It is hard to talk about America’s problems sympathetically, because we are so wealthy. There is a bitterness to American critique. Even our poor are wealthy, so wealthy that their incompetence is embarrassing. Our wealth has itself “deconstructed” us, exposing a collective guilt behind suffering that echoes the throes of biological attrition. We apologize for those who don’t vote, calling them “disempowered by the system,” as if their failure to participate was not part of “the system.” So much was expected from the escape from attrition (oppression, poverty, disease, and other incessant suffering and mortification) that we are ashamed to talk about our problems; we are not supposed to have them as free and well-fed citizens. We have in fact looked to the victims of attrition for guidance (Third World intellectuals), as if they were closer to wisdom by virtue of their proximity to attrition. We are ashamed, I think, to have failed the gods, steeped in Ho Hos and wine, our poor people declining on poor habits and bad diets, Nintendo, Reebok and cocaine: free, fed, even educated, but still fallen, neglectful, and neglected.
Wealth has led us average men, us ex-workers and farmers, to nothing, to the terror of empty freedom. When we are not working, we escape. We have escaped into catatonic trances, absurd hobbies, consumption, television, and hemp, or we have bred our own bodies like prize dogs and Frankensteins, obsessing on stair machines and ugly solo dancing in groups like waiting armies of naked sleepwalkers. The Escape from Freedom has not ceased with the demise of Fascism: it has become personal and private.
Learning is the specific challenge of freedom, and freedom is not easy. In this tragic sense, Marx also underestimated Democracy’s competitors (whom I like to call “The Guilds”), who have learned (with the help of your Great Uncle) to intervene into and obviate individual learning in order to leverage or derive surplus-value like soul-juice from individual, “alienated” labor, which must be given up voluntarily due to (historical) constraints put on capital by the State. By accommodating the adolescent’s demand for a perfect parent to refacilitate its childhood, the Guild structure enables re-inversions (human vice appearing as an inverted, emergent virtue) that correspond to the principal inversion Britt has unearthed in his essay;
"...the persistence of power is only possible insofar as obedience appears, to the enslaved subject, as what it is not: liberty and power. (VS, p.7)"