Conclusions

An introduction to cultural hegemony

It is a shame that I have not read, let alone fully understood, Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on cultural hegemony. I apologise in advance to any expert in Gramsci for how I will abuse the terminology in this post.

The basic nature Gramsci’s ideas seem irrefutable. Everyone acknowledges we are products of a system. People say it and then they forget its material consequences as if they never said it and as if it never happened. It seems that by the act of acknowledging that there is a system, the system ceases to affect us. There exists an economic order that dominates our broader social and cultural lives. We continue to be moulded by the currents of said domination throughout our lives. The sharpness of its effects may gradually reduce as we age, but only because the difference between what the system wants us to be and what we are is much reduced by a certain age.

We refuse to believe that we can be manipulated as people. We tell ourselves convenient lies that convince us of our agency. Furthermore, we struggle to comprehend the mechanics of a system that is capable of manipulating such a large number of us simultaneously. It is hard to reconcile the fact that nobody can really force us (mentally) to do something we do not wish to do with the fact that entire populaces are herded mentally like cattle. All of this is worthy of multiple sociological theses in their own right and I will do well to not claim complete understanding of it all. But the purpose of this vague introduction to this post is to suggest to the reader that our actions in daily life are moulded by the desires of an economic order that imposes upon us in turn a social and cultural order. This situation arises in a rather organic manner independent of the direction of any one person or body. But there is an invisible hand that is able to move the cultural and social order and it is not the hand of god but of capitalism.

Planned obsolescence

Every modern product has a usage life beyond which the product is expected to become obsolete. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in technology; Moore’s law suggests that computing power doubles every 2 years and so it seems necessary to replace our old gadgets with new ones at the same pace. Apple got into trouble not too long ago for slowing down older iPhones intentionally to spur sales of the latest models for example. Clothes are not designed for long term or practical usage. Fast fashion is the name of the game and trends must be artificially created every new season with a demand to boot. A convenient way to push demand is to simply make clothing that lacks resilience. God knows IKEA furniture is not supposed to become a family heirloom.

There is a price associated with such consumer habits beyond the currency we depart with. The intrinsic human cost in terms of the misery of workers in the producer nations, the environmental cost of such rampant consumption, and the cultural desertification we affluent consumers in the West experience is not really factored into the price. I wish to talk about this cultural desertification. More specifically how it has a noticeably negative impact on generation Y or millennials as we are referred to in the realm of romance.

Childish tendencies

The purpose of introducing cultural hegemony and planned obsolescence shall hopefully become apparent now. Our economic order manipulates and moulds our lives in an insidious manner. It is not enough that we must live in an age of overabundance and yet still rent our bodies for at least half of our waking lives merely to survive in an increasingly cutthroat world. It is not enough that people controlling this order on the back of ill-gotten wealth control the fate of billions through their economic yoke. We must be forced to embrace this servitude and praise the system that subjugates us. We must be made to behave in a way that suits the interests of this economic system and replicate its rotten personality of rabid, aimless and self-defeating consumption. This is the essence of cultural hegemony: complete domination of mind and body. Frantz Fanon, in his seminal work on the psychology of colonised peoples “Black Skins, White Masks”, talked about a similar domination of the colonised person’s mind. The colonised person must hate his or her own skin, culture and existence. The colonised person must mimic the coloniser in every way to wash away its inferiority. Similarly, capitalism makes us hate our own skins and tells us to overcome it by serving it ideologically and monetarily.

People may find this description absurd and hyperbolic but people living in a dystopia find any suggestion that they live in a dystopia absurd. Much like bigots or very devout religious people, when you have so much of your own self invested in the essential truth of the way of life you’ve over the course of your life, it is painful to accept that you may have been misled your whole life. Even more so when you are in the dominant majority, there is simply no incentive to accept ideas that shatter the framework of your existence. Yet at every stage in history, if one thing is clear is that a stable, quasi-static framework of existence is almost certainly full of shit. People who obediently accept the framework, try to justify it, apologise for its horrifying failures and underplay them are destined for the dustbin of history.

Just as high frequency algorithmic trading tries to make profits on the most slender changes in the value of stocks, thereby blurring the meaning of real value altogether, today’s economy is coming up with ingenious ways to prolong its battle against an insurmountable challenge: achieving infinite growth in a finite world.

The West is the climatic battleground for this fight against the limits of nature. Blessed with the affluence gained from centuries of global oppression, the pockets of Westerners are the deepest of them all. To make people part with their meagre wealth (meagre in comparison to the oppressor class that owns more than half the world), the corporate world wages a relentless battle against our minds. The goal is simple: to bring the child out in people.

Freud is reported to have said: “Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them”. A key differentiation between adults and children is the ability of adults to delay gratification. The ability to see a bigger picture, be patient and not giving in to impulse. If adults act impulsively, they are often referred to as child-like.

Boring people and flavourless romances

It is odd that in the most liberal and most wealthy societies in the world, younger people are having a harder time in matters of romance. Yet I can attest to the dystopic quality of romance in the West first-hand. The current generation is living in a moment of utmost precarity. There is no optimism to drive us towards a goal and we live in a dystopia built on consumerism. In post-war periods there has always been rebuilding and rejuvenation of society that necessitates the growth of families. But the modern context is the polar opposite of that. We live in an ageing, overpopulated society where the balance of wealth is acutely tilted towards the generation born after the war. As young people in the 21st century, despite a record proportion of our generation having had tertiary education, we are facing down the barrel of economic uncertainty. Even those of us who do find promising careers we feel the constant pressure to prioritise not ourselves but our masters; those who are in charge of our pay cheques and progression. Gone are the days when you could reliably have the prospect of a career and a home. So, on the one hand, I guess we are too stressed to take the psychological risk of attachments that may become distractions from the rat race imposed upon us.

