“Even with appliances and devices, the technical outsourcing of family to machines, a single man is also his own wife and maid, his own father and grandfather and son. A laborer and a housekeeper and cook, activities manager and social director. He’s responsible for seeking out his own wisdom and recreation. The atomized self tends toward androgyny, in that it must carry out the work of both sexes.”
From volume VII of the file · Essay & article · 21st century
Themes: family · liberalism & modernity
More from Caleb Caudell
“The human spirit has two remarkable powers: invention and assimilation. Turning the old into the new and then turning the new into the old. The most abrasive intrusion into the body and the most violent disruption of habit are quickly absorbed and domesticated. Almost immediately we lose our connection to old ways, our former agonies. The clanking of machines drowns out years of suffering. New technical programs revise our memories and beliefs in their own image, and the present stands ready to be erased by the future.”
“Although it may appeal to a man’s selfish instincts to sit in sweatpants and type on a computer in a locked room while gnawing on a turkey leg, he’s spiritually, civically and morally improved by embodied interactions, by spending time in public space.
The relaxed fashion and behavior in the home may seem preferable to the formalities of the office, but the current resentment toward a public standard of appearance indicates widespread maladaptation and stunted maturity, a pathological obliviousness to others and a decline of outwardly directed behavior in professional and collective settings. We dress like refugees and mental patients because of mass-produced sleepwear and because we’re not expected to cultivate self-respect or restraint. We don’t value bodily comfort obesity and chronic illness ravage the body, bad choices trouble the soul.
People wear comfortable clothes in public because they’re uncomfortable, because their bodies are panicked and inflamed from decades of nutritional and emotional chaos.
Modern hedonism violently contradicts the sagely approach to moderating passions and limiting pleasures. Unrestrained eating, drinking, drug intake and consumption of media implies hatred of the body, not love of the senses.”
“Division of labor multiplies inconvenience, obnoxious intermediaries, liaisons and representatives. Zeno’s paradox of infinite middlemen between middlemen. People make their living by making my living harder to make. Division of labor is subtraction of organic bonds. Almost everyone I know I met through an economic or electronic exchange. No human contact without an application, contract, a bill or an app. Professional and romantic relationships dissolved with a message, a phone call. Cutting someone out takes less than a gesture. Whole networks pulverized and reformed every six months.”
“Everyone wants everything to be free and available and easy, but then they want everything to be protected and safe and guaranteed as well, and then they also want everything to be valuable and esteemed and recognized as worthy. If you are a genuine outcast, then you will be cast out. You cannot be a normal weirdo, a mainstream deviant. It is one or the other. The life of a mutant criminal freak who has to outrun and outwit power, or a normal conforming person with everyday habits and interests.”
“Human life is miserable in this exact way: you fall short of your ideals but you exceed your low expectations. You are too good to enjoy what’s base but not good enough to fulfill your higher calling. A little more than nothing and a little less than something. No peace in the void, no plenitude of being.”
“I believe in the public good until I’m out in public.”
“More filters on faces, no filters on mouths. On the internet you have no idea what others look like, how they move, sound or smell, even with video access. You know far too much about what they think, or at least what they think they want you to think. Sensory deprivation and noetic overload.”
“Much right-wing internet discourse boils down to a complaint that society won’t let men be men. These dissidents tend to project a fantasy image of the masculine man as an independent figure, bold, risk-taking, creative and authoritative. But if masculinity is predicated on independence and strength, how can it be stifled by women and effeminate men? Pretend patriarchs are more comfortable in their subordinate roles than they’d like to think.”
“No animals harmed in the making of our products except for the animals who eat them.”
“Nothing seemed to happen except what always happened, at its regular time and in its regular way. The traffic got heavy and then it got lighter. The day was hot and now it was cooler. The shadows hid underground and now they oozed up and spread everywhere like spilled oil. It was summer but soon it would be fall. The sun would set and the horizon would glow red and orange like embers. Even Clemons’s crimes and wanderings fit into the fixed order. One broken life did nothing to disturb the workings of the world.
Everything the same even in its changes. Every scrap of matter, every last acorn or spot of sunlight changing just as it should, blending into its opposite or morphing into a being wholly unlike it. In all movement and bustle and chaos and noise there was a profound stillness and silence, something abiding yet unknowable.”
“People talk about the militarization of the police; what about the militarization of the public? Every person armed with machine guns and pistols and surveillance equipment and knives and pepper spray and lead pipes, enrolled in street fighting martial arts classes; townhouses and sedans outfitted with state-of-the-art security systems.”
“Pretend you are an atheist in the Middle Ages. How would you have managed? You could have kept quiet and pretended to go along with the dominant beliefs, you could have expressed your disagreements and doubts in code or obliquely through art, or you could have spoken up and challenged the consensus and demanded recognition of your minority views.
Those are still your options. Most likely you will not be strung up by your testicles or impaled or crucified or burned at the stake or have molten lead poured down your throat or have your fingertips smashed. You probably will not be buried up to your neck in the hot desert sand with your eyelids cut off so the sun cooks your eyeballs and you probably will not have your head slathered in honey so ants and flies eat your face.”
“Reality used to impose itself on you, while fantasy was your own doing. Now illusions flush your brain and reality is something you laboriously construct, rip from the earth and beat out of people.”
“The leftist concept of emotional labor used to describe how service jobs require a performance of happiness and camaraderie. Now the idea is cited in a petulant demand to be paid for listening to your friends and family. Economic thinking has seeped into every domain, corrupted all relationships. We feel pressured to treat coworkers like friends and feel entitled to treat friends and family like clients. A warm smiling face for bloodless transactions and a self-interested logic applied to the most intimate bonds.”
“The system punishes you for trying to provide for yourself until you reach total destitution and madness. Then you’re eligible for assistance.”