Selling Out

 I was listening to an episode of the Omnibus podcast today that was devoted to the subject of the anti-consumerist movement of the late twentieth century (ranging from Situationism, to No Logo, to Ad Busters, to "monkey-wrenchers," to "culture jamming," and all the rest of it); and as I listened, I became subtly aware of two distinct facts: 1) everything about this movement—its ideology, its methods, its total conviction of its own righteousness—would have seemed self-evidently correct to my younger self, especially in high school. And 2) every one of these intuitions that—as I say—would have seemed so patent to me once upon a time—is now lost to me. 

Why is consumerism bad, again? What's the problem with commodity fetishism? As a teenager, these questions would have seemed to hardly warrant asking. Indeed, they would have seemed self-annihilatingly absurd. "Those things are bad by definition!" And so the tactics of the movement intending to disrupt them—ranging from the unlawful (such as defacing billboards) to the basically innocuous (such as organizing a nationwide "Buy Nothing Day") would have seemed no less self-evidently righteous. But nowadays, even the relatively benign aspects of these movements strike me as wrongheaded, even harmful if taken too seriously. 

Take "Buy Nothing Day," for example. Once, I would have been a glad participant. Now I just think: those are people's livelihoods you're interfering with! Those are people's jobs! A "Buy Union Day" I would get behind 100%. Or a "Buy from Your Local Independent Bookseller Day." But buying nothing does nothing for the people who depend on the economy to live, which at some stage of remove is all of us. "Let's take demand out of the economy!" and "Let's encourage personal savings!" are not in fact the radical and revolutionary slogans people may think they are. These are fundamentally conservative economic ideas that should have been laid to rest alongside pre-Keynesian thought in general. 

What is happening here? Have I just been corrupted? Have I suffered a Wordsworthian loss of infancy's direct insight into moral truth, and allowed my views to be distorted with age by the dominant ideology of neoliberal society? Or has something even simpler happened—in short, have I sold out? 

Perhaps so. Maybe it is the nature of the sold out that we cannot see our own selling out as it is happening before our eyes, like the damned in Anatole France who cannot see their own damnation. But if I have sold out, it has at least been for no thirty pieces of silver, or any amount of silver. I haven't made a dime from my bargain with the devil. Whatever corruption there has been took place not during any epoch in which I served a corporate overlord, but rather in the course of working for a radical nonprofit of unimpeachably anti-capitalist views.  And if selling out is in fact what's happened to me, then all I can say is that the process of doing so is very different from how I might have imagined it on the front end. 

When most people think of selling out, they picture it as a straightforward temptation. A shuffling imp—one of hell's lesser minions—will sidle up to them and offer a contract inked in blood. Confronted with an invitation to engage in some morally degrading enterprise, in exchange for mere lucre, they imagine it will be easy to say no. Example: a friend shared with me a recent column that ran in the New York Times, in which the author answered a question from a law student who wanted to know whether it is okay to work for an evil climate-destroying, Earth-polluting corporation (or law firm serving the same) if one really needs the money to pay off student debt. 

The answer is—or should have been—no! (Bizarrely, such was not the advice the column gave, but that's another story). Guess what, a lot of people need money. That doesn't make it okay to do something evil and harmful to the whole human race. If this is really the choice that people confront in their careers, then it is a simple one. Do the right thing and enjoy the solace of an easy conscience. Besides, if you really hate your clients and believe that they are evil, you won't be a good lawyer to them anyway; you won't succeed at your fancy law firm job; then you will be unemployed and a sell-out: the worst of both worlds. For, as a character puts it in William Gaddis's legal novel, A Frolic of His Own: there is "nothing worse [...] than failing at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place simply because that's where the money was[.]"

But such clear-cut moral stakes are rare—such diabolical clients are not the norm—and thus the choice that most people face in their careers bears no resemblance to the cosmic moment of decision—the binary option of good and evil—that the student's letter to the columnist describes. The more common reason that people "sell out" (using the term in the sense understood by the anti-consumerist movement) is not that they decide to take their blood money and serve Mammon instead of God—instead, it's that they start to question whether business as such is really inherently evil after all. This is what happened to me. 

Of course, some businesses are evil, in the sense that they profit from human misery and/or seek to exacerbate it. I don't think any amount of money on Earth could convince me to advocate for a private prison contractor, say, or to work for one (though even as I type this, I am feeling a twinge of pity (more on that later) for the staff of such enterprises, simply because they are so loathed and have so far forfeited—however deservedly—the sympathy of their fellows). But many other companies just strike me as... morally neutral. Doing the best they can. Trying to make a living. (I didn't mean to start quoting "Ramblin' Man"; that's just what came out). Maybe even they are meeting socially-legitimate needs.

