The Necessary Hostility

I struggle with how terrible things are, and with the amount of hostility that I think is necessary.

I’m not talking about performatively scolding individual people, about “cancelling” whoever is the scapegoat of the day, or of constant displays of narcissism disguised as emotional fragility. No, what I think is necessary is a ruthless hostility towards everything as it now is. This is as true of politics as it is of art.

In politics, it’s popular to moan about things being bad, but most of the time that simply means moaning about Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. That’s irrelevant. Trump is a blip, and once he’s gone the exact same policies will continue and the media will stop caring. And that’s precisly my point. It’s not Trump. It’s not Biden. It’s not Bolsonaro or Merkel or whoever. It’s the whole damn thing. Everything is so profoundly rotten, from the press to the courts to this parody of democracy we inhabit, that even expressing that rot in the conventional language of politics is misleading.

People panicking about the rise of fascism are missing the point. Things are much worse than that. We’re looking at the slow, miserable, drawn-out collapse of modern civilization. We’re replaying the descent into the Middle Ages. It’s not dramatic, like in a film. There are no compelling villains. It’s just the gradual and moronic accumulation of the right material conditions. We worship the algorithm and the algorithm does what it does.

And the thing is, just like back then, everyone wants to believe in the half-baked solutions that don’t require fundamental change. And the system gladly sells you a vast gamut of “radical” figures that will change absolutely nothing. It sells you identity politics, in both left-wing and right-wing flavours. It sells you culture wars. It sells you a million ways of feeling emotionally entangled, because after all this person is a bigot and that person is outrageous and did you know that so-and-so lied and so-and-so cheated and and and?

And if you deviate just a little from the bland centrist nightmare of the last few decades, than you feel like a radical, because pseudo-radicalism is a heavily-marketed brand, and so you think it’s amazing that you retweeted AOC or that you listened to Jordan Peterson and there’s all these emotions and all this antagonism and you are invested in defending your values and you don’t see that it’s the same, it’s all the same shit with slightly different packaging.

Of course you want to scream no, it’s not, because these people are good, and these other people are bad! “I may not agree with all their ideas but…” And so the system gets you, because in this way you don’t notice that they’re just the same bland centrist nightmare reheated and fundamentally they all agree on how the system should be run. One of them will run a fundraiser for veterans and the other for LGBT youth but both will drop the same bombs, both will let you be exploited, and if you ever get any ideas about being free both will crush you in a second.

But one of them will pretend to be sad about it.

And that’s the thing, we need to be hostile, completely and utterly hostile to this entire circus, because there isn’t one side of the ruling class that’s for us and another that’s against us. And most of what calls itself “the Left” just wants to manage the working class in a different way than the Right. But that’s what they are: managers. Having a better manager is not freedom.

But it’s hard to talk about this. It’s exhausting, and it’s alienating. Because it’s so much easier to say oh, did you see the horrible things some conservative said about whoever is the current version of Obama or Tsipras or Corbyn or Sanders or AOC or AMLO or? I mean that’s outrageous, and if the Right hates him, that must mean he/she’s on our side, despite the political differences I have with him/her, and I can’t just let this slide, that would coarsen the discourse, so… and on and on and on.

And I don’t know how you stop this, I don’t know how you break out of that cycle of always falling for the next fucker who doesn’t give a shit about you but whose performative half-arsed “radicalism” gets a response, and then a counter-response, and so on.

And in the arts? God, in the fucking arts.

The sheer gutlessness of contemporary art is astounding. The disconnect between artists and the real world. Between artists and anything that is of aesthetic or intellectual value. The takeover of the arts by utterly narcissistic, even sociopathic middle-class liberals with no stakes in anything except their own careers has had a disastrous effect. The embrace of reactionary anti-humanist ideologies, ongoing since the 60s and culminating in postmodernism, has resulted in artists uniquely incapable of dealing with the present moment in history.

The vast majority of art produced today is insufferably banal, inhumane, and incompetent. It is adolescent garbage. And the state of criticism is even more dire, meaning that good art, when it exists, is generally dismissed, buried, or outright attacked.

“But hasn’t it always been exactly like this?”

That’s the line we’re sold, another variation of the end of history, except in this case history never even began, and any analysis can be dismissed because things have always been exactly the same.

Because God help us if we actually looked at ourselves in history, if we actually thought about things in detail instead of resorting to such pseudo-worldly platitudes, if we actually demanded something of ourselves.

And hostility is the only way. You can’t slowly increment yourself out of banal garbage. The fundamentals are broken. The parody of art we live with, much like the parody of democracy we’re trapped in, is built on a rejection of the very core of what art is. Talent. Vision. A drive greater and more profound than careerism or hollow moralism.

But again, it’s exhausting, and it’s alienating. Because the truth is so much worse than the half-baked criticisms we sometimes allow ourselves. Those criticisms exist to relieve pressure, to at least admit a little bit of what’s wrong and in doing so preserve the existing sitution. We can’t admit just how fundamentally terrible contemporary criticism is. We can’t admit that things that bear moral signifiers are actually often not just banal, but downright misanthropic. We certainly can’t talk about class and the sheer hatred of the working class present in so much art. We can’t admit how many lauded artists aren’t just “not to my taste” but utterly, irredeemably shit. We can’t even admit that most films produced nowadays are just propagandistic commercials aimed at children, more ideologically constrained even than what was produced in the Soviet Union.

What’s your favourite cinematic universe, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman?

We have to be polite. We have to pretend to appreciate the garbage. We have to pretend to agree with the moralistic nonsense designed purely to serve the ruling class.

Oh, we can be angry. Anger sells, if it’s packaged in the correct language, if it’s aspirational, if it’s vague in just the right way. After all, most stuff can be sold. Che Guevara makes a great T-shirt. “I’m an angry oppressed middle-class person who speaks about the Big Issues” is a very popular brand right now. It spawns essays, podcasts, Twitter accounts, books, even some TV shows. Every now and then a politician even says “fuck” about some culture war issue that their base is invested in.

That’s why the necessary hostility to the present state of affairs must be cold, analytical, and profound. Why we must utterly reject the corporate drivel, and the performances of morality, and the quasi-religious misanthropy, and all their insipid pseudo-intellectual defense mechanisms that have infected our thinking.

But who wants to walk that path? It’s nothing but pain. It’s how you get called an arrogant asshole. It’s often how you lose the opportunity to make any art at all. It’s how you get branded a reactionary by people who call themselves progressives while advocating views that belong in the 18th century.

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Maybe if enough people walk that path together. Maybe if enough of us aren’t just hostile to the current state of affairs, but present an alternative. Maybe if enough of us can say no, this is not the way to go. We’ve taken a wrong turn and we need to get the fuck out of here.

Maybe.