The Secret of the Sages
The first article can be found here...
The Secret of the Sages
Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited by interests that contribute nothing to the transaction but must be paid off before the transaction can take place. Lenocracy is a feature of all complex human societies, for much the same reason that every animal species has parasites: whenever freeloading on someone else’s labor and resources instead of doing the work yourself is an option, someone or something will be found to fill that niche.
Yet societies vary in the amount of lenocracy they tolerate. In particular, when markets are relatively free from the double-headed monster of huge business monopolies and metastatic government bureaucracy, people who don’t want to put up with the exactions of lenocrats can quite often do an end run around them, and this puts an upper limit on how far lenocracy can run amok. On the other hand, once they reach a certain degree of bloat, it rarely takes long for big business and big government to figure out that they can both prosper by supporting each other’s lenocratic habits at the expense of everyone else.
Once this takes place, the balancing factor just described goes out the window. Lenocrats in the private sector can demand more and more out of every transaction, knowing that lenocrats in the government sector will throw up barriers in the way of any attempt to get by without them. Business profits increase and so does the number of bureaucrats, while the costs are shoved off on the rest of society. The only limit to the process is the one that the United States is running up against right now—the point at which the sheer burden of lenocracy becomes so vast that it’s impossible for either the public or the private sector to cope with its problems, much less solve them. Under such conditions, nations collapse and civilizations fall; it really is as simple as that.
Here again, the United States is a relevant example. One of the unwelcome lessons of the Ukraine war is that it’s been decades since we’ve produced a weapons system that can actually stand up to the rigors of combat against a well-armed enemy. The Abrams tank has proved to be a dud; most of the Navy’s recent ships have been overpriced flops; the F-35, our frontline fighter, is called the Penguin by Air Force pilots because it flies like one. At this point our once-mighty defense industry can’t even produce enough 155mm cannon shells to keep the Ukrainian army supplied for a one-front war, much less stockpile munitions for the kind of multifront war we could be facing, and we haven’t yet been able to field a working hypersonic missile—unlike the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and now the North Koreans, who all have them in service.
A nation so deeply mired in lenocracy that it can’t even provide for its own defense is in no condition to swagger around the planet demanding that everyone else kowtow to whatever notions its leadership happens to favor this week. A nation in that condition needs instead to ask serious questions about how long it will survive intact. I tried to raise such questions a decade ago in my novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming, in which the US gets beaten in a proxy war, setting off a death spiral that ends in the dissolution of the United States and its partition into half a dozen smaller nations. More than once over the last two years, I’ve commented that I meant that novel to be a warning, not a manual to be followed! Still, there’s only so much a fringe intellectual like me can do to notify a smug and clueless elite class that their actions are sawing away merrily at the branch on which they’re perched, and it’s a long, long, long way down.
While we wait to see whether our current leadership, such as it is, can muster enough of a basic sense of self-preservation to back away from the edge of that well-marked abyss, certain other questions might reasonably be asked and answered. One of the most necessary is also one of the simplest: how might ordinary people get by in such times, when a lenocracy has become fixed in place but hasn’t yet imploded from its own corruption? It’s not just the defense industry, after all, that is having to make do with substandard goods at vastly inflated prices, not to mention a vast army of special interests battening on ordinary economic activities until they grind to a halt. It’s you and me, baby. What should we do?
It so happens that there’s a simple, straightforward, and highly effective answer to that question, one that’s been proven over and over again in circumstances just like the one we’re going through now. It’s scalable—that is to say, you don’t have to go into it whole hog all at once; you can dip your toes into the water, and splash around all you want in the shallow side of the pool while you work up the nerve to go deeper. It’s also flexible—that is to say, there’s not a single rigid sequence of steps you have to follow, but rather a set of principles that can be adapted as needed to fit your personal situation. What’s more, it also offers one of the few ways to hit the lenocratic system where it hurts.
Excited? Ready to try it out? No, you’re not. I’m quite certain that at least half the people reading this will wail like gutshot banshees the moment they realize what I’m getting at, and a good many of them will post angry or plaintive comments loudly insisting that I’m being unfair, unkind, unrealistic, and probably a Blue Meanie as well.
Now for all I know I’ve got Blue Meanies somewhere in my pedigree, though whether it’s by way of the Butterfly Stompers or those tall guys who bonk people with giant apples is a point on which I don’t care to speculate. Nonetheless the fact remains that there’s one proven, effective way to mess with lenocracy, and it’something that a great many people are already doing, generally without realizing that they’re undermining the system that’s dealt them out so much grief. Furthermore, lenocrats themselves realize that this strategy is a threat to their power and privilege; this is demonstrated by the frantic efforts they’ve made, in this and many other failing civilizations, to coax and bully people into doing everything but the thing I have in mind.
