Ever Wonder Why You’re Better Than Everyone Else?

“The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.”
- Oscar Wilde

My wife and I have a little joke we tell each other regularly. When we catch ourselves complaining about other people – whether specific people or people in general (the blind, stupid masses). One or both of us will finish the kvetch with the statement “because we’re better than everybody else.” Asking around, it turns out that this feeling is one that most people have. Don’t bother to deny it, you know it’s true. If we don’t support it explicitly (at least whispered to our nearest and dearest our in our inner monologues) then we support the idea implicitly, through your support of all sorts of repressive institutions.
Why do we support funding for the police? Surely we don’t think WE need to be policed. WE’RE not law-breakers, murderers and the like. It’s those other people out there. Why do we think that we don’t need a union in our workplace? Well, because unions destroy productivity and innovation. How is it that unions do this? Well, they prevent our boss from promoting people with real talent and instead, with unions, the people who get promoted or who keep their job do so on the basis of seniority. And we know that this just means lazy people. Not us, of course – WE’RE not lazy. It’s those other people who ruin it for everyone else.
As Sartre noted “Hell is other people.” I’m alright, Jack. What’s your problem? And that feeling must be widespread because according to a 2006 study, Americans have fewer close friends and confidantes now than they did twenty years ago. Surely the same thing likely applies to Canadians who are culturally very close to Americans, at least in English Canada.
“Researchers also found that the number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. The survey found that both family and non-family confidants dropped, with the loss greatest in non-family connections.”
A significant part in this growing isolation is the fact that we are working more hours now than we were 20 years ago. But this creates a reinforcing effect where our sense of distance from our fellow humans grows the less contact we have with them. And the more we feel disconnected from our fellow humans, the less contact we are likely to have with them. Of course, those with lower incomes and education levels are affected the most.
This dynamic is, of course, encouraged by our mass media, which specifically, regularly, and repeatedly undermines social empathy. We are treated to Cops, America’s Most Wanted, Crime Stoppers, and other “true crime” shows and segments that encourage us to fear our neighbours and, even better, to rat them out whenever possible. We have talk show hosts encouraging us to mock our neighbours’ troubles and worship celebrities. Radio has brought us “shock jocks” who are, let’s face it, just plain assholes and who make us laugh by being pricks to other people – because those people are never us. Reality shows teach us to envy, despise, laugh at, fear the people who are humiliating and abusing each other for the right to be the top banana and win the million dollars, or million dollar husband (who maybe turns out to be a murderer).
That these things exist and that we generate a significant sense of ourselves in opposition to the rest of the human race as a result of such cultural productions is horrifying. But these are all symptoms of a deeper social disease with which we are all infected.
To some, our sense of superiority over the rest of the species is proof that humanity is doomed with some original sin that cannot be overcome – greed, lust, covetousness. But this is to beg the question and to start with symptoms, while ascribing to them prime causes.
Marx makes note of this in his discussion of political economy in the 1844 Manuscripts. He has a lot of insightful things to say that still ring true. For Marx, he starts not from this or that value but from the fact of our basic material needs and how we satisfy them. He starts from nature and humans (who are a part of nature). What makes us human is that we act upon nature, transform it, mold it to meet our needs – food, clothing, housing, etc. He calls this conscious act of labour, to tranform the world to meet our needs, that thing which makes us human; it is our species-being.
But, Marx goes on, if that is what makes us human, what does it mean that we live in a world where we don’t control our labour, where we don’t produce freely according to our needs but instead according to the plan and desires of our employer.

“…he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague…”

He then continues with this very pithy and, frankly, visionary description of the roots of consumerism:

“The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal.
“It is true that eating, drinking, and procreating, etc., are also genuine human functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of human activity, and turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal.”

