Sixteen Volts

When we were sitting in a pub last weekend, we tried to think about what a revolution of nice people would look like. Probably such a revolution would lead to a society that uses harsher punishments because it punishes criminals for their selfishness and dishonesty.

One day I will create a web page about being nice, but it's interesting to note that if society ever started to follow the satanist principle in which good acts are responded with good acts and bad acts are responded with bad acts, nice people would come ahead and be a lot better off.

In some respects this is already true. Even though the anti-nice movement propagates memes about "healthy selfishness" and narcissism and that you shouldn't be "too nice", do the nice people really suffer for being so benevolent so that it's worse than living in a not-nice world in which unpredictability, being fraudulent, covering up important issues and explicit violence are constant?

According to the modern culture, the best person in the world is a drug addicted and violent career criminal. The loose pants (belts or anything else that makes hanging yourself possible are not allowed in prison cells, hence the pants which are always falling) and headrags (some American prison uniforms do not include a cap, so prisoners have to make one by ripping a piece of fabric from their sheets) have certainly established their meaning to everybody past the nursery school age. Some spoken song video that I watched described how horrible it is when a gangster first counts the stolen loot with his girlfriend, and then the cops (or the members of a rival gang, I forgot which one) come to take him away. My heart was almost shattered when I saw this.

The basic idea of hiphop culture is that the life outside prison is made to be as similar to prison life as possible. This lowers the prison's main punishing effect of taking away the prisoner's everyday culture and thus helps to recruit more career criminals. Spoken song singers shake their arms and heads, keep their mouth open in a way reminiscent of morons and keep their eyelids half-closed. No doubt these gestures, which in the past used to indicate that the person had permanently damaged his central nervous system with drugs, will soon become normal behaviour in our country. The habit of endlessly repeating the same word or sentence would also certainly tell a lot to an experienced neurologist.

I am not an admirer of old times, but once I played Fats Waller to my then-girlfriend, and she admitted that those who used to consider Elvis and Beatles primitive music were right in a sense: compared to Waller's jazz music this new popular music was explicitly simple and commercial. The Danimal once wrote that popular music must be simple so it sells, and every time popular music has grown too complex it was forcefully brought down back to its own level, the same way that punk was born as a counterreaction to progressive rock.

Of course there had to be a good reason why these simple musical tunes of Elvises became fashionable. Simplicity itself does not suffice as an explanation, because the earlier popular music had its own surface structure that made it partially easy to grasp. The reason was combining music and way of life.

In the 1950's Americans were afraid of nuclear bombs, communism and other results of abstractions. A culture that emphasized emotion and subjectivity instead of form was born. This culture included the subconscious painter Jackson Pollock and the mentally deficient movie characters such as Brando's thugs and James Dean's cool cats. Subjectivity and refusal to see and understand the whole picture was later condensed to rock'n'roll which from the very beginning embraced breaking stuff and living in a self-destructive fashion.

Rock'n'roll is kind of a parasite of modern culture. As the world constantly evolves to a direction that is more technological and better organized, rock offers people (who tend to be intellectually lazy) an illusion that all this law and order is something that we could get rid of, provided that you enthusiastically jump up and down to the rhythms of the rock orchestra that the capitalist points out to you and remember to spray paint a graffiti on the bus stop on the way home.

For the past 50 years only a few percent of the media that was directed to the average citizen hasn't directly supported this illusion of liberation. Basically the whole world of entertainment is built around it, and in movies and songs people break the rules and are liberated by taking other people into consideration less and less. Schools still for some reason have an image of regimented discipline, but the vast majority of things that are taught in them is directly from the liberation ideology of rock'n'roll.

Now that people would never voluntarily give up the comforts that the Western technology and science tirelessly provide, this world of objective truths and boring facts is doomed to remain with us forever, and therefore the illusion of liberating ourselves from it is so deeply entrenched in the non-technological culture. That is, the liberal arts.

Liberal arts intellectuals are against nice people. Criminals are good, society is bad. Honesty is boring. Minorities are oppressed (although these people never bother to wonder why the vast majority of minorities are not oppressed, and those that are oppressed are usually oppressed by other oppressed minorities too), people don't get to be free, and boring normals tend to look down on people who walk around with a hash syringe in their arm. (*)

The liberal arts don't really have any other possibility, because otherwise the liberal arts couldn't really have an identity of their own that would be somehow separate from the technological and scientific culture. For this reason, about 90% of every "examining the unspoken assumptions" and "challenging the patriarchal values" consists of material that advocates stealing bicycles and smoking crack, at least indirectly.

The common sense of most humans is famously efficient, which is why most people usually understand that the ideas of liberal arts intellectuals don't need to be taken very seriously. At the end of the day, it's just smart not to burn down the house that you paid a lot of money for, and it's similarly smart to delay dying of a heroin overdose at least for a while. Liberal arts provide as an entertainment an illusion that it would be possible for everybody to riot and booze while society still remains as safe, clean and wealthy as it is now. This works for the Joe Average who lets loose with a few beers on the Saturday night, but who on Monday again diligently produces added value and cleans up his dwelling. But then there's those who take the ideas of liberal arts intellectuals far too seriously.

(*) The history of the humorous expression "hash syringe" in Finnish Usenet and blogosphere is so old and complex that I couldn't but scratch the surface if I tried to explain it.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, February 27, 2006 at 2:05 PM