Waking Life Part II.1 - Society

Waking Life’s 12th chapter entitled Society Is a Fraud, depicted by four guys walking down a street and taking turns talking.

If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible.

On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path of what we desire.

The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market.

A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness.

We’ll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We’ll yank the social symbols through the looking glass We’ll devalue society’s currency.

To confront the familiar.

Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence.

Where there is fire, we will carry gasoline.

To interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it.

To live as if something actually depended on one’s actions.

To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society so that our repressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward.

To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be.

To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we’re making it happen.

There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions.

An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.

***

(The same four guys see an old man up on a telephone pole.)

Hey, old man, what you doin’ up there?

Well, I’m not sure.

You need any help getting down, sir?

No, don’t think so.

Stupid bastard.

No worse than us. He’s all action and no theory. We’re all theory and no action.

Talking about society today is like talking about the existence and non-existence of a divine god; it ends with both sides agreeing to disagree. At the end of all the words, theories, proofs, arguments, and counter-arguments, they would both walk away with either beliefs changed. Nothing matters because nothing is changed in the world, the theist still believes in a higher power that controls him and the atheist still believes that he is the captain of his own ship. Society talks are similar because after all the debates at the end of the day, people just walk away and do nothing because they agree that nothing can be done about it–that they can’t do anything about it.
There are a total of 15 passages in this chapter, and each one is as meaty as the other so I will be dividing this part into three sub parts; this post will contain the first six, the next will show the next six passages, and the last sub part will be about the 13th-15th passage along with my interpretation of the whole chapter itself (which can be seen in the conversation with the old man who is up on the telephone pole). I have also grouped the passages that have connecting explanations.

If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible.
Everything that we know right now are merely knowledge that are passed on from centuries before us. There is only one Earth out of the eight planets, we live in it, and it is not flat; it is round. There is no arguing with it or trying to disprove it, only living with it. These facts have been passed on through us by our parents and teachers through their parents and teachers and so on and so forth. The line, “we are forced to accept,” I think depicts the way that the education system, of any country for that matter, is established. There are these facts (only one Earth, eight planets, it is round) and you can’t not accept it because you’ll just end up writing the wrong answer, fail the class, be a disgrace to your parents, have no friends, and basically just socially die. This kind of social death is what forces us to accept these scientific facts because we want to be accepted; because most of the things that we do right now are geared towards acceptance by our society. Although this passage not only talks about science classes in our schools but also the social classes. For example, we are taught that there is only one government/economic system that will work and that it is best for us (democracy/capitalism), at the same time, the way that we are taught also makes us understand that the alternatives are evil and not good for us (monarchy/communism). I’m not saying that monarchy and communism are automatically good, but what I am saying, is that democracy and capitalism can also be bad they can be false. And the possibilities beyond that realization are endless, or as the movie says, “everything is possible.”

On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path of what we desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market.
Happiness is the highest form of good, or truth, according to Aristotle. Individuals seek happiness for the sake of itself, not for the sake of anything else. For example, having an iPad: a 16-year-old kid would say that she wants an iPad, and her parents of course ask her, “Why do you want an iPad? You’re 16 for christssake!” then the kid would probably say something like, “Because Mikey (her friend) has one. And it’s really cool and it has games like Temple Run and you can listen to music in it, blah, blah, blah…” So now we ask, “Does the kid want the iPad because it has games and music and whatnot?” No. She wants the iPad not because she wants or even needs those things, she wants it because it’ll simply make her happy. We never pursue the things we like purely because of that thing that we like; we pursue the things we like because those things are means to happiness, which is the ultimate end (Aristotle calls it eudaimonia or the highest form of good). The problem with pursuing this highest form of happiness is that it is never a one way street–sort of like, “If the goal (happiness) is at the end of a straight path and you just have to walk the path and voila you’re happy.” No. Happiness couldn’t be that easy to attain, otherwise, it wouldn’t be real happiness because, as cliche as it sounds, we can only understand happiness if we understand the pain that we have to go through while trying to attain it.
Comfort on the other-hand is the freedom from pain and suffering. One could argue that achieving happiness, or eudaimonia if you would, is the freedom from all kinds of pain and suffering, because you have already experienced it–you’re way past that part. But that sort of highest good is never without its pains and suffering. So the question on comfort is, “If the thing that will make us truly happy, and therefore free from all pain and suffering, is unattainable, then will we ever be truly happy?” Then again, going back to the first passage, if we only realize that what we perceive as truths and constants can be false, then nothing is unattainable.
There will always be something very wrong and very disappointing on the path towards happiness; like in the kid who wants an iPad scenario, the parents might be disappointing or the price that comes from an individual’s capitalistic wants might be in the way, and you could make a list of more than a hundred reasons why wanting to be happy through one thing will only make you sad. That much I agree with. But the next move now is up the that 16-year-old kid (or us); she could accept the status quo and give up because happiness is impossible to attain or keep walking on her path because of the realization that if nothing is true if everything is false, then nothing is unattainable. The same can be said for the rest of us who are traversing the path towards happiness as well, I think.

