The Nihilism of Everyday Life

The recording artist Nine Inch Nails often uses themes of denial of reality, especially in the form of solipsism, or the belief that the self is the only true being and that all others are illusions or actually mere projections of the self. Interestingly, these themes are often accompanied by the dissolution of the self. Identity lines and ethical boundaries rupture. For the full effect I recommend you listen to the below:

In Head Down he sings:

“This is not my face

This is not my life

There is not a single thing

That I can recognize…

This is all a dream,

And none of you are real…”

In Right Where It Belongs he sings:

“What if everything around you

isn't quite as it seems?

What if all the world you think you know

is an elaborate dream?”

In Only he sings:

“I’m becoming less defined

As days go by

Fading away

Well, you might say I’m losing focus

Kind of drifting in the abstract

In terms of how I see myself…

Sometimes I think I can see right through myself…

Less concerned about fitting into the world!

(Your world, that is.)”

In The Line Begins to Blur he sings:

“The more I stay in here, the more it’s not so clear.

The more I stay in here, the more I disappear.

As far as I have gone, I knew what side I’m on;

but now I’m not so sure. The line begins to blur.”

These motifs in Trent Reznor’s work are very evocative, and reflected not only lyrically but sonically, in the form of eerie, dreamy synthesizer echoes and disorienting shifts in context from static to cheering crowds, from whispering to shouting. This says something about our times.

As humans we desire human contact. We desire co-creation of reality, collaborative participation. True human contact exists through common labor. By acting upon the world outside of ourselves, we become ourselves. By actualizing our will in the world around us, we discover and create who we are. Only through free creative labor can there be any such thing as an “I,” and only through common creative effort can there be any such thing as “we.”

Throughout most of our lives, our labor is not cooperative at all, but competitive. We do not find ourselves in our work, but we are assigned rote tasks by bureaucracies, tasks which are not fulfilling because they do not come from us.

We do not experience people in any kind of unity. Other people devolve from partners in life to personal enemies, from personal enemies to impersonal competitors, from impersonal competitors to obstacle-objects.

Some people are lucky enough to have the money to remove themselves from the rat race. Effectively all they have done is reduced their frequency of contact with meaningless objects. We are superficially surrounded by people, but at a deeper level are alone. Naturally we are drawn to make our lives consistent with what is actually real, and our effective aloneness causes us to seek actual physical isolation from other bodies.

Our lack of genuine human contact begins to convince us that we are not even surrounded by people, but only the illusion of people. We are surrounded by irritating objects and obstacles merely masquerading in the form of people. We may not necessarily become self-conscious, self-labeling solipsists. We may give it a good deal of thought, we might not. Even if we do not consciously become solipsists, we are forced to behave like them. There is no difference between a solipsist philosopher and an ordinary person in practice, except a bit of awareness and clarity. Our circumstances drive us toward increasingly dealing with people only in professionalized, bureaucratized relationships – not human relationships. These relationships are either of commander and commanded between people of different rank, or of competition between people of the same rank. Whenever we speak to a person we are really speaking to a title, an office, a department, a division of labor. If we looked for a person, we could not find them. Nothing feels natural, everything feels foreign. As a great rebel of the 1960’s Mario Savio described, “We are strangers in our own lives.” Naturally this is a depressing arrangement.

This effective solipsism in turns leads to fantasy, denial of reality, belief that life is but a dream. Again this can manifest in the form of actual self-conscious nihilists or people who simply act as if nothing matters. This is because we humans as social beings find our reference points in real human relationships with real other humans. But in society’s current state we do not have very much in the way of real human contact, and therefore lose our reference points for reality.

Finally the perceived collapse of reality leads to a perceived collapse of the self. Without any grounding in reality, we ourselves lose that most self-creating thing: our labor, our ability to have a goal or desire, create a plan to achieve it, and act it out. If there is no reality – or in reality, no meaningful reality – then there is no point in doing any one thing over any other, or in doing anything at all. If there is no point in doing, there is no point in being. We come to see ourselves as passive objects in a system. We are part of a colossal machine built in a forgotten past for reasons which at some irretrievable point have become irrelevant to the actual practiced working of the machine. The machine hums on, running off of our going-through-the-motions.

