Please, Shoot the Messenger

The End of an Era, and a Few Take-less Takes

Me and my Substack

Laying down the law, any law, is stranger and crueller than it looks; the forbidden is always a provocation, whatever else it is; and therefore we should forget certain words and try to remember other ones instead. Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. Think of the languages you prefer; think of language as a pleasure and not a penance, as a celebration and not a sacrifice…We want to narrow our minds—we want to speak and write in particular ways—because we want to set limits to our wanting…

- Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures

Go and dance yourself clean/
You're blowing Marxism to pieces

- LCD Soundsystem, 2010

1. Shit Done Changed

Well, gentle reader, the world has changed, so it’s time to start shaking things up again at Vita Contemplativa.

But first, say it with me, everyone:

“I don’t know anything!” (“I don’t know anything!”)

“I’ve been wrong about everything!” (“I’ve been wrong about everything!”)

“I still don’t know anything!” (“I still don’t know anything!”)

“I’m still wrong about everything!” (“I’m still wrong about everything!”)

Fantastic. Very good. Doesn’t that feel wonderful to say? Now, before you start to feel too much shame or anger creeping up in reaction to that necessarily self-flagellating chant, I’d like to invite you to consider something initially counterintuitive: that this is in fact a very good place to be, this place of not knowing anything, or of always being wrong. Being wrong has many possibilities. There are so many fresh, exciting ways to be wrong. But there’s only one way to be right. And that’s why—you will notice—that the people most concerned with being right about everything are these days pretty much the most exhausting, hectoring, dull, miserable people imaginable. You know the ones I’m talking about. Many were just in involved in losing the “most important election of our lifetimes.” They’ve spent a very long time thinking they needed to be right, instead of being good, or happy, or beautiful. Or experiencing pleasure. And now they’ve lost, and might even start losing the bigger culture war they’ve been betting on to get them some staying political power. It may not be totally over but I’d say their salad days are behind them.

Which is not to say I'm excited for the coming chaos. Only a very certain, or very rash, person would prefer unbridled chaos to an anxious blandness. And yet we have no real choice in this. The people have chosen chaos. They’ve hit the big red button that says, “Go on, fuck it all up, what do we have to lose?” and now we’ll get to see exactly what we have to lose. I’ve witnessed many friends’ reactions, and they run the gamut from “this is the apocalypse” to “I’ll be alright but consider [x] people” to “you know, rapid institutional collapse might be just what the doctor ordered." Hell, I know full well that Elon Musk buying his way into the government will be a disaster (honestly, I think we should’ve literally drawn and quartered the man in public the moment he started babbling about brain implants) yet I find myself also hoping that the counter-culture we’ve all been dreaming about might actually have a chance in the America we’re about to watch bloom.

Yet before I return to my glorious and enlightened state of not-knowing, I offer this much analysis: if, up until this moment, you took either rightist or centrist or leftist politics very seriously, and you still wish to do so now, you have misunderstood everything, again. The only way to avoid going to the circus is to whistle as you walk past the tent. And a vulgar world requires a vulgar picture, so here goes: it seems to me that what we’ve just collectively witnessed is the political equivalent of a bad BDSM session, played out over ten years or so, between two vague and furious political camps. The moment that American progressives began to speak in that bell hooks-and-Judith Butler-by-way-of-Tumblr style, and starting forming a politics based entirely on forbidding people from certain ways of talking or feeling, it didn’t matter one whit whether they were right, whether what they were doing was good, or whether they had any real passion or justice on their side. The moment they made their politics out of relentlessly declaring what was now officially forbidden, they created the very people they needed to hate most. In fact, from a certain point of view, you could say the reason for developing the politics they did was precisely the kind of person it necessitated. And that was the kind who would come to love and heil Donald Trump.

