing ideas in ancient Stoicism, but I think they should be updated by existential and cosmicist interpretations of philosophical naturalism.

Cynics and Stoics

Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in the 4^th C. BCE, was influenced by ancient Cynicism, so I’ll begin by summarizing some relevant Cynic beliefs. Ancient Cynicism was a form of asceticism, so you can see that it differs greatly from the modern meaning of “cynic.” The Cynics agreed with Plato, Aristotle, and with Greek ethicists generally that happiness is the primary good in life and that rationality is crucial to achieving it. But whereas most Greek philosophers taught that a virtuous balance between reason and emotion was a means to various practical ends, such as excellence in some profession, the Cynics believed that virtue was its own reward and that worldly pursuits tended to corrupt the character, dull the critical faculties, and mislead a person by distracting her with trivialities. Reason, the Cynics thought, shows us clearly what is of ultimate importance, and that is the everlasting natural world. Along with the much-later Romantics who rebelled against modern forms of decadence, the Cynics’ central distinction was between nature, which is to say the wilderness, and what we might think of as artificiality, which is to say the arbitrary social convention that doesn’t correspond with any natural reality.

Our moral duty, then, is to understand nature and to live as relatively wild creatures, not to be misled by social expectations which are brought on by ignorance and delusion. The reason this is our duty is that such an unburdened, ascetic life frees us from stress and from unrealistic, unfulfillable desires, and thus makes for happiness in the sense of tranquility. Artificiality is the root of evil (vice) and suffering, since when we become proud of so-called human progress we form unnatural desires and set up unrealistic plans which nature is bound to frustrate. Wise people live in accordance with nature; they use ascetic techniques of non-attachment to train themselves to want only what will probably be provided, not to set themselves up for failure and misery by living in a fantasy world. The Cynics were infamous, though, because far from merely ignoring the phony world of popular culture, they openly ridiculed those attached to fantasies of being supernatural masters of the world who owe nothing to nature because they occupy the self-made artificial world we call civilization. Anyone who routinely condescends to the other species, by assuming that humans have some right of dominion over the world because of our innate greatness is a fool whom nature will punish. The Cynics acted like ravens sounding their ominous warnings of the downfall that inevitably follows this popular sort of pride, mocking upstanding citizens who in turn regarded Cynics as deranged for living like beasts and renouncing the fruits of social progress. Indeed, Cynics called themselves dogs, they owned no possessions, and they might masturbate in public or otherwise demonstrate their contempt for average people’s presumptions.

PDF Installments of RWUG

Here are the eBook installments of this blog: 

First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth

Note that the first one is really long (about 700 pages).

Here's a special installment: Artificiality and the Aesthetic Dimension.

Backward-Walking Politician has Limited Use of Political Platitudes

Dateline: WASHINGTON—Due to a rare neurological disorder, Rupert Farfenoogle can walk only backwards. He can’t face backwards, so he uses a system of rearview mirrors strapped around his upper arms to see where he’s walking.

From a young age, Mr. Farfenoogle dreamed of being a politician. “I just thought of how great it would be,” he said, “to exploit people’s naivety, to tell them lies to make them feel good so they’d give me power which I could use to enrich myself.

“Like all politicians-in-training I attended The Machiavelli School for Rapscallions. There I learned how to subdue my conscience, to see the horrors of the real world ever so clearly, and to keep those revelations a secret so I could smile and nod and shake hands with the best of them. I learned how to be cynical, to hold average people in contempt so that I could ignore how they think society should be run and I could fob off my talking points on them.”

But when it came time to graduate and Mr. Farfenoogle was told the inner secrets of his craft, he became dismayed. “They showed me a list of principles, which they said were the bedrocks of politics. One of them shocked me and I still remember the exact words: ‘When you’ve run out of lies and you’re in danger of letting the public see how hollow you are, just tell them we’ve all got to move forward.’ That was it, you see. ‘Move forward.’ But how could I resort to that vacuous cliché, in my condition? If I literally couldn’t move forward, how could I rely on that stale metaphor to get me out of trouble? Wouldn’t that hackneyed standby line backfire on me? But wouldn’t I be a hopelessly ineffectual politician without it?”