But, back to the point of this whole discussion, which was why we feel superior to our neighbours. According to Marx, if we are alienated from that thing which makes us human, then we are alienated from ourselves, our nature. If we are alienated from our selves then we are also alienated from our fellow humans, for the same reason.
Capitalism creates a situation where all confront all as alien, hostile beings. And this, of course, isn’t simply some abstract mental state, it has a real concrete manifestation through generalized competition. We fight over jobs. We fight to retain control of as many of our scarce financial resources as possible. The carpenter who we hire to fix our house faces us as a man who wants to get the most out of us that he can. We, on the other hand, want to pay the lowest possible price; we want to get the most out of him. And this general dynamic applies whether it is craftsman/businessman vs client or customer vs massive corporation. And, of course, it is so when, as workers, we confront our boss. The same dynamic prevails.
This historically specific – not natural – state of conflict and competition for (artificially) scarce resources becomes generalized throughout society as a state of perpetual antagonism. We feel like someone is always trying to rip us off (and they quite likely are, that’s the nature of scarcity). It causes us to feel not only defensive but also morally superior.
This is one of the key reasons why, for Marx, superceding capitalism is not something that can be announced or dictated from above. Workers, to overthrow capitalism or win a strike even, have to band together. They have to fuse their interest and recognize a common aim. In doing so they begin to overcome that dynamic that puts us at odds with one another. We must fight racism, sexism and homophobia, which increase competition between workers and leave all in a weaker, material, political and moral state. This growing class unity increasingly divides society into those camps that represent the fundamental division – humanity from their species-being, from control of their creative labour. The fact, as the study above demonstrated, that we have less friends now than 20 years ago, and probably feel less connected to our fellow humans, is a measure of how successful neo-liberalism has been in North America in ratcheting up competition between workers. We are working harder for less.
Knowing all this won’t in itself stop us from feeling superior. It’s a material-social problem that can only be solved with a material-social solution. But knowing it will provide us with one more reason to feel superior to all the ignoramuses who are laughing at their fellow workers being humiliated on TV talk shows.

