On the Education of Desire

As I mentioned a little over a month ago, the competition over which theme would get the fifth Wednesday post in December was almost unparalleled in the enthusiasm it generated and the number of votes the top three themes generated. All three of the themes are worth a post, and I decided well before cognitive collapse got the top spot that all three of them would get a post; if the complexities of a quick relocation to Silver Spring, MD hadn’t gotten in the way, we’d have covered all of them by the time January was out. Still, here we are, and it’s time to discuss the theme that nearly won in December: why downward mobility is one of the few ways to achieve certain kinds of relative freedom in today’s decaying industrial nations.

Yes, I know that this sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. There are reasons for that reaction. We’ve all been taught since about thirty seconds after we finished being born that the rich have more freedom than the rest of us. This is true, as it happens, but most people go on from there to convince themselves that the only way to achieve the freedom they want is to claw their way up the social ladder to the rarefied classes that the rich inhabit. That’s where they run off the rails, partly because the life of the would-be social climber involves less actual access to freedom than most forms of outright chattel slavery, and partly because modern industrial societies have a couple of centuries of practice at harnessing and redirecting the energies of would-be social climbers so that additional freedom is the least likely outcome of their efforts.

To make sense of this, it’s crucial to recognize that there’s a vast difference between money and social class. It’s quite possible to have a net worth in the godzillions and still be excluded from the uppermost class, just as it’s possible to have a net worth that puts you somewhere in the upper middle classes at best and still be a member of the ruling elite. Money is straightforward: it’s a system of arbitrary tokens that modern societies use to regulate access to goods and services, and either you have it or you don’t.

Class, by contrast, is anything but straightforward. Human beings have the same instincts of herd behavior as all other social vertebrates, and those have unimaginably deep roots; while behavior doesn’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to observe, the patterns we’re discussing are so broadly distributed among vertebrates that it’s probably safe to assume that they evolved back in the Devonian period, when primitive fish first started swimming in schools for mutual defense. Despite our pretensions, human mentality consists of a fragile and imperfect veneer of conscious thought over the top of a standard-issue primate nervous system, and when it comes to a conflict between conscious thought and the rest of our minds, conscious thought rarely wins. This is true in many contexts, but it is especially true when the social instincts come into play.

Social climbers almost inevitably fall victim to the consequences. Aspire to a class above your own and two things follow as the night the day. The first is that members of the class you’re trying to enter raise barriers against you, since you don’t make the right social signals that tell other people you belong to that class. The second, if you succeed in learning how to make those signals, is that once you’re let inside, you will be influenced by the other members of the class you are joining: your opinions, ideas, and values will shift, gradually or not so gradually, to conform to those of the other members of that particular herd.

This is why all the talk about “changing the system from within” you heard as the Sixties wound down was never going to be anything but empty air. As former hippies shaved, put on “square” clothing, and applied for corporate jobs, they promptly absorbed the values of the people and institutions they once despised, and voted for Ronald Reagan in droves in 1980 and 1984. That wasn’t just hypocrisy, or the vagaries of bored children who got tired of one game and decided to play another, though both these factors arguably played a role. The herd instincts we share with guppies and gazelles swung into play, drawing them willy-nilly into conformity with their new herd.

The unconscious gravitation exerted by collective thinking on the social climber has two results that are lethal to any hope of freedom. The first is that even if the climber clings to the idea of becoming more free, any freedom he wins will be exercised in conformity with the collective convictions of his new class. (“Look, I want to be more obedient and conformist, okay? It’s my free choice.”) The second and more deadly of the two is that the habits of every class in modern society involve spending more money than people of that class generally make. That means either pining after things you want and can’t quite afford, or going into debt to buy them anyway, and both these choices are mental manacles far more unyielding than any shackles made of iron.

The most important forces holding people in bondage in modern industrial societies, in fact, are the paired factors of desire and fear deployed by the consumer economy: desire for the goods and services you don’t have and fear that you’ll lose the ones you do have. For most people these days, desire is the more important of the two. You don’t have to terrorize people into obedience if you can convince them that obedience will get them the things they want, and if you manipulate them so that you decide in advance what they’re going to want, your power is complete.

The roles of desire in maintaining the current system is anything but accidental. In his important book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, as discussed in a post late last year, historian of religions Ioan Couliano dug deep into an important current of Renaissance occultism and showed how certain mages of that era explored the ways that people can be controlled and manipulated through desire. He also suggested that the reason most modern industrial societies don’t use police state tactics very often is that they are “magician states” that dominate their populations through the manipulation of desire, rather than through the more brutal and clumsy methods used by dictatorships.

A more recent scholar, Mauricio Loza, built on this insight in his 2000 book The Hounds of Actaeon: The Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media. He makes a very strong case that magic—actual magic, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, rather than fake magic of the Harry Potter variety—is central to the political economy of modern industrial nations. Both writers, as I’ve noted in the past, make the mistake of thinking that the kind of magic they discuss is the only kind there is, but within their limits they provide a very useful tool for understanding life in today’s world.

The mistake just noted is all the more ironic in that it was challenged millennia in advance by the most influential intellectual figure in the history of the Western world. That would be Plato, the extraordinary Greek thinker who set Western philosophy on its feet once and for all, and traced out the possibilities of the discipline so cogently that 2300 years later our intellectuals are still following in his footsteps. (Alfred North Whitehead, another extraordinary thinker, wasn’t wrong when he characterized all subsequent Western philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.”)

Plato’s main writings were dialogues in which different characters proposed competing answers to an assortment of profound questions. In the best of his works, there’s never an obvious winner or loser in the resulting debates, because his goal was to get people thinking, not to force-feed them dogmas. Even so, there are times when it’s not hard to figure out what Plato himself is thinking, and the dialogue we’re about to review is one of these examples.