But in my view, the cultural forces are of equal if not greater importance. I say greater because in the past people have managed to overcome much longer odds economically. Today’s cultural drivers are designed to make atomised and boring consumers of everyone. There is something grotesquely unromantic about this. My claim is simple. On the one hand we feel the boot of economic insecurity pressing against our gullets and on the other we are being moulded into boring, short-sighted, self-gratifying kidults.

The consumer monoculture takes away the individuality of people in a most nefarious way. On an individual level you can find plenty to distinguish people. People have distinct likes, dislikes, traits, hobbies, talents and passions. I hold the view that almost nobody is truly boring, only that their full personality does not thrive or find adequate expression in given environments. Growing up, I was the loner kid at school spending his breaks alone without any friends. That image of myself is very much at odds with who I am today.

Since when did this boring bollocks become a substitute for a personality? Isn’t it remarkable that in an era of unprecedented tolerance people seem to be unable to express their personalities? This is before we even consider the way things play out when you do finally match with someone on these online dating platforms. Now, I admit the way people behave very differently on Tinder than they would in person. Is it really representative of people? I would argue that your behaviour when there are no consequences are actually a very good way of gauging you as a person. When you can unmatch someone or ghost them do you treat the other person with respect or do you behave like a child that can move on to the next match? This is just one example and this blog post is close to 3000 words as it is. Argue with me in person and I might pull a few more examples in millennial dating.

I claim that there is a connection between the manner of general consumption in the economic system and this behaviour that’s so common in modern dating. Just like we can replace or dispose of everything else we buy, we can dispose of any human connection. We have such an oversupply of humans to come into contact with in this hyperconnected age that our relationships become so dilute as to be meaningless. Relationships, whether platonic or otherwise, require patient effort and putting your skin in the game. There is a reward for successful relationships and there is emotional pain for unsuccessful ones. It means putting yourself out there and risking something in the first place and that requires emotional maturity and bravery that our culture simply doesn’t encourage.

When all around us we find signals encouraging us to act in a short-sighted, impulsive and superficial manner, is it really surprising that our friendships and relationships demonstrate the same qualities? We lose respect for the feelings of fellow humans, we fail to realise the emotional slight of ignoring someone or giving them half-baked or unsatisfactory explanations for why we do not wish to escalate a relationship of any sort with them. It is so much easier and convenient to simply ignore them as if they never existed in the first place. Rather than admit a fear of commitment, discuss the psychology of certain actions or thoughts, we retreat into this comfortable shell of emotional irresponsibility. We lack the courage to speak freely and honestly. We struggle to face socially challenging situations and would rather cower behind our digital filters.

It need not even be a majority of people who must instigate the trend. It takes only a significant minority of people to adopt this behaviour such that it makes the overwhelming majority become wary. Wary of emotional shocks such that it is better to be lonely than to have hope that is then crushed. Thus, people become emotional prisoners of their own anxieties. Anxieties which are constantly reinforced by the consumer monoculture to make them spend money or energy for things they do not need, to fulfil superficial needs whose fulfilment does not remove the void people feel in their hearts. The consumer monoculture thus attacks people’s psyche in a pincer formation. The consumer monoculture encourages base desires and discourages emotional maturity to facilitate its ongoing existence while generating anxieties among people that make them particularly vulnerable to the effects of uncaring, thoughtless behaviour. Once this cycle is established, it cannot be broken without expending significant intellectual and emotional energy. Furthermore, an individual will struggle to rail against the cultural hegemony of the consumer monoculture. The best of us can be driven to despair and loneliness in such a world. To overcome this cultural hegemony is akin to overcoming the laws of entropy in the universe.

Frantz Fanon famously wrote: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”

Our generation must discover its mission. Before we can fulfil or betray it, we must discover this mission. Our mission, as a generation, is arguably the most challenging of them all. We must notice our chains of social and cultural domination, we must overcome them, and then we must take stewardship of the environment and preserve it from the unprecedented threats facing it from humankind itself. We have not yet discovered the shackles of the consumer monoculture imposed upon us. We do not notice the cultural hegemony imposed upon us. We can’t even find love in a dystopic world because of this hegemony and our mission is far greater than that. Our mission is to preserve the future generations of humankind from self-imposed destruction.

No pressure…

We live in a boring dystopia in the West. We are fortunate that ours is boring whereas that of others is full of horrors. But we are mentally enslaved by this dystopia that is obsessed with superficial economic growth without any care for the intrinsic value of life, individuality, or environmental integrity. This cancerous economic ideology imposes upon us a cultural force that seems to an observer insurmountable. It makes us boring, emotionally immature, uninteresting and incapable of finding meaningful relationships (romantic or platonic). Despite living in an era of unprecedented social tolerance and sexual freedom, we find our generation struggling to take advantage of the freedom that can be afforded to us in this era. In part due to our economic anxieties and equally in part due to the cultural drivers imposed by the consumer monoculture, a depressing cynicism dominates our pursuit of romance in the modern age of hyper-connectivity. Much like everything we buy is supposed to be disposable and meant to be obsolete in a society where consumption is supposed to be constant and fulfilling superficial ends, our romantic pursuits follow a similar framework. This cultural trend in our romantic lives is a branch of the greater cultural hegemony imposed by a consumer monoculture that aims to prevent our generation from finding its generational mission and fulfilling it. There has never been an era where the necessity to overcome this hegemony of modern capitalism has been so imperative to the survival of the human race.

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” — Rosa Luxemburg

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