Guest Post by Edward Curtin
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit. Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.
When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me. A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.”
He meant it as a complement. I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.
Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start. Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack. This was clearly false.
Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have. My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.
Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss.
In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence” and elicits anger or dismissal.
Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits. They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.
But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to. José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit. While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.
For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past. It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it.
Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying more than their appearances present.
It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not. For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”
Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place. As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand. “It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.” Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.
Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the US government. It is more than a century old. Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution. Today’s US war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.
Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert. For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent.
The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders. Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.
Take the US government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum. Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the US government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.
Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks.
This propaganda supported the US invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the US war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance.
All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control. Their minds cluttered with lies.
Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today. Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health. Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.
In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves.
Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago,
…in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”
Ellul describes the modern person thus:
Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.
And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill. To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves. As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown.
Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.
It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:
One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …
Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda. They tend to be addictive. Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example. Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda. Few can give them up.
And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited. There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought. Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”
Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.
But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
It may end with a bang while many just whimper.
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Excellent … reminded me of a quote from very interesting book, translated from German.
I’ve always marveled at how closely people clung to their things, only to see them disrespected by scavengers rummaging thru them at some future yard sale sometime after their demise. I’ve also seen, and experienced the petty squabbles , that led to a permanent fractures in family unity, over some left behind artifact of the family members life…wounds that never healed.
One would thing the closer one gets to the edge, the less material things have meaning, but that simply is not the case.
People cling to their crap to the bitter end. Apparently, it gives their life meaning , but in the end, it only generates a future revenue for estate sales operators. I know a few of those vultures, too.
“There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one’s name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.”
W. G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn
Great comment and great quote.
I think someone said that same theme long ago…….
9 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
” Tens of thousands of photographs and slides were squirreled into cabinets, closets, and their own file cabinets, each neatly marked with the date and place of their taking. Time in a “bottle” from which one would never drink again – possessing the past in a vain attempt to stop time. These photos were kept in places where their taker would never see them again but could find a weird comfort that they were saved somewhere in this vast collection. Cold comfort by embalming time.”
This a great read. Before my mother died, I took the time to scan and insert into the cloud, nearly 800 photos she had collected over 8 plus decades here on this earth I had already anticipated the me, me , mine family scrabble that would erupt over trivial possessions, but I was totally unprepared for the firestorm that erupted over knick knacks and photo, of which I got none. But I digress.
The point, I’m making is that all the time I put into making theses photos available to family in digitized version, in the cloud, no one gave a rats’ ass. They wanted the material stuff, because after all, it is really about the possession of things that motivate people to do anything. To possess is to be fulfilled and on and on.
I’m not saying collecting picture of ancestors is a bad thing, just a drip in time, which is evidenced at flea markets and antique marts where thousands of old portraits and photos of someone’s’ unknown ancestors are for sale , to collectors, another crazy lot looking for redemption through things.
This trend will eventually go the way of the oil lamp, too, because all young families these days store all their recorded cherished memories on hard drives, thumb drives and cloud storages, which will never stand the test of time as did paper backed photos. I recently lost the contents of an external entire hard drive, I’ve had for 11 years, because their lifespans are measured in years , and not decades.
In the current year, it is not just photos that are stored digitally, that may be lost. It is also all of the knowledge of modern man, too. I suspect that due to future mass electronic failings caused by increasing energy constraints, there will be major gaps in the memories of modern man, with reams of knowledge totally lost that will have to be rediscovered by future generations. This is progress, Luddite . The current year is Zero.
Sounds like the great blackout in blade runner 2049.
After a loved one dies, it’s the “agonizing poignancy of small familiar things” that we want to hold on to. Your grandmother’s apron, your father’s favorite coffee mug, the rocking chair your mother nursed you in, the baseball jacket your dead son wore the night he crashed his car, the old tinfoil star for the top of the Christmas tree. It’s as if by holding on to these things we can still hold on to the love our family gave us and it also somehow measures OUR worth in the family dynamic. I have known of permanent family rifts that never healed because these things weren’t listed in a will or had the distribution of said items specifically talked about beforehand. When you are gone and the last person who remembers you is gone, it is right that you fade from memory. Try doing some good while you are here, endow a scholarship, plant trees, donate to a library, volunteer as a Big Brother to a vulnerable young boy. One person wasn’t sure if he would be remembered so he arranged for anyone who signed the tribute book at his funeral to receive a cash amount later.