These persons—whatever we want to call them; some a bit early on with the IDW, then the “new right,” then MAGA nation, Trump himself, the “anti-woke”—merely did what they were supposed to do, according to basic human psychology. On seeing what was being so censoriously forbidden to them, they resolved to become that very thing, and to love being that thing. Progressive anger became their kink and figuratively stomping on these hordes of deplorables in turn became the new progressivism’s favorite fetish, and together the two of them carried on the most pathetic and political sadomasochistic dance conceivable. And now that the Trumpian Right has accomplished the coup all this backed up energy was headed towards, I predict they’ll soon be as confused and exhausted as the Democrats are. It’s an awful picture, yet I can think of no other way to put it: the entire attitude post-election seems to me to be essentially post-ejaculatory. We’ve been anxiously invested and secretly turned on by a carnivalesque libidinal ritual, being hacked out by two very unsexy parties, and now we’re all emerging from a vaguely masturbatory haze to discover how sordid and sad the whole thing was. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” is how Shakespeare had it in a sonnet 400 years ago. And as with all Shakespeare, there can be no better epitaph. An era is over. The next may be worse. But at least we can hope it won’t be that.

And so it seems to me that part of my job now, as the writer of this small Substack with few grand prospects (but some latent ambitions), has to be to survey the land and resolutely say what I think no one else is saying. I can’t really do otherwise. At least, I mean, than to say what I don’t see anybody else bothering to get across, in the mad rush for explanation. So I want to take this moment to have my own sort of political coming out. Because my “political journey” these past few years has been one long, slow sloughing off of all political convictions whatsoever. All I care about now is getting very, very serious about not taking everything so seriously anymore.

What I really mean when I say I’m a Marxist.

2. “And How Does That Make You Feel?”

So the project is to discover how one feels, after politics. We’re in a period of toxic referendum. If you have half a brain and any raw human spirit left in your poor sore bones, surely your best possible use of this moment is to stop and be quiet and think: What do I really feel? What can I trust? Why have I spent so long listening to pundits pretending to be artists, and artists forgetting to be humans, and men and women who walk around with heads full of certain thoughts and the awful itch to enforce them? Well, I’m here with a brief antidote, and a quick attempt at a classically Substackian thing: the Take-less Take.

Behold—ecce! Substack has achieved its goal, and now there’s an endless menu of options for you to choose about how to feel, for takes to argue with, for people to unfollow, or to follow. Will you continue to outsource your truth? Will you continue to let these writers seduce you into trying to be right about everything? Because there are so many miserable, narrow ways of being right. But I’m here to tell you today, gentle reader, that it’s so much more pleasurable, interesting, and fun, to do away with being correct and focus instead on being pleasurable, interesting, and fun.

Do you want to blame the new political situation on trans hysteria? You can, with Sam Harris as your guide, do just that. If that great meditating pinhead of our time is the right shepherd for you, then go to him! Ah—but still you wonder what my own take is? I think no one knows what gender even is. No one ever can. Not even Judith. Though on the one hand, our nature runs so deep it embarrasses us, on the other, people can create out of their own bodies tremendously intricate subjective worlds. Above all, let me now articulate what I’ve never seen anyone articulate, in the dodge between that pendulum swinging from political zeal to categorical hate: the best reason to be broadly pro-trans is because trans people are often very lovely, and their mere presence makes the world more interesting. See how simple that makes things? It’s like queerness: many queer people admit the label can turn silly, and that much of what goes on in its name is ridiculous. But god, do we really want everybody to be the same? To want all the same things? These are not finally political categories, but metaphysical ones. Be fruitful and multiply. Allow the mass course of human life to run into many rivulets—not one current. Celebrate the expanse of possibility, not its contraction. Be on the side of life (and remember that many doctrines only pretend to be on the side of life).

Do you want to blame individualism? You surely can. The Atlantic is certainly trying to get you to consider it. Railing against “individualism” has become just as popular amongst liberals as railing against groupthink. Somehow the same people seem to make both arguments, as in: “Too many people are thinking for themselves, together.” My man Justin Smith-Ruiu just wrote a devastating exploration of this (among other things): given how concerned they are with being in charge of what is correct, liberals and progressives have believed themselves to be naturally allied with science, yet somehow also with revolutionary politics. The issue is, however, that when lots of people decide they want to think for themselves and abandon the experts, they don’t always start thinking the way you might want them to. They start to want inconvenient things. And as for revolution—well, revolution is a tremendous way of becoming sure of what you want. And as a lapsed leftist, the more I age, the more I agree with Oscar Wilde: “The problem with Socialism is it takes up too many evenings.”