Cosmetic Surgery: Peter Pan & The Beauty Myth

Hey, are you worried that you’re getting a little soft in the middle? Maybe your boobs or your eyebrows are getting droopy? Well, get on that willya. Cripes, everybody’s doing the nip & tuck and it’ll boost your earnings, your chances of promotion and the likelihood of being found not-guilty after you rob that bank to pay for all the cosmetic surgery you just had done. Seriously.
In case you had any doubts that our culture is descending into a pathetic narcissism or that it’s promoting the virtues of shallowness and youth obsession, a quick look at the plastic surgery stats is in order.
The last ten years has seen an explosive growth in cosmetic surgery in North America and beyond. In Canada alone, between 2002 and 2003 non-surgical “enhancements” grew by 24.6 percent, and surgical procedures – led by breast augmentation – jumped by nearly 17 percent.
In the USA, as they were bombing Iraq and immiserating their domestic working class population, they were also rushing to the front of the beauty line with 11.5 million surgical and non-surgical procedures in 2005 alone; 364, 610 of those procedures were for breast augmentation. Since 1997 there has been a jump of 444 percent in the number of procedures. Americans spent $12.4 billion on cosmetic surgery.
And it’s not just women who are “getting work done”. Men now make up about 9 percent of the clientele in the USA. In the UK it’s even higher at 11 percent in 2005, with the biggest procedure being nose jobs followed by fixing those embarrassing droopy eyelids.
Don’t worry if it’s a little out of your price-range, not only are the new “less invasive” techniques bringing prices down (ahem, “democratizing access”, as they say), you can also catch a flight down to Brazil where “vanity tourism” is a thriving business. And in Brazil – home to Ivo Pitanguy, father of modern plastic surgery – you can save from a third to a half on the costs.
OK but what’s with this obsession? Why are we afraid to look like we’re growing old?
Sure, we don’t want to die and old age is about the body breaking down as death approaches. But old age isn’t new and it wasn’t always so loathed as it is now. There was a time when our elderly were revered for their wisdom and experience. What’s changed?
Four words: Capitalism makes you vain.
Look, don’t get me wrong – I want to look hot too. I’m scared that my youth is slipping (has slipped?) away. Hell, I may get some “work” done myself, on my face or my ass – just as soon as I win that lottery and pay off my debts. And, Lord knows, there’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself. In fact, if more people ate better food and exercised, there’d be less need to get liposuction
But there’s two things about capitalism that makes us obsess about youth and body perfection. The first is that for the vast majority of the population, we look to our older years as a time to retire; our producerly lives come to an end. We want to get the hell out of the workforce, which has taken up so much of our lives with mundane, shitty work. But the flip side is that we are seen as no longer useful to the economy. We are now a net drain (witness all the attacks on pensions over the past decade and a half; hell, we can’t afford our old people anymore). To be old it to be useless – that’s why we put ‘em away in homes and forget about them to be cared for by underpaid and overworked (mostly) women. Soylent Green anyone?
The second factor has to do with how we experience work – it is forced labour. We would rather do anything else than go to our jobs. How many times have you heard someone say that if it weren’t for their mortgage they wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. That’s because the economy, via our workplace, approaches us as an alien being, like a blind natural force. All we see are the innumerable private corporations and businesses fighting with each other for market share and production. It is anarchy.
The only comprehensible way we experience the social, interactive nature of the economy – which, after all isn’t a natural phenomenon but a socially, historically created one – is in the purchase of goods. Production is isolated and privatized, consumption is a public act. So, commodities increasingly seem to exist on their own, without history or process. They have come into the world fully formed. That’s why they are flat, surfacey things that can attract us only through two features: their usefulness and their beauty.
Oftentimes their beauty is a significant part of their usefulness – clothes, shoes, cars – and the less “productively” useful they are, the more beautiful a consumer good they are considered. But whatever the case, their beauty is not connected to the process of their production – except perhaps with luxury goods in which the “artisanal” methods of production are valorized: we don’t admire the welding work of the autoworker or the historical development of silicon chips in our computer. The only basis for judgment is the end product: the commodity.
We are a society that values ends and not means. The ultimate expression of this, for me, was when Secretary of State under Clinton said, in describing the death of over a million children as a result of American led sanctions: “we think the price is worth it (to remove Saddam)”. The ends forever justifies the means. Where does this come from?
As industrial capitalist society develops and spreads, reaching into every nook and cranny of our social world, this commodity fetishism spreads with it, this worship of history-less ends, of aesthetic values without technique or process. Reality and experience become a barrier to the achievement of pure beauty, ie. that which is untouched by the griminess of life. Beauty has no hair, no wrinkles. Its skin is smooth and unblemished. Its curves are perfect without effort or strain and its teeth are perfectly straight. Anything that reminds us that we are beings in process, constantly changing and remaking ourselves through our experience and that this process leaves its mark on us, like medals to show the battles we’ve survived, any such thing is a deformity. That’s why Michael Jackson’s horror mask face and his Never-Never-Land fantasy mansion aren’t a deviation from our society’s values, they are its highest expressions.
And it’s no surprise that Michael Jackson would be the ultimate self-commodifying beauty monster. He is a star and what role do stars play in our society? Their job is to renew our hope in the values we have been taught are good – leisure, beauty, sex, financial success (itself measured in part by beauty), and of course the inevitable rewards of hard work. They are a concrete example that if we follow the righteous path and believe the fairy tales that we’re told we will succeed and we will be beautiful. They are the sugar that makes the bitter pills of so many people’s possible to swallow. That’s why there is such pressure on stars to have their faces done over and over again. It’s the equivalent of Olympic training for ideological athletes.
In this view, Michael Jackson was only trying to do what all the stars do – only with the added handicap that he is a black man, with all the features of an African. And we all know that the real measure of beauty is whiteness, especially when Jackson was coming of age. In 1995, Empire Magazine’s famous “100 Sexiest Stars of All-Time” had only one African-American on it. Even the 2007 list only included six black stars and none in the top ten. Is it any wonder Jackson drew the conclusions he did in his mind. He’d had his star qualities literally beaten into him as a child. He just continued the beating after his father was done but to the same ends.
Besides film and music stars, there is the much larger demographic of women who are the primary targets and clients of cosmetic surgery. Why? For many of the same reasons as movie stars. Movies – and popular music – set up the expectations and it is ordinary women who are expected to implement it. It is women who are still laden down with the task of making people (men and children) fit to continue working, spiritually, sexually and physically. As Marx described it, they serve to reproduce labour – both in the sense of carrying the children and also in refreshing the workers so that they can and will return the next day.
And women are the proof of your success – a beautiful woman on a rich man’s arm is the ultimate success story – she’s bagged the sugar daddy and he’s bagged the sex toy. Ordinary working class people can never hope to live up to the standards of our mega-rich betters with their unlimited expense accounts, private trainers and personal surgeons. But we can emulate them in our own small way. We too can try to hide the labour that marks our bodies – with fat because we’re too busy to cook good meals, with drooping skin from years of being exhausted. Just, whatever you do, for god’s sake, don’t try to eliminate the system that scars you so badly you want to hide from it and the fact that your life is being stolen out from under you.