It isn’t just that the winners write history, but that they always portray themselves as the underdogs. History looks to us like one long David and Goliath story. And so will the “Mayor Pete: America’s Mayor” Netflix original docuseries accompanying his election victory.
One of the central problems of modern life, as Georg Simmel sees it, is that the will of the individual to assert himself is resisted by the social forces exerted back on him by the “social-technological mechanism”. He is free to be himself only to the extent that his uniqueness has a useful function in his society.
The problem was just the same in the state of nature. He was totally free to be his unique self so long as his uniqueness aided in his physical survival. His species then reaped from him his advantageous distinctiveness and spread it into successive generations until it was no longer his own. His traits become standard by virtue of their success. This phenomenon takes on a new form in modern life.
Modern man’s will to assert himself is leftover from his days of having to outwit his predators. What he has available to him as an outlet for it is the markets and the cultures surrounding them. They provide him with the resources he needs to compete with others in games of status and shame. Everyone is free to assert their worth by acting out their identity within the parameters set by the markets. Look at this formula for the typical ad on television to see what I mean:
The ad starts off reminding you that you are a strong/confident/interesting/etc. person
It tells you this company happens to make a product for strong/confident/interesting/etc. people
It then suggests you ought to buy this product because you are strong/confident/interesting/etc.
If you were compelled by the ad, then you choose to buy the product. For their sale, the advertising department gets a nice bonus at the end of the year and you get a marker of your worth in the games of status and shame. Everybody wins.
You might see through its bullshit if you weren’t compelled by the ad. The fools who buy these products are little more than actors on a stage, you think, their shirts are costumes and their coffee makers are props they use to act out their identity. You must think you’re smarter than them. Unfortunately for you, the Identity Industrial Complex’s tentacles run deep and they got a hold of you too. These markets don’t just sell you physical objects. Beyond your style of dress and how expensive your coffee is, you assert your status through your taste in music and by having more interesting opinions about politics than the next guy over. Somebody somewhere is going to make a buck off your will to assert how much smarter you are than the cretins who buy t-shirts to communicate their identity. You can’t escape it.
The remark about politics is especially true today, since the 2010s when people started saying unironically, and without any indication of feeling shame about it, “I only get my news from The Daily Show.” The boundary between politics and entertainment dissolved away at this point (the United States has a Reality TV star president!) and now one’s political orientation has become a taste in entertainment for those who are the most self-important among us. Increasingly, your utterances about political matters become a significant part of the script you recite as you play your public character.
In the same way that the species reaps the advantageous distinctiveness from its organisms, the society reaps the best memes from its individuals. The games of status and shame have us running on a hamster wheel that generates an indefinite supply of profit out of our will to assert ourselves. Once we finally feel that we have established what makes us individually significant – we have the best style of clothes, the best taste in music and coffee, and the most interesting and informed political opinions – we start noticing more people around us are wearing the same clothes, drinking the same coffee, and uttering those brainless talking points you’ve moved on from in 2018. When will it end? When will these inauthentic zombies stop copying me? You think to yourself as you read an ad for a new social media site for the small number of people who are only as interesting as you.
The task of asserting yourself is an eternal effort. The Identity Industrial Complex has its markets rooted deep in this never-ending cycle. It makes its money mass producing unique identities for its consumers. Simmel doesn’t describe the situation in quite this language. He wrote his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in 1903, but everything he describes in that essay is salient to the contemporary problem I just described. When he opens his essay saying that this will for the individual to assert himself pitted against the social forces which flatten out individuality is a fundamental issue to society, we can see that it still holds true today. I’m going to spend a few essays dissecting “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and finally return to explaining that little quip I made about Mayor Pete in the opening of this essay. Once we lay out the background of ideas that are embedded in Simmel’s essay, we can talk more about the relationship between politics and the Identity Industrial Complex.