Our position of isolation is destructive to our humanity not only ideologically but literally. It does destroy human reality, driving us further and further into insignificant and meaningless contexts, making which particular context in which we exist a matter of increasing indifference, Our condition is truly nihilistic, not simply in the attitudes it creates, but in what it actually is. It is truly our destruction, our non-existence as anything more than objects. When we lose each other we lose our anchor in reality, and when we lose our anchor in reality we lose ourselves.

Besides the fragmentation of the human population into isolated individuals, we also have an internal fragmentation of each individual because most of us do not control the content of our everyday labor.

At work, ours is not to question why, ours is just to do or die. Our labor is to focus only on a task, not on its significance. As we accustom ourselves to going through the motions, our human impulses dissolve into floating disembodiment. And of course after the disembodiment comes a break with reality, because if you’re not where your body is, you’re not really anywhere except la-la land. This is not an illusion, either. If you are not in your own life, you truly do not exist, except perhaps as a presence suppressed under the surface, waiting for your chance to break out.

Our experience of what is and our affirmation of what should be, our realities and our daydreamed desires, these two things never touch. We live half our lives as robot-objects and half our lives as ghosts. The divide between our inner and outer lives turns our existence as people into a series of thoughts and passions banging on the outside of real life, spectating and never participating.

College students are not excepted from this situation. Our future employers own us before we even walk in their doors. Our years in college and all the work we do are owned by the people whom we will work for – owned in advance. We are working toward becoming properly-shaped tools in their institutions. In Europe, payment for this training is spread across the entire population via taxes and free tuition channeled through governments. In the USA, we have the honor of paying for our own transformation into tools which meet our future employers’ specifications. Worse than all of this are the many required classes unrelated to our major or our interests.

No doubt all people should be exposed to the entirety of their culture, all of its categories of knowledge. However, a world-integrating vision is something which must come from the passions and curiosities of the student. It cannot be force-fed, as is attempted. Rather than becoming well-rounded people, we endure alienating busy work and are forced to stare for hours at people saying things about which we do not care. To engage in the entirety of culture is the greatest choice, but it is a choice that people must be free to make, especially by the time they are eighteen years of age. Of course in the technical sense no one is required to go to college. There is no law that says so. But this is really a fiction, much in the same way that the rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under bridges if they so choose. For most jobs of any decent life quality and pay, a liberal arts degree is required. We experience this alienation in the form of bureaucracy at our individual campuses but really it is a problem which invades campuses and originates in the private sector. Our alienation at college is only an extension of our alienation at our future jobs.

Living life as a robot is not only a workplace affair (as if the workplace has not now extended to the entire planet, especially in the academic practice of assigning homework). It is something extending to every corner of our culture. A homosexual living “in the closet” lives a half-life, going along and “passing,” appearing to conform to the approved sexual party line of the USA. Behind the scenes, their true passions live a secret existence. Their practiced life and their imagined life do not touch, object and ghost.

And it is not an issue affecting only a fraction of the population. If you were placed with a random set of any Americans and your well-being depended on the group getting along, it would be a bad idea to express any opinions. It would be an even worse idea to actually have them. In polite conversation with new acquaintances, the three forbidden topics are religion, politics, and sex, even though these are the things which are most genuinely interesting, or at least the surest signs of people who have gotten to know themselves and developed into full personalities. This unwritten rule of polite society can be summed up as: don’t have opinions. Worse, this can be boiled down to: don’t be yourself. Carried to its logical conclusion it means: don’t exist. Since these are the laws under which we live from childhood on, many people do indeed fail to exist, having no character or uniqueness (even if they do persist in creating Facebook accounts so they can write about their non-selves).

