On emptiness

A feeling of emptiness, lack of meaning, the never ending search for ones "true" self, they are perhaps what best characterizes the modern Zeitgeist. The symptoms are many: expressive consumption (buying to satisfy emotional needs or needs of belonging), the grotesque inflation of expectations regarding erotic relationships and child rearing, new age cults, a surge in national chauvinism. Reactionaries have been preaching for some time now that we need more religion, more indoctrination, more propaganda, more ideology. They believe meaning is socially created and from that assumption they derive the demand for social institutions that create meaning. Truth be told we need more indoctrination like we need another hole in the head. We have way too much of it already and most of it of the wrong kind: the one that tries to convince us to ignore our interests in the interest of the powerful, that tells us our hurt is not real, that our frustrations are imaginary, that our anger is unjustified but most of all that we should not act on our feelings.

This is perhaps the most pervasive and most diabolic effect of propaganda: not that it changes our opinions and attitudes (almost a century of scientific investigation has demonstrated that propaganda is terribly ineffective at changing attitudes) but that it constructs a wall between perception, feelings, knowledge on the one hand and action on the other. To change someone's attitude you need to provide proof, you have to argue, you have to inform, you have to plead, and even then the results are unreliable at best and only make themselves felt in the long run. To change behavior turns out to be much easier. Change the structural conditions and people behave differently (not that hard to do for someone acting from a position of power). Associate the feelings of people with the action you want them to perform - that is why washing powders don't clean clothes anymore, at least as far as advertising is concerned, they create happy families, just as toothpaste makes you attractive, SUVs make you powerful, and Marlboro cigarettes make you independent. When you trick people into changing their behavior, you get their attitudes for free, since people try really hard to convince themselves that an action they had already performed was justified (another thing scientific investigation has shown us). To change their attitudes after they have acted is easy, since at that point they want to be convinced.

The all-pervasive feeling of emptiness is a consequence of this rift between cognition and feeling and action. Indoctrination will not cure it since it is actively contributing to the problem. The argument also rests on a flawed epistemology. Meaning is not created by ideological apparatuses, but by action. The only proof we have that the world exists is because we are able to interact with it meaningfully. All the philosophical proofs that we can not be certain of the existence of the world will mean nothing to the person who has just bumped his or her head against a wall. They can feel the pain, they can not feel philosophical arguments. All the sermons of love for ones fellows will remain futile as long as our society is structured by a logic of competition instead of cooperation. The world is meaningful insofar it is able to satisfy needs and desires: sufficient food and shelter (a minority of people on our planet is able to enjoy these), safety and belonging. A society in which the achievement of basic needs is based on a bellum omnia contra omnes can never lead to happiness. Meaningless of life today is quite objective. The problem will not be solved until a humane society has been built. Until that day our best bet is the happiness ensuing from the anticipation of that better world, the belonging we feel when we are building it together.