SOCIETY

So-ci-e-ty n. from L. socius, companion. 1. an organized aggregate of 
interrelated individuals and groups. 2. totalizing racket, advancing at 
the expense of the individual, nature and human solidarity.

Society everywhere is now driven by the treadmill of work and 
consumption. This harnessed movement, so very far from a state of 
companionship, does not take place without agony and disaffection. 
Having more never compensates for being less, as witness rampant 
addiction to drugs, work, exercise, sex, etc. Virtually anything can be 
and is overused in the desire for satisfaction in a society whose 
hallmark is denial of satisfaction. But such excess at least gives 
evidence of the hunger for fulfillment, that is, an immense 
dissatisfaction with what is before us.

Hucksters purvey every kind of dodge, for example. New Age panaceas, 
disgusting materialistic mysticism on a mass scale: sickly and 
self-absorbed, apparently incapable of looking at any part of reality 
with courage or honesty. For New Age practitioners, psychology is 
nothing short of an ideology and society is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Bush, surveying "generations born numbly into despair," was 
predictably loathsome enough to blame the victimized by citing their 
"moral emptiness." The depth of immiseration might best be summed up by 
the federal survey of high schoolers released 9/19/91, which found that 
27 percent of them "thought seriously" about suicide in the preceding 
year.

It could be that the social, with its growing testimony to 
alienation-mass depression, the refusal of literacy, the rise of panic 
disorders, etc.-may finally be registering politically. Such phenomena 
as continually declining voter turnout and deep distrust of government 
led the Kettering Foundation in June '91 to conclude that "the 
legitimacy of our political institutions is more at issue than our 
leaders imagine," and an October study of three states (as reported by 
columnist Tom Wicker, 10/14/91) to discern "a dangerously broad gulf 
between the governors and the governed."

The longing for nonmutilated life and a nonmutilated world in which to 
live it collides with one chilling fact: underlying the progress of 
modern society is capital's insatiable need for growth and expansion. 
The collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe and the USSR leaves 
only the 'triumphant' regular variety, in command but now confronted 
insistently with far more basic contradictions than the ones it 
allegedly overcame in its pseudo-struggle with 'socialism'. Of course, 
Soviet industrialism was not qualitatively different from any other 
variant of capitalism, and far more importantly, no system of production 
(division of labor, domination of nature, and work-and-pay slavery in 
more or less equal doses) can allow for either human happiness or 
ecological survival.

We can now see an approaching vista of all the world as a toxic, 
ozone-less deadness. Where once most people looked to technology as a 
promise, now we know for certain that it will kill us. Computerization, 
with its congealed tedium and concealed poisons, expresses the 
trajectory of society, engineered sleekly away from sensuous existence 
and finding its current apotheosis in Vrtual Reality.

The escapism of VR is not the issue, for which of us could get by 
without escapes? Likewise, it is not so much a diversion from 
consciousness as it is itself a consciousness of complete estrangement 
from the natural world. Virtual Reality testifies to a deep pathology, 
reminiscent of the Baroque canvases of Rubens that depict armored 
knights mingling with but separated from naked women. Here the 
'alternative' technojunkies of Whole Earth Review, pioneer promoters of 
VR, show their true colors. A fetish of 'tools', and a total lack of 
interest in critique of society's direction, lead to glorification of 
the artificial paradise of VR.

The consumerist void of high tech simulation and manipulation owes its 
dominance to two increasing tendencies in society, specialization of 
labor and the isolation of individuals. From this context emerges the 
most terrifying aspect of evil: it tends to be committed by people who 
are not particularly evil. Society, which in no way could survive a 
conscious inspection is arranged to prevent that very inspection.

The dominant, oppressive ideas do not permeate the whole of society, 
rather their success is assured by the fragmented nature of opposition 
to them. Meanwhile, what society dreads most are precisely the lies it 
suspects it is built upon. This dread or avoidance is obviously not the 
same as beginning to subject a deadening force of circumstances to the 
force of events.

Adorno noted in the '60s that society is growing more and more 
entrapping and disabling. He predicted that eventually talk of causation 
within society would become meaningless: society itself is the cause. 
The struggle toward a society-if it could still be called that-of the 
face-to-face, in and of the natural world, must be based on an 
understanding of societv today as a monolithic, all-encompassing death 
march.