The anti-consumerist movement would hold otherwise. Their fundamental complaint is against the pervasiveness of marketing and advertising in our society. Which certainly is annoying. But is it evil? It seems to me it is fundamentally just an invitation to an exchange. Certainly some products are harmful to people and animal life and shouldn't be sold. But I don't see what's inherently wicked about advertising when the product is—I don't know, say, dish soap. Our society needs markets in order to provide people with a means of sustenance on the one hand, and basic goods and services on the other. Those markets also have to be regulated in the public interest. But our position can't be that they just shouldn't exist, particularly since the primary alternative to free exchange throughout human history has been coerced exchange—or simple extraction. 

The anti-consumerists—as described on Omnibus—would retort that the exchange is not actually free—that this notion of marketing as a free and non-coercive invitation to exchange obscures the subtle mental manipulation that it entails. Advertising in fact distorts our free mental processing, the argument goes, by warping our thoughts against our will and injecting false desires and generating demand where it never otherwise would have existed. To this I can only cite what seems to be a valid rejoinder (and here I reveal how deeply I have drunk from the tap-root of the hegemonic ideology) from ad-man Rosser Reeves: everyone who's ever worked in advertising of any kind knows that it is actually impossible to convince anyone that they want or need anything that they do not already want or need. 

This, then, is how it happens—the way in which one loses one's simple, childlike faith. It's not that at a certain age I got greedy and went over to the dark side in exchange for a higher paycheck. Maybe some people do that; but I can proudly say that I have made a decent living for myself for the last five to seven years working for a progressive nonprofit, and have never gone over to the corporate paymaster. But even while I was doing this—living life fully in accord with what my high school self would have defined as a standard of moral purity—I nonetheless lost my ability to believe in the complete evil of corporations, and the unimpeachable righteousness of whoever opposed them. 

I wish I still believed that all corporations and all of consumerist culture were pure evil. It would give my life much more direction. I would know each day who I was supposed to fight and why. But I was not fated to bring such comforting certainties with me into adulthood. Instead, like Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh: "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer." He goes on to say: "As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse [....] You have to see [...] that this is all black, and that is all white."

For O'Neill's character, it is pity (at times described by himself and others as "the wrong kind of pity") that forms his character, no matter how much he tries to disown it. It is pity that made him an anarchist once upon a time (a member of the ultimate anti-consumerist movement of his day, which he dubs simply "the Movement"). But it is also pity that ruined his usefulness to the Movement or his ability to stay a member. Beyond a certain point, his pity meant that he could no longer convince himself that those inside the Movement were any more virtuous than those outside it. So in the end he is left cursing "the damned pity—the wrong kind." He prophesies: "I'll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die." 

So it is with me. I can't convince myself that people trying to make a living by selling dish soap are more evil or self-interested or greedy than people trying to make a living by selling copies of Ad Busters magazine. Everybody has to find a way to survive. Why is satisfying consumer demand for basic goods and services the wrong way to do it? And even the people who are making their living selling something truly wicked and harmful to humankind—I'll not defend their choice. I'll never join them in the enterprise. But are they beyond pity? Are they doing anything that didn't make sense in their circumstances? Are they doing something that any of us wouldn't have done in their place—including all the righteous anarchists and anti-consumerists out there? 

Are the world's righteous anarchists not most commonly righteous anarchists because they can afford to be, and those who engage in morally dubious enterprises to make a living most often doing it because they can't see any other way to do so?  

Whenever I get going in this vein, a friend always reminds me that I am really just repeating in so many words a poetic tag I've quoted many times before, and of which I'm inordinately fond (I owe the citation of it originally, by the way, to Sheila Fitzpatrick's memoir My Father's Daughter). The line is Robert Lowell's, from his poem "Florence": "Perhaps, one always took the wrong side. Pity the monsters! Pity the monsters!"

Perhaps this pity for the monsters is simply Larry Slade's "the wrong kind of pity." Perhaps it has ruined me and robbed me of any usefulness to the revolutionary movement, even if it's also precisely pity that made me an anti-capitalist in the first place. Perhaps Larry Slade's "two sides of everything" is just another way of expressing, with Lowell, the doubt that poisons every faith, the question that defeats one's ability permanently to remain for long a loyal member of any righteous crusade: "Perhaps, one always took the wrong side"! Perhaps it is this doubt that has made me a sell-out and a turn-coat. 

But no... if the pity has made me useless to the revolutionary movement, it has made me equally useless to any evil enterprise. The pity would keep me from seeing things solely from the side of business just as it prevents me from seeing matters solely from the perspective of the anti-consumerists. And if such uselessness is not the best thing in the world, I would prefer it a thousand times over to being useful to a harmful cause, or to a righteous yet wrongfully absolutist cause whose absolute triumph I would not wish to see.