Nihilism: Anarchism for Lazy People

There's an interview at Salon.com today with the author Benjamin Kunkel about his book Indecision: A Novel. But the interview didn't happen because the author was on a book tour, rather the interviewer was pondering the lacklustre dating scene in New York City as she perceived it, seeing most of the available men as lacking in ambition or passion or any kind of interests beyond a passing fondness for Star Wars. But while her intention was to engage in the very normal part of female coping of talking through one's complaints about relationships with men similar to the main character in Indecision, the discussion quickly moves on to cover much deeper territory surrounding modern society. Link.

"Indecision" doesn't address the phenomenon of the new male torpor directly. But in its hero, Dwight Wilmerding -- a 28-year-old New Yorker with several roommates, no job or opinions, a listless romantic relationship, and an ill-gotten prescription for Abulinix, a remedy for chronic indecisiveness -- Kunkel has crafted an emblem of the vigor-impaired idlers currently clogging the dating pool.

...

One of reasons I liked "Indecision" was also one of the reasons it made me crazy: that it so precisely portrayed not just the indecisiveness but the lack of energy in men of my generation -- men whom I've known and dated. They haven't had things they loved, or even things they really cared about ...

[Interrupting] Women shouldn't have sex with these guys! As a whole, you should go on some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.

Well, I sort of have.

No. It's like with the labor movement: an individual worker striking won't do it. There needs to be a general strike. If there is not a mass strike against such men they will be able to achieve libidinal expenditure relatively frequently, if not satisfyingly; they'll fail to sublimate their libidinal energies in the way that actually makes men attractive, which is by accomplishing things that may not be what they've always wanted to accomplish but are worthy things all the same, and they'll respond to women with the slack apathy with which one might respond to women if one felt that women were too available to them. Women as a whole should go on sexual strike; this is what I'm proposing.

Why is it up to us? A girl likes to get laid, too, after all. Why should it be our responsibility to go on a sex strike just to energize the male population?

You need to make an old-fashioned masculine distinction between sex and love. Just find some guy and use him. The guys you want love from? Give them nothing.

So is that the only solution? Or is there another way this dynamic can change?

I don't really know. I'm dealing with this from a highly theoretical standpoint. Of course, there is a broader sense of male apathy that I'm sure has causes that aren't just romantico-sexual in nature. It has to do with the difficulty of finding something that seems meaningful to do in the world.

Why would the difficulty of finding meaning afflict men more than women?

I suppose because the fact that nearly the whole universe of jobs is open to women is a tremendous gain in possibility for them. For men, there's been no corresponding gain. In fact, we live in this world that for reasons that are kind of hard to explain, [though] I think Hannah Arendt has gone some distance in explaining them, it seems that meaningful action is harder to take than it has been in previous historical times. I think this is the sense even of people who have no historical sense. It's something that they feel.

Are you saying that the role that men have historically been expected to play has been muddied by the fact that women are now able and often expected to play the same role?

I don't think this has anything to do with women.

No?

No. I think it's something that men sense more acutely than women because men have been actors in the world, as a whole, for more generations than women have been. I think there's got to be a reason that the slacker -- the person who feels that nothing he could do could really be all that meaningful, so why really do anything -- is a more common male figure than a female figure. It must be because the person expected to act meaningfully in the public world, man or woman, has been a man forever. And men then are in a better position to sense some sort of decline in the ability to feel that you can do something meaningful in your life.

So men are responding to broader political issues?

Yeah.

And why is there this decline in the ability to act meaningfully?

Well, the answers that people like Arendt have given have to do with bureaucratization. You could also adduce the narrowness of political hopes in our time. [Historically], someone with a relatively meaningless job might have nevertheless felt he belonged to a very meaningful group, whether he was a fascist or a socialist. I feel out of my depth talking about this stuff. It is very important but hard to wrap your head around. I think men inherit -- if from nowhere else than from the movies -- the impression that in order to win the respect and love of a woman, you ought to be doing something meaningful in the world. And if you can't hold your head up high in that sense, then why ask somebody to love you?

The author has a point about something not being there to make a lot of males want to 'do something'. It's not just in New York City, either. I've come to find many females even around here, while still ambitious and hopeful, seem to be immersed in a social group in which the pool of potential partners mostly consists of lacklustre navel-gazing, unambitious and to an extent nearly lifeless males. I know I often feel like ambition is for the duped.

On the other hand, we find the sharp contrast of the materialistic yuppie jocks who display the kind of hollow greed and destructiveness (towards the environment with their SUVs and towards humanity with their support of wars and noxious, war-making power structures.) that may be what's in turn contributing to the knee-jerk all-encompassing disinterest on the part of so many others.

One starts to ask if what many have come to believe is merely the illusion of happiness is really the only happiness most people might ever get to experience.

Perhaps because we're told to do something, and our post-realizing-the-world-is-a-scam selves automatically assume anything society tells you to do is a distraction or a ploy to sell you something, we might also be rejecting the core of human nature, some kind of drive to fill the those nagging holes in our inner consciousnesses rather than wallowing in them.

It could be that being unhappy because we've rejected everything in our rejection of that which is false is that final revenge of the system.

“whew. that's pretty soul sucking”

Clearly the Man can get along just fine if some of his would-be happy consumers become unhappy consumers.

So how do we destroy the system (a given) without being destroyed by it? Can we keep hold of human ambition and drive and re-focus it? Is there some visible means towards ending corrupt institutions without having to fight them head-on?

I thought that striking out on my own to pursue independent work was the answer, but if I'm merely working enough to support myself, where does that leave me in relation to the world I'm in? I'm I building myself a life vest to keep my own head above the toxic waters? I'm starting to think that I'm going to need to pursue some more deeply subversive path if I'm going to view my existence on this earth as anything other than a parasitic one.

Institutional voluntarism isn't the answer, either, since any body that is permitted to act within the system must necessarily have been neutered by it.

All I know is Jesus was up on the cross when he was just a few years older than me, and I haven't even managed to get one republican really, genuinely mad at me. I'm clearly falling behind.
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