A few years ago on some sunny afternoon, I was browsing through the Strand bookstore in Union Square, Manhattan, when I stumbled upon a collection of essays by Mark Greif entitled Against Everything. I can’t imagine a funnier title, and it’s always stuck with me. So I decided: I am against everything.
Being against everything is, on the surface, a very cynical outlook. But as a cultural proofing mechanism, I thought it would have some value. Or at least, I hoped it did. But as they say, the only way to win a losing game is not to play. So the only way to be coolly, smoothly against everything, is to stand for nothing. That seemed pathetic to me, and also a mark of privilege I can’t lay claim to. So, I had to accept this unease and work towards … something satisfying that will assuage its grip around my psyche.
Suddenly, I felt like a Lombard, crusading to the Sacred Place.
What I’ve decided now is that being against everything means you have to prove everything in reductio. As I’ve grown older, I’ve struggled to tame my childish arrogance via the introspection of: I don’t know a damn thing, so acting like I do is stupid. Thus, acting as if I know enough to be against everything is, simply, stupid.
But I no longer feel that way, despite knowing more than ever how little I know. Instead, I’ve figured out that I do, in fact, know some things, not nearly enough, but enough to know that I know some things. And the great thing about realizing that is that then you realize how much you don’t know, and this can bring some humility. It’s times like this that I feel embarrassed about landing in an inbox, poking and nudging the attention of my peers - hey, look! It is what it is, and for that reader, I do apologize.
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But what am I really getting at here? I don’t feel unease about my bank account, my social life, my future, or my immediate surroundings - chaotic as they are - I only feel unease about things that are completely outside my control. The geist, the direction of things, the decay of society, etc. How does one find some solid ground to sit on, meditate in, like the Buddha under the bodhi tree?
It is a sign of maturity that one begins to narrow their scope of ‘the world’ to their immediate, close-proximity network. But it is maturity itself when one begins to sculpt that network with precision.
It is so painful to even broach the membrane of the foul politic. Even typing it, thinking it out loud in some fashion, is egregious. I don’t read the news, I don’t engage with anything political whatsoever, and I relish in not knowing whatever is the new thing. With some luck (and a lot of wealth) I will never have to engage with politics for the rest of my life. But I am patently aware that everything is now political. For that reason alone, I am against everything, against every-thing.
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When I was in high school, I embraced a punk mentality. Being punk is kind of like being against everything. I listened to Crass and Minor Threat (still do) and embodied their spirit; I never dressed like a degenerate but I felt the anger and confusion so acutely, I think it’s left an indelible mark. When I reached New York, I found that the so-called punk scene had been subsumed by systems, cradled by capital and the phenomenology of aesthetics. In essence, it turned out that being punk was just a combination of your material presentation - clothing, tattoos, piercings - and your subconscious desire to let loose on weekends. Or, as it is in Brooklyn, any day of the week. The only drive was self-annihilation, to turn off the human-brain and engage the animal-id.
This depressed me, because I realized that I didn’t really know what I was looking for to even start with. Yes, I could enjoy myself, but to what end? Was that all there was to it, to start with? Were we not on board the great train of worldspirit fulfilling its own ambition, revealing God in our collective grace and movement towards the Kingdom On Earth? I didn’t have the words then so I just felt … against it.
Then I moved to the world of techno, which seemed in 2013 as the New Punk. Keep in mind, being born in ‘94, that was the way it seemed - now I just realize that things move in cycles, and that there is no such thing as forward in our day and age.
Again, I found myself having a good time, dancing and listening to great music, for a while. But then, again, I found that the entire act of going to a club was the same act - of being subsumed by capital, of losing yourself to the maw. It never could progress beyond the form it took for itself. I had even written a paper for school at that time comparing the ‘Ecstasy of St. Theresa with Dancing to 136BPM Techno’ - which is cute, but again I have only to ask myself, what was I really looking for?
I still love the music, all of it. The music sits in the world of highest-order; it exists pre-thought, pre-language, pre-cognition, and that keeps it beautiful and transcendent. It was the transmission into the ether of the world I found troubling, and I could feel myself turning against it.
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In late-2016 I started working as a sound engineer for a jazz club. Here, I thought, finally I would find the thing I was looking for - eliminate the romance of art fulfilling some sort of spiritual need, and instead focus on the technical elements of great players playing great music. Surely, being impressed with great skill would bring some sort of satisfaction.
I can say that it did. However, the reality of that world was that - nobody cared. In the glitz and glamor of downtown Manhattan, at the expensive-to-enter jazz club, the music was yet again, a soundtrack to the id exposing itself. I was able to witness great players, who played with immense feeling, be paid under minimum wage. And they were all in their middle ages. And behind every audience member was a staffload of middle-aged Bengali immigrant busboys. And behind them were the Nigerian dishwashers, who prayed together at 2AM after the shift was over. All of us together propped up this industry, like Atlas holding up a serving tray.
That’s fine, it’s fine, I thought. It is what it is, this is the game we play, this is the thing we signed up for. And that’s true, and I accept it. But I’m still against it.
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Around 2016 as the Trump election loomed and I was in the depths of self-loathing, I turned to more radical right-wing politics. I say right-wing even though it’s really not accurate (and is actually kind of humorous); indeed, I had found the only other class of intelligent people who were also against everything. These were people, in those days mostly online, who rejected virtually everything about neoliberal society, and its presuppositional logic. I won’t get into it here. But the important thing was that they had shown me boundaries around my worldview that I didn’t realize existed. It was like living your whole life in water and then realizing you’re in a pool, and can get out anytime - all you have to do is see the land beyond. It felt, then, like learning new words for feelings I’d always had.
And that brings me to why I wanted to write this - because for all the good that being exposed to radical, reactionary politics did me, and it did do a lot of good for me, just yesterday I saw this monster of an article in Vanity Fair about Curtis Yarvin and company: A veritable who’s who of the new New.
Jesus Christ, Curtis Yarvin in Vanity Fair?
I received the article because I read Curtis’ newsletter from time to time, and honestly at this point, I couldn’t be more indifferent to it all. It’s funny to me that this article was written about all these people, and their movement is equally amusing. Because, like everything else, it will be or has already been, subsumed by capital. Or maybe not - maybe they will achieve all their goals and radical change is coming to America. But I really don’t think so. Just like every other ‘movement’ happening right now - Neo Catholicism, Academic Hackerism, Awakened Religiosity, Crypto-Freedom, New Colorism, Neo Paganism, Radical Leftism, etc, it’s all fake. Lol. It’s just another reason to go to the club or bar and turn on the animal mind, it never has and never will be any different.
God, I can only imagine what it’d feel like if I actually gave a shit about politics. There’s a passage in the article where Curtis says:
Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview. There are signs that this may be happening…
And all I can think is, Curtis you boomer, the cool kids ruin everything…
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If one is against everything they whip around like a multi-sided turnstile. Against that and that and that; you turn in a circle, facing everything like a house of mirrors. And eventually, you end up with nothing but yourself and your surroundings to look at. I’ve tried my best to make sure that that introspective look bears fruit and brings me happiness. I do feel proud of myself, I’ve done so much in life. And I still have a lot to do, which drives me. I don’t want to change the world - well, I do, I just can’t stress about doing so. And when I was 21, 25, or even 26, I was so angry, filled with rage and directing it at people close to me. But, even though I don’t have the answers, I don’t feel that anger anymore. I can see the arc of destiny, curving far over the knowledge of all men.
Because I am against every-thing, I am left with being for all non-things. I like it that way.
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