A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness.
René Descartes introduced the method of systematic doubt, or as some people call it the Cartesian doubt. To put it simply, since the realization that some things is/can be false, then you would have to doubt everything else, so as to attain knowledge (something) that is beyond any kind of doubt. This is a kind of temporary skepticism where one would have to suspend all judgement, except the judgement that everything is false, and then only then start looking for things to believe in that are not possible to doubt. Now when the systematic doubt is applied personal concepts of happiness, then any form of happiness would be suspended. So initially one would have to know how what happiness is first before being able to move on; in other words, when you want to find/have something, you have to know what that something is first. Take the 16-year-old who thinks that an iPad will make her attain eudaimonia. If she suspends the perceivable happiness that is attainable through owning an iPad, and systematically question her idea of happiness through owning an iPad, then, if she still ends up with an answer, “I really want an iPad, beyond any kind of doubt,” then attaining that iPad would grant her an authentic kind of happiness because she doesn’t think, anymore, that she wants it because she saw it in her friend Mikey, but she wants it because she understands, by herself, that an iPad will make her attain eudaimonia. Happiness, in this sense then, becomes an existential reason for being of a person, or the 16-year-old kid in this scenario. In other words, when we systematically question happiness, and get to an answer that cannot be doubted in any way, happiness gains another level to it, which is eudaimonistic, or perhaps it becomes eudaimonia itself.
Of course this kind of happiness differs from one person to another. Some scholars of philosophy say that Descartes’ philosophy is a personal philosophy. He said that he is because he thinks because that is his personal observation of his personal self and that it cannot be applied to just any person because we would have to individually doubt everything first before reaching our own realizations about everything else in the world. I for one, of course, would not have the same level of happiness attained by the post-systematic doubt state of the 16-year-old girl because I am a different person with different experiences and so on and so forth. Not to mention that she is a fictional explanatory character in this article.

We’ll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We’ll yank the social symbols through the looking glass We’ll devalue society’s currency. To confront the familiar.
The tempo of the whole chapter is changed by this fifth passage; it now becomes a whole different monster, so to speak. From the initial personal issues like happiness, comfort, pain and suffering, and whatnot, the movie transitions to the social aspect of being human. I must admit, I was trying to keep the personal side of this chapter light, which is why I gave it an atmosphere of a 16-year-old kid who wants an iPad. But like any other kid, we all grow up–even Mikey grows up. From being kids who can only look at the world one street at a time, the world becomes big with billions of beings like ourselves who live in it; this prompts the entrance to the adult world, or what the adults usually refer to as the “real” world. As kids, people only have to socialize with a very little group; a few friends, families, teachers. But in the real world, people confront bosses from different departments, co-workers from different departments, rival companies, the bosses in rival companies, the workers from rival companies, the government, taxmen, capitalists, friends, and family. This kind of experience opens up a realization that there is a society beyond my existential pursuit of eudaimonia; in other words, human beings evolve from being individualistic to being part of a global society (this realization is actually easier now with globalization). In this level of existence, we equate the pain that we personally experience to that of other people in the world; your personal problems are also the personal problems of other people in the world because you are all living in one world, with the same kinds of government with the same economic system, so you go through life with, even if it is small, similarities. Now one can appreciate the pain that the other suffers. Now we actually live in the society.
With this entry to the society comes the entry of the concept of power. In the real world, the “people with power” are no longer vague silhouettes who wear coats and ties in our imagination because we don’t know them; inside the society, they are actually paraded in front of us. And with that comes the realization that the people in power control your sources of happiness, they turn the sources of your comfort into commodity, that they, if only they would wish it, can make you attain eudaimonia. But they don’t, apparently. Power is the currency of the society, if you have power, you can buy/have anything–perhaps you don’t even have to pay for it. So, I think and I do agree with this, that cutting the “vocal chords of every empowered speaker” is possible if the society, as an individual with an existential end that is eudaimonia, devalues power as the controlling force of its life, then individuals will be free to pursue their personal happiness thereby pursuing the social sense of happiness. But this is only possible if the people “yank the chains,” of the the individuals with power–and that is only, again, possible if the people realize that they are the ones who give value to power, the enslaving factor in their lives. To attain that kind of freedom, people would have to “confront the familiar,” and really pursue happiness.

This ends the first sub part for chapter 12 of Waking Life. It is obviously very long and tiring to read, but do find the time read, like, follow this blog, comment, or even argue if you will. I would greatly appreciate it. I expect the next installment of this part to be published earl next week.

References: Movie transcript from wakinglifemovie.net; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; René Descartes, Medtiations on First Philosophy, 1641.