There was this rich guy, gave to the church regularly, even had his name on a huge stain-glass window, anyway he was dying so he called the priest, deacons, and family in. Told them to put a big bag of cash up in the attic, and after giving up the ghost on his way to Heaven he would snatch up the bag and show that one could take it with you.
Well he died surrounded by loved ones, afterwards they headed up to the attic, and there was the bag of cash just like it had been left.
The wife said “Maybe we should have put it in the basement”.
Fair? Well, sure. An addict’s monkey is also fairly referred to as “habit.” And if the addict partakes in a gallery of shooters, well, let’s call that “social.”
“I drink to make other people more interesting.” Disintegrate-medicate to integrate is a great idea.
(The piece on the Noslers today. The hunters ethos, or one of them anyway, espoused in the comments section. Just like grammar & spelling & a 1001 other bits of drawer-clogging detritus.)
“Stricture” is a more accurate term. Social Strictures. The pow’er o’ peers (appears to be soooo real)… is the powerlessness of the peeps who peer.
(I had an SS Camaro once. Built it. Super Sport Stricture pretty much choked out the budget. As usual, the way out was through. The snakes go s-ssssss. Which I “collected” for a time, too. I’d walk a mile for a reptile.)
The accumulated hand-me-down clutter-wads o’ “wisdom.” Or political affiliation. Or that’s-the-way-we-do-things-around-here — & you better do it that way, too, boy (I say, boy! ~ Foghorn Leghorn)
“Winter’s coming.” But GOT is always already here & ain’t goin’ nowhere. Always that.
Even people, some at least, who have only ever lived in the summer sunshine have lurking memory-like senses that hay’s gotta be made while the sun shines because the shine is temporary. But the need for hay is permanent.
“Better to have it & not need it than …”
Or, if you came up hard, then you know firsthand. It’s about life. Real life. Not about forestalling, or what comes after, death. Unless you’re a nut, of course.
Books. I have a lot of them. Too many for the shelf space currently available. Don’t care. I keep buying more. Wish I had all the ones I gave away to lighten loads of various moves. Will I ever re-read most of them? No. Matters not in the least. I have them. I am in them. They are in me. But I’d like them all out & up & organized, to be able to refer to them as a connection or memory flashes. And no dwelling is better looking, “decorated,” than one with book-lined walls is. Tool-lined workshops, & kitchens, are also beautiful.
But think on what Gary North thought. He had a large dedicated building erected to house his library. The internet, digitization, caused him to regret the expense of all that hard copy. Inet was convincing people that books were becoming “unfashionable.” Well, have you noticed what’s “been happening” (aka the plan unfolding) on the darpanet lately? Done any searches for things you know used to be “out there” & come up empty?
Fuck the cloud. And lofty generalized positions vis a vis accumulated possessions, too.
(The satellites that revolve around atomic nucleaus me seem disembodied superfluities only to the discombobulated … & not a few of those think my satellites belong to them. Hoarder-nuts, those.)
Unless those are strictly strictured toward the nuts, of course, that’s a waste of loft space. You could put more books up there. Or “loftily” defend property, real estate in which to house libraries, etc – which ordinary people are not actually allowed to own, but are encouraged to pretend they own …
… & the ordinary-as-fook believer-kooks buy it up. Prop(erty)aganda. Big (Short) Lie.
Savings are the source of progress. Capital structure isn’t some walled off compartment where the impulse, practically extinct, resides in pure platonic form. As versus hedonistic dissipation & waste works just fine in “the other compartments.”
There are no compartments.
If you haven’t noticed, dissipation & waste rules the whole compartmental-less roost.
It is based on slow, constant impregnation. And that is based on being a slow vagina. Aka the “victimized emptiness.” Solitude (&emptiness) is source … but that ironic hole-in-one turns out a lotta victim/izers, too.
Is this rite’r slow, or does he think those reading him are? Paternal lookout, “Paul Revere” – the excessive info overloadlords are coming! Save us from that heavy load, pater. Just load those proper packs on our backs, pa.
Like any of this malleability of massman is something new. Massman wants it. He ain’t Cool Hand Luke (who also wants it, but in the negative image pics format, stored in all his drawers & boxes). He ain’t a communication failure. He’s a communitarian collectivist borg node through & through, 3D square, & everywhere.
As usual the point comes down to who fills the hollowheads. If we could just get the right honorable good people into hollowhead-filling positions … well, then TS Eliot’d (1888-1965) have to write jingles for pop tarts & such.
Ain’t gonna happen.