Nevertheless, Mr. Farfenoogle did enter politics and was elected to office. “At first I coasted on my disability, since I could just tell the public sob stories so they’d vote for me out of pity. But then—disaster! I was being interviewed by a pack of reporters and suddenly I realized I’d run out of preapproved talking points. It was like losing your life preserver and being cast adrift at sea. ‘How do you respond to that specific criticism?’ they kept asking me, and I was running on empty. Should I risk an invocation of forward motion? I thought, even though I could move only backward. Shall I still fall back on that platitude? I had no choice since the alternative was to have an actual public conversation. But that would have exposed my sociopathy, which I’d cultivated while training to be a politician.

“So I intoned the magic words: ‘In any case, we must move forward,’ I said, pretending I was being wise and profound. ‘Now’s not the time for looking back.’ Then I warmed to the theme: “No, forward we must go as a people, ever onward…’ I carried on and on like that, wondering if I was making a fool of myself—especially since I’d decided then to make my exit and was forced to physically back away from that crowd. I used the mirrors at my side as I took those backward steps to the hall that led to my office. Glancing forward at the reporters, I tripped over a garbage bin and soiled my suit with the remnants of a Diet Coke can. I’m sure I was blushing, but the mesmerism seemed to work since the reporters just stood there like they couldn’t have been more bored.”

Months went by and Mr. Farfenoogle routinely filled the awkward public silences with calls for everyone to move forward. He would answer substantive criticisms of his policies on immigration or health care or the war on terrorism with the bromide, “Yes, well, surely we can’t move backward.” Despite the fact that Mr. Farfenoogle would sometimes take long backward strides even as he spoke those words, his critics were stymied.

Enlightenment and Suicide

Is there such a thing as a pessimistic, nihilistic, or otherwise melancholy person who’s not also a hypocrite? This question is at the root of a conventional criticism of anyone who subscribes to some dark way of looking at things. The natural suspicion is that believing that life is wretched and hopeless should lead the person to suicide, so if the person chooses instead to keep living, the person's philosophical beliefs must be phony. In fact, the philosophy I’ve been exploring on this blog, which draws from existentialism and cosmicism, among other sources, is pretty grim and iconoclastic, so does it also imply that life isn’t worth living? To anticipate the conclusion, the answer is no.

The Dark Side of Existential Cosmicism

It’s important here to distinguish between having a cause and having a reason to kill yourself. Any cause of suicide must overcome the instincts that drive us to keep going even under dire circumstances. Some people’s instinctive will to live might be stronger or weaker than that of others, so different situations may prove unbearable to different people. In any case, this question of what might cause someone to take her life differs from the question I’ll try to answer here, which is whether a melancholy worldview, and in particular the one I’ve laid out, might provide a good, which is to say, a sufficient, reason for suicide. Notice that you can have such a reason but not the cause, because your will to live may be stronger than your rational side which recognizes the logic of the reason in question. This is the basis of the criticism of melancholy individuals: their reason tells them the proper course, but they lack the courage or the intelligence to follow through, that is, to overcome the pro-life forces both in them and in society.

Now I’ll summarize what seem like the pro-death parts of my philosophy, to see whether they imply a reason for suicide. To begin with, I assume naturalistic metaphysics, according to which science tells us what the fundamental facts are, and I interpret the social relevance of that naturalism in a way influenced by Nietzsche, Thomas Ligotti, Leo Strauss, and others. So of course I assume atheism. There’s no personal God. But with Nietzsche, I assume there’s a good reason the majority of people throughout history have been theists. There are many explanations of the prevalence of theism, but the one that’s most relevant to the existential question at issue, about whether life is worth living, is that we all have an irrational side that makes us want to trust in myths and believe in something sacred. That’s why we conceive of God (and of all manner of other supernatural entities) in the first place, even as children like to play with their invisible friends. The crisis of postmodernity is that we’ve killed the God we created, because of the Enlightenment, so that now we’re left with the threat of nihilism, that is, with the feelings that nothing’s sacred and that life is absurd. This is all just standard Nietzsche. I reject, however, Nietzsche’s solution to this crisis, which is to glorify the natural impulse to cherish life because of the opportunity it gives the strong to overpower the weak. I agree with Nietzsche’s aesthetic take on viable morality, but I don’t think power for itself is a worthy goal, nor do I feel that raw natural processes are sacred.