For many Americans, this undeclared law against existing is everyday life at the workplace – not only the alienation of the work itself, but the co-habitation of the workplace with other coworkers. In the activity which occupies one third to one half of our waking hours, the unwritten rules expect us to adhere to a strict non-participation in society’s exchange of ideas and culture. Once more these arbitrary impersonal relationships reduce our consideration of other people to hostile objects which merely obstruct us instead of as humans with whom we can share life. Work is one of the most dangerous places to be yourself. Fortunately we get to go home after work. Unfortunately the family can be even less welcoming than the workplace to the emerging ideological self. It seems our authentic existence has no refuge anywhere, causing many young people to identify much more closely with their friends, lovers, and occasionally fellow activists whom they have chosen, rather than with their coworkers and families whom they received by arbitrary assignment.

The only way to return to any kind of reality, any kind of “we” and any kind of “I,” is in the uphill battle against our condition. The only way to resist our alienation is through common struggles to challenge policies, situations, or hard-to-finger vibes that hold us down. Interestingly, any serious attempt to overthrow our condition of isolation must begin with the very goal to which we strive: common cooperative creative effort. In isolation, we are ghosts and objects in a bureaucratic hierarchy. In the process of gathering to challenge our circumstances, we are in-the-flesh human animals in a living democracy. In order to struggle against our isolated and powerless situation, we must overthrow its echo in our own minds, solipsism and separation from reality. This is not simply a change of perceptions but also means becoming mentally engaged in the world, in its culture, its politics, its news, its economics. This ideological shift is in turn itself a partial overthrow of a materially solipsistic and nihilistic condition. By weaving reality and humanity and ourselves back together in our minds, we make an important real step in weaving them back together in reality. It is, however, not the last step by any stretch.

Is picking up a sign and chanting an instant cure for the lack of authenticity, human closeness, and authentic human closeness in our lives? Absolutely not. There are no instant cures. The answer is a way of life, a lifelong striving to fight for yourself and fight for others; a lifelong struggle against the divisions between each of us as well as our lack of control over our economic lives. Such a struggle requires a lifelong striving to understand the world – its structure, its history, its buzzing present; a life of watching the news, reading history, thinking about that true science of everyday life known as economics, thinking about politics and why people do what they do, believe what they believe. We must live a life of all the difficulties of working with people, making mistakes, getting feelings hurt, and enduring disappointing failures, but also the occasional golden victory to share and celebrate, and the new conquered and liberated spaces where we can be ourselves, with and through each other.

NJ TRAILER PARK RESIDENTS FIGHT EVICTION AND WIN

NJ TRAILER PARK RESIDENTS

FIGHT EVICTION AND WIN

by Matt Hoke

When Carol Lynn trailer park resident Al Ripa received a letter in the mail kicking him off his land, it didn’t surprise him. Ripa had never received as much as a friendly word or even a notice in the mail from his landlord Anthony Saduk in over sixteen years of living at Carol Lynn. But to other residents of the southern New Jersey trailer park, the letter was completely unexpected – one old woman suffered a heart attack upon reading.

Technically they weren’t eviction notices, but they might as well have been. Carol Lynn Resort had been advertised in 1978 as the only year-round trailer park in the area, which by the letter of the law was false advertising. For whatever reason, Carol Lynn exists in a legal limbo. On paper it is a seasonal resort, but with the petty requirement that for three months out of the year, residents would have to take a week-long vacation. In practice, Carol Lynn “Resort” is home to about three hundred permanent households, consisting mainly of disabled senior citizens and low-income workers.

The letters sent out to the residents in July informed them that New Jersey State Department of Community Affairs (DCA) now designated the wiring in certain trailers as a fire safety issue if inhabited permanently. Landlord Saduk, also a member of the Woodbine city council, informed the residents that he intended to enforce these regulations, and that as of November 1^st, 2009 the water would be shut off and the front gate would be locked. Throughout the course of the affair Saduk hid behind the idea that these had apparently been the rules all along, even if he had happened not to enforce them. Low-income and disabled people who had been living on the site for over a decade were surprised to learn that they suddenly lived on a seasonal resort. Without the money to get up and go, living in trailers not built to be easily moved, the notices were practically a death sentence to some residents. One Tennessee woman had sold her home and moved to Carol Lynn believing it was a year-round site just before summer. Some residents curiously observed that Carol Lynn seemed to be the only site in the state where these regulations were being actually enforced.