(Honestly, if you want to blame anybody, blame Ayn Rand, Rupi Kaur, and Jacob Collier—three of my picks for the worst “artists” of the last hundred years. A demon, a poseur, and a robot: the three things which our glorious Muskian future intends to turn us all into.)

But you see where I’m going with all this, don’t you? If I have any project whatsoever from here on out—if there’s any project that I think is actually worthwhile for any of us to be carrying on with—it’s to do the important things outlined in that Adam Phillips quote I pasted at the top of this piece: “Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. Think of the languages you prefer…” My vulgar picture of the election is just me trying to think up a different language. And you know, looking back at it now, I don’t even like it. I’m not a naturally vulgar person! But the experiment was done and now I know that.

Tears b/w/o Man Ray.

3. “But Sam, what is the Fundamental Thing?”

This is the fundamental thing: the world remains immense and open for exploration. Our lives are open for exploration. I’m riding high on this Adam Phillips kick precisely because he gets it so—dare I say it—right. Our world is unfathomably complex, yet profoundly simple. These are not just poles: they are simultaneously true, and the universe dances between them every instant. In fact, all true things are beautifully opposite to themselves. We don’t have to choose between individualism and collectivism, or between being on the giving or receiving end of anyone’s political kink. I am me; “me” is not much at all. All I know is what I’ve seen; what I’ve seen hardly constitutes all I know. Life is a dream; life is frighteningly real. But if you pick just one of these things to believe, everything becomes impoverished. You cannot pick—life lives in motion—life is in the dance.

All our convictions—all our morals—are just as likely to stunt our growth as they are to stimulate it. And most of the things we want, or say we want, are things we’ve chosen only because we wished to be the kind of person who wants these things. It’s often seemed to me as simple as: some people believe in God because they want to, and some disbelieve because they want to. Atheists and materialists, alike with religionists and idealists—we all believe the thing we want to believe, and our believing is a way of deciding what we should want. Happiest are they who can understand that compared to most, this is a perfectly reasonable reason to believe in something like God, or to disbelieve in something like God.

Of course, the things we want are always ways of subduing other possibilities, other visions. Wanting to be right is only a way of never being creatively wrong. Wanting to win is only a way of being the kind of person who doesn’t lose. It won’t do to believe in nothing, yet every belief easily becomes a hinderance. The only way to break the loop, the only way out, is to make desire, action, and belief somehow one wonderful thing—your fate, perhaps, at which you’re running full speed, heedless and alive.

What we have at the moment, it seems to me—in the culture at large, and on Substack, too—is a rare opportunity to stop and think. To consider what we really want, to acknowledge that wanting is slippery and never certain. If anything, there’s a moment to think about what we’re doing trying to make art. Why we’ve put up for so long with the idea that art can’t be genuinely volatile, or crazy, or even wrong. It has to be, and no desire to be socially or politically correct (whether from the Right or Left) is ever legitimate. Art has to be volatile, it has to risk being wrong. How else will we ever know how we feel about it? How else will we figure out what we want?

I may not have any grand answers but I can say this: the future, as I see it, must begin in genuine experimentation, and genuine thought. Far from the pressures of politics, or academia, or sociology. Let’s have a Happening. Let’s get down to it, really figure out what we’re on about. No political convictions. No miserable games. No sexless, censorious forbidders forbidding sexless, angry rule-breakers.

That’s my aim anyways. There will be more things to come here at Vita Contemplativa. Probably a lot more personal essays and weird screeds. The fictions and lists are fun but they court few readers. And part of the experiment here is being very honest about my own nature, as a writer and a person. And part of that nature is a wild, keening, frankly embarrassing, ambition. The world is open for play; I have much to do and to make; I can’t sit on my hands pretending I don’t want to play for the biggest possible audience. I’ll be back soon with another follow-up on the misery of the last few weeks (both electoral and personal), in a piece called “Against Despair”—and I’ll soon be contributing again over at The Hinternet to their current “Future of Reading” series, so stay tuned for that. Until next time, thanks again for reading. And now some life-affirming music to play us out. Peace.