That’s the theme of a remarkable book by historian James Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World. Francis chronicles one of the odder features of the Roman empire in its heyday. Amid all the other threats that surrounded it and all the other crises it faced, its leaders repeatedly lashed out against what might sound like one of the most unthreatening groups imaginable: philosophers.
Now of course that word didn’t mean “academics who specialize in abstract logic-chopping,” as it does today. Philosophies in the classical world were systems of mental and spiritual training that each embodied a distinctive way of life. You could usually figure out that somebody was a philosopher pretty quickly once you met them. If the unfashionably plain and inexpensive clothing and the general air of unobtrusive but unyielding self-control didn’t clue you in, all you had to do was ask whether they’d be at the orgy at Clodius’s on the Calends or ask what they thought of the gladiatorial games on the Ides, and they’d comment mildly that they weren’t planning to go to the one and hadn’t watched the other.
That’s the thing that set philosophers apart in those days: they practiced moral virtue. (That was as true, by the way, of the Epicureans, who believed that happiness was the proper goal of life, as it was of their Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian rivals. Epicurus and his followers had the good common sense to notice that keeping your pleasures from becoming addictions is essential if you want to be as happy as possible.) Philosophers practiced moderation, self-control, and a certain modest degree of austerity. They didn’t necessarily fit anybody’s definition of heroic virtue, but then Roman culture in its decadence set a very, very low bar when it came to virtue of any kind; casual vice was practiced there to a degree you have to go to Hollywood to find reliably these days. Yet these quiet, self-controlled, reflective men and women—yes, there were female philosophers in classical times—were treated by the imperial authorities as such a threat that on several occasions they were driven en masse out of Rome.
The imperial authories weren’t simply paranoid, either. Like most decadent societies, the Roman empire dominated the subject peoples on its periphery through savage violence but preferred to control those in the imperial core using less disruptive means. Bribery was the most important of these. Cooperate with the Roman system, and the system kept you supplied with whatever you craved. The imperial government thus had a vested interest in encouraging ordinary Romans to wallow in whatever vices appealed to them, since those vices were so many levers of control by which they could be manipulated at will.
Philosophers didn’t play along. They didn’t leave themselves open to manipulation the way most Romans did. Worse, by the simple force of example, they reminded other people that there could be more to life than the mindless pursuit of biological cravings. That made them a threat to an increasingly brittle system. The same was true, of course, of that annoying little sect called Christians. Unlike the philosophers, who mostly came from the middle and upper classes, Christians in those days were mostly working people and slaves, but they routinely embarrassed their supposed betters by displaying the kind of self-control and idealism that Roman patricians used to practice in the grand days of the Republic but had abandoned completely later on. Of course they came in for an even greater share of harsh treatment.
It’s worth noting that this same thing happens, in one form or another, in every decadent society. Controlling people by catering to their cravings seems to be a universal habit of corrupt and failing civilizations. Equally universal is the countermove: the cultivation of a thoughtful refusal to take part in whatever gimmick the ruling elite uses to lure people into compliance. In every such age there are wise people who simply turn and walk away. This is the secret of the sages: the only way to win is not to play.
Now let’s step back and reframe this discussion in terms of our current predicament. Am I seriously suggesting moral virtue as a way to counter the modern American lenocracy? In a certain sense, yes. Our self-anointed overlords and their corporate flacks don’t rely quite so heavily on raw biological cravings as their Roman equivalents did, though pornography and the endless, dreary simulation of violence in media have their roles to play. The lever that our lenocrats use to control people is the craving to own stuff. The way to mess with lenocracy, in turn, is to refuse to participate, when and where you can, in little ways and in big ones. Of course that’s going to require giving up some things—and it’s when this gets mentioned, or even hinted, that the screaming starts.
Granted, there are ways in which you can’t avoid dealing with lenocracy. Those vary from person to person—remember what I said about flexibility? The options available to a mildly autistic sixty-something geek like me are going to differ significantly from those open to someone much younger or, for that matter, someone who has the social skills I lack. Nonetheless it’s true that a great deal of today’s lenocracy is voluntary. Various baits are dangled in front of you to get you to step into the trap, and tolerably often those same baits are used to keep you there. Refuse the bait and you walk safely past the trap.
Now of course the entire manufactured pseudoculture being pumped out of various corporate orifices and shoveled at you by the mass media pushes you in the opposite direction. That’s not accidental. Billions upon billions of dollars a year are being spent to convince you that the only thing you can do with even the most pallid and pointless craving is run right out to the nearest available store, online or off, and waste money trying to satisfy it. It’s essential to the scam that what you buy never actually satisfies the desire, or at best does so only for a very short time. To keep the system from imploding, you and everyone else have to be kept in a perpetual state of frustrated craving, forever buying things that don’t do what their marketing claims they will do.
From the point of view of the system, this isn’t optional. The consumer economy as it now exists was a desperate expedient installed right after the Second World War to keep the US economy from churning out more goods than people would buy, and slumping back into the same sort of overproduction crisis that brought on the Great Depression. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, it’s had to keep running faster and faster ever since just to stay in the same place; the offshoring of American industry to sweatshops in the Global South and the accelerating crapification of consumer products are two of many gimmicks employed to keep the game going.