Realistically, some changes in the management staff and market conditions allowed owner Saduk to attempt a land grab, forcing the impoverished residents of Carol Lynn off of their sites while real estate was selling hot. Resident and informal leader of the fight-back, Al Ripa, calculated that Saduk could have made more than $45 million from the maneuver. Heavy construction equipment loomed ominously around the park, ready for renovations.

Al Ripa, a retired US Marine and senior citizen, wasn’t about to roll over and take it. Though he had the money to move and had been meaning to head for Florida anyway, Ripa couldn’t stomach the idea of walking away and letting it slide. He was concerned for his friends who physically and financially simply could not move. He said, “What if I threw my dogs out on the street? They’d arrest me for animal abuse. That’s exactly what he’s doing to these senior citizens.” Besides, the evictions were just one more example of trends he had witnessed for years:

They’re a bunch of high-class society suckers who don’t give a damn about working people. All the rich people in this country forget they wouldn’t have all that money if not for working people. We should fire ‘em all from their positions and replace them with workers.

They never have the money for what you want…but when they need to put a building up, or a pay raise, there’s money.

I’m not anti-American, but I’m scared of this government. You never know if one day they’re gonna just come in here and throw you on the street…There’s gonna be a war in this country.

But Ripa, a Marine, was ready for that. The day the notices came out, he began going door to door with plans to crash the next Woodbine city council meeting. Most residents instantly agreed. Some began going door to door with the news themselves. A few sighed and warned Ripa that he was wasting his time and there was probably nothing that could be done about it – mainly those for whom Carol Lynn was only a vacation home.

Within two days the entire trailer park had gone from despair and outrage to a determined anger. Ripa’s trailer became the movement’s headquarters, a buzzing hive of visitors constantly coming and going with ideas about what to do, questions, doubts. Ripa said that a handful of residents half-jokingly named him “the mayor.”

When the city council meeting came on July 17, the air was thick with tension as well more than fifty furious residents packed the usually dull and empty chamber. As if trying to spark the gasoline, landlord and councilman Anthony Saduk opened the public comment session by saying that he could not comment on any discussion related to the trailer park. This was followed by an immediate outburst from the gallery.

The meeting consisted of resident after resident taking their turn on the floor, verbally pounding Saduk for his cruelty and greed while the councilors fidgeted over their relatively light security. Cameras flashed and journalists from local papers jotted down quotes from the torrent of anger. Each resident’s tirade was fueled by Saduk’s arrogance in unconditionally refusing to even speak to the people whom he was trying to destroy, first at the trailer park and now in public.

The mayor of Woodbine, NJ William Pikolycky made the sad mistake of going to bat for the landlord who had excused himself from the conversation on cheap legalistic grounds. At the end, the caucasian Saduk said the meeting was a “lynch mob.” When asked about that comment, Ripa smiled, shrugged and nodded. It was hard to blame him.

Over the intervening weeks Ripa had several phone conversations of similar tone with state officials, including the state Department of Community Affairs chief Joseph Doria. He warned them, “Don’t you know that this is on YouTube?” He reminded them that election season was coming, and that via the internet, friends and relatives as far away as Canada and the west coast knew about the situation.

In a bizarre stroke of fate, news swept New Jersey shortly thereafter that police had rounded up forty-four people in a corruption sting, involving mayors taking bribes, laundering money, and even selling kidneys. NJ Governor Jon Corzine asked Doria to resign behind the scenes. Doria complied. This of course does not prove that Doria may have been taking money from landlords in order to write regulations that could help them evict their stubborn tenants – but it sure doesn’t help the suspicion. Widespread acknowledgement that New Jersey politicians are for brazenly sale also happens to make getting the rules re-written a little easier.