Granted, I do think naturalism implies a kind of pantheism, according to which natural processes are supremely divine in that they’re ultimately creative. But I don’t commit the naturalistic fallacy of inferring that because something is absolutely X (in this case, creative) as a matter of fact, therefore that thing is highly good because of that fact. That hasty evaluation would leave open the questions of whether creativity ought to be valued at all and whether it should have a positive or a negative value. Perhaps nature is absolutely repulsive because of its supreme creativity, since nature creates new things by destroying old ones. Even if naturalists should worship nature, the question would remain whether they should be tree-hugging hippies or wiccans, on the one hand, or doom-and-gloom Satanists or neo-Lovecraftian cultists, on the other. I’m inclined to think either that all valuations are subjective or that nature’s authentic, most fitting value is beyond our comprehension, so that we can only project onto the universe a value that satisfies us.

Torontonians fear Mayor Rob Ford’s Scandals make their City too Interesting

Dateline: TORONTO—Toronto’s citizens are mortified by the world’s mockery of their Mayor Rob Ford for his many scandals, such as his admitting to having smoked crack cocaine while in office, because they fear Toronto will lose its status as the world’s most boring big city.

“We just want everything to go back the way it was,” said one Torontonian, “when no one cared about Toronto. We want to fly under the world’s radar so we can keep living in quiet desperation. Is that too much to ask? To not have a crazy circus come to town, so I can get on with wasting my life?

“What we need is a robot with no personality, like our Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Now there’s a leader for you: hair like a piece of Lego, never offends anyone, never rocks the boat. We need an empty suit as our leader to reflect our blissful lack of any worthwhile culture.”

Another Torontonian is even more candid. “Rob Ford broke his contract with us. He’s supposed to lie to the people about absolutely everything. That’s what we elect them for, right? But Ford can’t stop speaking his mind. Doesn’t he know that politicians are supposed to be the cream of the crop? Truth-telling children grow up to be adults who lie constantly to themselves and to others, and then they choose the most pathological of the liars among them and elect them to lead the people to disaster. That’s how we go from A to B.

“I mean, sure, Ford lied for a while about smoking crack. He did his best to be a politician there. But he’s constantly gaffing: it’s one thing to have no respect whatsoever for the liberals on the Toronto City Council or for the downtown elitists or even for the institution of Canadian government. But as any kind of executive, surely you’re supposed to keep your grudges a secret so you can more easily backstab your enemies.”

However, Mr. Ford shows no sign of being less forthright with his opinions. “I’m no phony or snob,” the mayor said in an improvised press conference. “I say what I want, just like any average Joe, and if you don’t like it you can go fuck yourself. Especially you, John,” Mr. Ford said, pointing at a CBC reporter. “Right now you’re taking notes so the liberal pundits at CBC can make fun of everything I do. Let me tell you something: the CBC is a bunch of pussies. They have the nerve to call themselves ‘Canada’s number one news network’—even though they wouldn’t survive without the taxpayer subsidies. What a bunch of flaming girly-men and feminazis.

“Now, I’ve got a lot of work to do, lowering taxes so the blue collar folks around here don’t get raped by Toronto’s stuck-up socialists who have their heads up their asses, eating cheese while riding around on their bicycles like it’s the 19th century. Hello! Get yourself a car or get the hell off the road and take your airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy nanny state with you!”

The mayor proceeded to bowl over a bevy of journalists and cameramen, landing especially hard on the CBC reporter, whom he sat on in the confusion.

Mr. Ford’s psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Hornswoggler, admits that “People roll their eyes when Ford calls himself an average guy, because he’s—you know—a morbidly obese multimillionaire. But according to my diagnosis, the mayor is an avatar of the Id, like Rabelais’s bawdy character, Gargantua. All of us have embarrassing unconscious desires, but we learn to repress them to get on as civilized adults. Ford’s having none of that. He has gargantuan appetites, because he embodies what we think of as the worst in all of us. Thus, he's an everyman, after all.”

Tribal Antics of Canadian Question Period melt Face off of Skull

Dateline: OTTAWA—A study headed by Dr. Lawrence Dipplerdoo, medical researcher at McGill University, indicates that excessive exposure to Question Period at the Canadian House of Commons can be fatal. In an interview with RWUG Magazine, Dr. Dipplerdoo said that if you watch all 45 minutes of a Question Period, from beginning to end, there’s a statistically significant chance that your face will melt off of your skull and land in your lap.

The period officially called Oral Questions occurs each sitting day in Ottawa and allows the opposing parties to seek information from the Canadian government. Parties pose a limited number of timed questions to ministers, depending on the size of their caucus, and one or another minister rises to respond.