Advertising plays a central role in all this. The point of advertising is to whip up artificial desires, and then shroud some shoddy piece of consumer trash with a fog of delusions that insist that it and it alone can satisfy those desires. That’s why websites have become so frantic about trying to force you to look at their ads; it’s not just that the internet depends on advertising revenue for its very survival, it’s that the entire system depends on keeping you stuck in that trance of frustrated craving, spending money you don’t have on things you don’t actually want, to fulfill desires that were never actually yours in the first place. That’s how the consumer economy has become the most important factor keeping millions of people pinned down in lives of misery, frustration, and boredom.
It can therefore be a useful experience to go through all the stuff you own and note down how much of it has been sitting unused for at least a year. For most Americans, this amounts to at least half their possessions. Figure out as best you can how much each of these items cost, and then compare that to your hourly wage or monthly salary and figure out how many hours of work it took you to earn the money to buy it. (Remember, in doing these calculations, to use your take-home pay, subtracting taxes, health insurance, and so on.) Weigh the enjoyment you get from having the thing against the misery you had to put up with during that many hours of work. Was the purchase worth it? In many cases, the answer is no.
Now add up all the money you spent on these things that you haven’t used in a year. Imagine you had that much money sitting free and clear in your bank account, or if you’re underwater financially, that you had that much less debt hanging over you. Think about what your life would be like, what choices you’d have available that are closed to you now, and how you’d feel about the world if that were the case. With that in mind, were the purchases worth it? For many people, again, the answer is no.
You can take that into account when deciding whether to buy something. You can also use it as motivation to get the things you need at thrift stores, yard sales, and the like, where most items are available for something a good deal closer to their actual value. You can use it when deciding on big-ticket items, since you can often get these much more cheaply if you avoid the gimmicks that raise the price without adding any real value. Finally, you can weigh all this in the balance when assessing those expenditures that provide no value at all—the experiences that aren’t worth experiencing, the useless trinkets who get an illusion of value by way of dishonest marketing, and so on. You only have so long to live before the guy with the scythe taps you on the shoulder, you know, and each dollar you have was bought by cashing in so many minutes of your life. Is the thing the lenocracy wants you to buy worth that much of your lifespan?
Now of course this is where the screaming mentioned earlier becomes impossible to ignore. There’s a reason for that, dear reader, which is that you’ve spent your entire life being soaked in propaganda via the corporate media, and a great deal of that propaganda is meant to convince you that thoughts such as the ones I’ve sketched out here are doubleplusungood and must be shouted down as quickly as possible. Let’s discuss a few of the usual objections now.
“But there are things that I need to buy!” Of course there are. That’s why I pointed out that the strategy we’re discussing is flexible and scalable. Nobody’s suggesting that you have to go live in a cave in the mountains somewhere and live on tree bark. The point is that many, perhaps most, of the things you buy don’t satisfy the desires they claim to fulfill. They don’t make you happy, they don’t make you healthy, they don’t do anything for you at all. All the benefits go to the people who are pushing them on you. Those are the things you can let go of.
“But I’d be so unhappy without all this stuff!” That’s the commercials talking, using your mouth as an amplifier. Talk to people who’ve stopped wasting their money on consumer junk—there are quite a few of us these days, and the number seems to be increasing steadily—and you’ll find that by and large, they’re happier than the people who are still stuck in the consumer trap. Among other things, most of them have money to spend on the things they choose, rather than the things the consumer economy chooses for them. Wouldn’t you like that?
“But people will think that I’m poorer than I am!” Here we reach one of the terrors at the heart of the system. Most Americans live in abject dread of having other people think they don’t have as much money as they do. In a society where your chances in life are very strictly rationed by your income level, that’s understandable. The thing to keep in mind is that between runaway inflation and the crapification of products, you’re already effectively much poorer than you were a few years ago, and it’s only going to get worse. Face that fear, recognize that everyone else is sliding down the same slope you are, and you can learn to shrug off the opinions of the clueless and go on to do something more interesting with your life.
“But this won’t actually accomplish anything against the system!” I mentioned already that we were discussing ways to get by between the time that lenocracy seizes control of a society and the time that it collapses of its own dead weight. That said, the system in which we’re interned is extremely brittle; you can gauge that from the increasingly frantic use of short-term gimmicks like runaway deficit spending to try to hold things together a little longer. It’s quite possible that if any significant fraction of people follow the advice I’ve sketched out here, that in itself could destabilize the system enough to tip it into runaway collapse.
“But there are other ways to undermine lenocracy!” Now you’re talking. There are indeed other options, and most of them focus on a different weak point in the lenocratic system. We’ll talk about those two weeks from now.
Source: Ecosophia