The next gathering to crash was at the office of Democratic NJ state senator Jeff Van Drew. He had pledged to help out the situation. The faces of the crowd set the mood – Van Drew had better come through with something and not try to justify the inhumane rules, or else he would have to face the wrath of the residents as well. After ominously trickling in group by group on the hot, muggy day, about eighty people had gathered to see what this man who claimed to be on their side would say and do. After being told by the county government to “get a lawyer,” they had reason to be skeptical. Some of them were wearing uniforms from low-paying jobs. Many of them leaned on canes, walkers, sat in wheelchairs. A shaded pavilion was reserved for those who needed it. The eighty present stood for more who were too disabled to attend or were asleep after their long night shifts.

Van Drew said that with Joseph Doria’s resignation, the DCA was pliant to popular demands. He had also done some research, and learned (completely coincidentally at this moment of rage and publicity reaching a critical mass) that it was really up to the municipalities to define the regulations for seasonal sites. The Woodbine mayor also happened to be there to announce that Woodbine regulations would now revert to the old rules, which effectively made Carol Lynn a year-round trailer park once again.

A few questions were asked in order to clarify the legalese. There was a moment of suspense as the residents wondered – could it really be? – if at the bottom of all the doublespeak was the fact that they could stay in their precious homes. As the questions were answered, they realized that yes, they were not being thrown onto the streets.

Across the yard swept a breath of relief. As Van Drew’s speech ended, one by one people began turning to each other and talking. Every other conversation started off with one person saying: “Well, we actually won.” A few were crying.

One keen-minded resident said that this was good but it wasn’t over yet. When asked why, he said “Saduk is vindictive, he’s retaliatory…he wants his money.” He then went from person to person spreading the idea of a tenant’s union.

At first Senator Van Drew appeared to be playing the role of people’s champion. That may have even been his intention in his own mind. Either way, he also played the role of damage control for a state government and status quo whose legitimacy is reeling in the face of corruption scandals. He addressed the crowd like he was scolding a wild animal out of its temper tantrum, as if their anger was somehow inappropriate. He said “don’t lash out at the people who are trying to help you.” Nobody had been lashing out at Van Drew himself, so what exactly was Van Drew trying to protect other than faith in a system that almost destroyed the lives of the Carol Lynn residents? Who were these invisible helpers that the residents had offended? Almost nobody of status had taken their side. The Woodbine mayor, likewise, was not a consistent populist. He defended and even spoke for landlord Saduk in the beginning and obviously only caved under the withering mass anger and growing publicity.

In mid-August the residents voted to create a chapter of the New Jersey Tenant’s Organization in order to take on other grievances which had been collecting and building over time. Not least of the complaints is a $700 increase in maintenance fees in the course of one year (with maintenance often not done), which some residents believe is also part of Saduk’s plan to clear people out. A few residents have also faced harassment, such as one who was told that his shed was two feet in height over regulation – and then after working on it was told that it was still two inches too tall and that the owner had to reduce it in two days or be evicted.

But all in all, the people of the trailer park stood their ground. The threatening construction machines disappeared. Those who seemed on the surface to be the most powerless people in Cape May County, New Jersey flipped the situation around, denying the will of a landlord politician and contradicting the New Jersey state government itself.

With Democratic representatives giving up ground in the healthcare and same-sex marriage debates faster than you can say “white flag,” people are finding that if they want to be treated right, they will not be able to rely on the leadership of politicians. But this is not a recipe for despair. The residents of Carol Lynn have led the way and showed us all that if we take a hard line, organize ourselves independently and stand up, we will win. Ripa kept this foremost in his mind during the whole struggle, and wants the world to know what the residents’ victory means:

I been saying for years, we got to stand up, we got to take it back, and it’s not gonna take one or two people. If it was one or two people they’d laugh at you, ignore you. But this is an example of lots of people getting together and making it happen.