“Theoretically,” said Dr. Dipplerdoo, “a public exchange like that between elected politicians should be benign or even salutary. Transparency in government is widely assumed to be a virtue. But my team has discovered that transparency is beneficial only if what you’re permitted to see isn’t so horrible that the sight of it melts your face off.” Dr. Dipplerdoo therefore recommends either that Question Period be kept from the public “as a sort of lethal secret on par with the true name of God” or that television viewers of the abomination be forewarned that they could be left faceless.  

According to Dr. Dipplerdoo, the risks have gone unreported until now because hardly anyone bothers to watch even a moment of Question Period, let alone the entire daily cacophony, the assumption being that Canadian politics is boring and therefore unworthy of attention or that Question Period is a circus in which nothing is ever resolved amidst all the taunting and sneering. However, Dr. Dipplerdoo noticed that recent cases of human face-melting had a common cause, which was that when the bodies were found, the deceased had been sitting in front of their TVs which were tuned to a station that broadcasts Question Period.

“The petty jeering and juvenile cat-calling, the routine dodging of questions and reciting of mere market-tested talking points, the standard refusal to come clean and level with the public, the hypocritical nitpicking by the opposition that’s never saintly when it’s in charge of Parliament—all of that’s familiar to the minority of Canadians who’ve been brave enough to give even a passing glance at a Question Period,” said Dr. Dipplerdoo. “But what we’ve found is that those corruptions can be concentrated and effectively weaponized.”

The doctor hastens to add that the mechanism by which Question Period can kill its viewers is unknown, but his team hypothesizes that “the Canadian politicians’ soul-crushing cynicism, which is so evident in the farcical Oral Questions, is impossible to ignore or to misinterpret when a viewer absorbs a full dose of that poison. What can literally kill average Canadians is the shock that a government could be so hollow, that so many elected representatives could so recklessly sabotage the disguises for their nihilism—their conservative haircuts, tailored suits, and the like—by demonstrating their bottomless loathing for each other and for all Canadians.”

The doctor said that the depth of that hatred is evidently contagious and proves lethal in sufficiently high doses—unless the viewers are “immunized by a personal reserve of shamelessness.” “After all,” the doctor continued, “the politicians sit through day after day of the absurd goings-on at Question Period with their faces intact. We theorize, then, that viewers could survive a full dose of the poison from the House of Commons as long as they, too, were so jaded that nothing could appall them.”

Life as Art: Nature’s Strangeness and the Aesthetic Attitude

My last several articles have focused on the relationship between nature-as-wilderness and the artificial worlds we create with language, culture, and technology. This distinction comes up in my responses to Brassier’s nihilism and to Scott Bakker’s eliminativism (his view not just that there’s no meaning or value, but that there’s no personal self), in my discussions of the mythopoeic mindset, the Neolithic Revolution, and the development of the autonomous self. The trick is to see the bumbling exaptations and psychological and social tinkerings that complexify biological processes and produce higher-order worlds (language games, worldviews, cultures, infrastructures, cityscapes), which are regulated by prescriptive (optional) laws and intended functions as opposed to being driven by natural probability, as being stages in the greater decay of undead nature.

Metaphysically, as I’ve said elsewhere, the universe is natural in that mental properties aren’t primary, but nature is made up of matter and energy and these come together with their mindless creativity to foreshadow the mentality that has nevertheless developed. This is the key, mysterious concept: natural (not divine) creativity. The Presocratics called this the field of becoming, the impermanence of beings, which is to say the way all things enter and exit a state of being so that the apparent world is always in flux. There are patterns in those changes, including cycles, regularities, hierarchies, and the excrescence of new orders of being, which is the process of complexification. In fact, natural creativity can be mapped on horizontal and vertical axes, in that there’s change within the temporal dimension and also an increase in the variety of game pieces, as it were, from atoms to molecules, to nebulas, galaxies of stars, solar systems, and organisms, social orders, and artificial substitutes for the wilderness. The point is that in the big, metaphysical picture, there’s continuity in the splitting off of artificial worlds which alienate their inhabitants, but there are also revolutions in nature, new starting points for more complex changes. This is because the norm in nature is creativity, the change from the earlier to the later and from the simple to the complex.

Before I move on to other topics, beginning next week, I want to consider one other implication of this picture of the role of artificiality in the creation of meaning and in the world’s re-enchantment. Specifically, I think this picture tells us why morality can be understood as an aesthetic phenomenon. By “morality” I mean the ideal of the good life which we try to achieve by following rules that govern personal growth (virtues and vices) and social interactions. Now, assuming morality is a human creation, it has much in common with art since art too is our creation. But this isn’t saying much, because not all creations are artworks, at least not in the narrow, conventional sense of “art.” So we should look closer at artistic creations. It turns out that since Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and Andy Warhol’s soup can paintings, which is to say the birth of Dadaism and Postmodernism in art, the definition of “art” has broadened to include virtually anything. This might have spelled the death of art or else the re-enchantment of nature. But this may present us merely with a paradox rather than a choice between opposites, since postmodernists may have disposed of an unduly narrow conception of art and thus revealed the fact that everything becomes art for modern naturalists (atheists).

Embittered Man Opens Shelter for Regretful Advertisers

Dateline: NEW YORK—Hugo “Sellout” Slickster, a recovering ex-advertiser, opened The Center for Alienated and Cynical Advertisers (CACA). Its mission is to provide support for advertisers who are withdrawn and embittered because their job forces them to dehumanize consumers and thus themselves.

“I took creative writing in college,” Slickster told the crowd of reporters soon after he’d cut the ceremonial ribbon in front of the New York facility. “Then I realized there’s no money in that for most writers, so I went into advertising. As impractical as it is, I wish I’d stayed in creative writing.”

He recalled the first day of his studies in the field of advertising. “At first, I was taken aback by the focus of the introductory textbook. I thought it would cover the tricks of the trade, maybe how to put an optimistic spin on an imperfect product—that sort of thing. But the first chapter’s title was ‘Why you must Deaden your Heart and Learn to Loathe every Consumer.’ I asked the instructor if this was some sort of joke. She told me that advertising isn’t for bleeding hearts. ‘If you love your fellow man,’ she told me, ‘start a charity. But if you want to go into business, know that you’re in a war. And you can’t destroy your enemies unless you hate them.’ ‘But if you hate and destroy consumers as your enemies,’ I asked her, ‘who will buy the products?’ I’ll never forget what she said next: ‘Consumers are like cockroaches. You can never destroy them all.’

“For weeks I puzzled over what she'd told me and what I read in that textbook. I learned how to build up your contempt for consumers by objectifying them, by thinking of them as market-researched statistics and targeted demographics, as biased bundles of instincts and emotions that are driven by a primitive unconscious which can be enslaved and branded with code words and cognitive framing techniques. I learned how to ‘destroy’ consumers by making suckers out of them, perpetrating bait-and-switch operations by holding out abstract goods like happiness or a satisfying sex life and sticking the buyers only with loosely-associated, low-quality products manufactured by low-wage labourers in the Far East.

"Eventually everything clicked: consumers are loathsome materialists and so they deserve the crap that businesses feed them. Consumers demand this crap! They lap up the frozen foods, the designer underwear, and the mindless television programs as if they were cups of life-sustaining water. So they’re abominable and we advertisers were entitled to abuse them however we wished. In fact, our honour required that we lie to them in a thousand ways, to pay them back for their sinful demands.”

Only years later, after landing a string of advertising jobs, did Slickster realize he was trapped. “It dawned on me that I didn’t live in a cave. I too was a consumer, so as an advertiser I’d been trained to hate myself. That was the trap. It’s one thing to be cynical about your enemies if you can distinguish us from them. But what if there’s no such difference? Does knowing you’re a selfish, self-destructive materialist make you any better than the deluded herd that merely consumes without seeing the whole disgusting process for what it is? No, it only makes you doubly cursed.”

And so for every half-truth Slickster wrote in his advertising copy, for every phony, manipulative situation he conjured in his video or internet propaganda for soulless corporations, he felt he was wounding himself. 

“It was like going into battle with a sword, but every time you stab someone, the sword turns around and slices you too. I had no doubt consumers are pathetic creatures. I’d seen it first-hand; I’d seen the dirty tricks work, seen the masses gobble up the new line of crap in the false, irresponsible hope that those poisonous doodads would give them what they really want out of life, namely something to believe in, something sacred. The hipster secularists thought they were so sophisticated, leaving their church and buying into the hedonistic myths. They forsake their spiritual leaders, the priests and rabbis and imams—who are ignoramuses, of course, but at least they care about people instead of passionately hating them all. And the secularists pledge themselves to the Corporations. They beg hollow parasites like us for salvation, they demand that we make their lives worth living—we who condescend to them so brazenly, with a panoply of professional techniques; we who are forced to demonize them so we can conduct our evil business and feed the cattle a diet of lies.