It’s called The Symposium, and it’s the reason why meetings where scholars discuss things are still called “symposiums.” (Plato was the source of a remarkable number of terms like that. He used to teach in the precincts of a temple dedicated to a minor figure named Academus; that’s the reason the words “academy” and “academic” got into our language.) The original meaning of the Greek word symposion is “drinking party,” and that’s the setting of the dialogue: a drinking party that includes most of the great intellectuals of Athens during the latter part of its golden age. Because they’re ancient Greek intellectuals and philosophy as we know it is being invented around them, their drinking games are a little more erudite than most: to be precise, each of them is supposed to give a little talk about erotic desire as the others tip back their glasses.

There are some pretty lively talks, but the one that matters comes from Plato’s teacher Socrates, who is the central figure in most of Plato’s dialogues. Socrates wants to pass on the teachings she received from a wise woman, Diotima of Mantinea, on that very subject. What Diotima had to say, to summarize Plato’s precise and elegant prose too briefly, is that desire isn’t an immovable presence in our lives. It’s profoundly shaped by our expectations, our beliefs, and our understandings. This means that it’s possible to educate desire, to redirect it from self-defeating and self-destructive targets to other goals that enhance and affirm our lives.

This isn’t done by white-knuckling it, or using brute force of will. It’s done by a gentle, step-by-step expansion of consciousness. Suppressing or renouncing desire, from this way of thinking, is self-defeating; if it succeeds, which it almost never does, the result is a kind of spiritual castration, while if it fails in the usual way, you’re right back where you started. Instead, just as a budding musician is guided a little at a time to become more sensitive to the subtle nuances of tone and phrasing, the student of Diotima’s way learns to become more sensitive to what he actually desires, and sheds mistaken ideas of the desirable for a clearer sense, rooted in personal experience, of what happiness and fulfillment actually are.

The tradition that developed out of The Symposium became one of the core elements of Western esoteric spirituality. The concept of the education of desire also found its way tolerably often into the religious mainstream, though there it too often got shoved aside by more puritanical attitudes that treat desire as an evil weed that, at least in theory, has to be ripped out by the roots. All in all, it’s hard to learn anything about occultism without seeing the footprints of this among many other contributions of Plato all across the landscape. This makes it all the stranger that Couliano and Loza, both of them very well educated and alert to subtleties, nonetheless completely missed the idea that desire can be educated, refined, and put to work in the cause of liberty rather than remaining a source of vulnerability to coercion and manipulation.

If desire is the instrument by which the current order of society remains itself, though—and Couliano and Loza make a strong case that this is true—then learning to redirect desire, and to brush aside attempts to manipulate it in the service of social control, are both essential skills. It’s because your ordinary social climber doesn’t realize this that he so reliably fails to achieve the freedom he seeks by clambering up the social ladder. His desire for freedom becomes a lever by which he is drawn into conformity with the class to which he aspires to rise, and thus becomes more constrained and obedient to the system, not less.

The blind spot that makes the social climber vulnerable to this fate is quite simple: he assumes that increased freedom is a privilege of higher social status, pure and simple. This is far too simplistic an analysis. There are some modes of freedom that come with class standing–for example, the US and most industrial nations have a two-tier justice system in which the rich and famous can get away with nearly anything so long as they don’t irritate their rivals too greatly, while most of us don’t have that option–but most of the freedom that the wealthy classes possess has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with their social class at all. It is instead a function of money, and of a very simple equation involving money at that. They need less money than they have, and so they cannot be constrained by the paired forces of debt and greedy longing that close like jaws on most people in our society.

This equation works even at very modest levels of income. You can be very poor and quite free, so long as what little money you have is more than you need. That was Diogenes’ way. He was a contemporary of Plato, who took the quest for personal autonomy a good deal further than most. He had little and needed less. When Alexander the Great came to Athens, he sought out Diogenes and talked to him, and at the end of their conversation asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” The only thing Diogenes asked for was for the conqueror to stand to one side, because it was a cold day and Alexander’s shadow was keeping the sunlight from warming him. Awed, Alexander went away saying, “If I weren’t Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”

It’s not necessary to live in an upturned tub, as Diogenes did, to make use of the same lesson. All that’s required is that you embrace a level of expenditure, and accept a social status, lower than the one that your income would otherwise provide you. That’s downward mobility. Whatever your income level is, figure out how you would live if you were a little poorer and a little lower class than you are, and then live that way. Accept a lower status and standard of living in order to embrace a heightened degree of freedom: it really is as simple as that.

Simple, though, is not the same thing as easy. Peer pressure is only one of the challenges you’ll face. Depending on your social status, you may have to contend with systematic measures on the part of your employer meant to force you to remain in mental chains. All those absurd sumptuary rules about what office workers are supposed to wear to work have a very simple purpose: they are meant to help keep corporate employees so deeply mired in debt that they don’t dare risk doing anything that might threaten their incomes, and so remain high-paid serfs of their corporate masters. Downward mobility is easier with some jobs than with others, and in some cases a change of employer—or even of profession—might be necessary if you want to put downward mobility to work for you.

You will also have to contend with entire industries that are out to make you think you need things you don’t actually need, or want things you don’t actually want. Here, though, we’re in territory already explored at length in the discussion of Situationism that occupied nearly all of last autumn. Most of the more intrusive ways that the sorcerers of the corporate-bureaucratic system lure you with fake desires are at least partly voluntary; as I’ve mentioned tolerably often over the years, throwing away your television and getting a good ad blocker on your computer are good basic counterspells, and finding other content from outside the current media hive mind to keep your mind fed is another.

Here again, you don’t have to live under a tub to make this work. A quiet, relatively cheap apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood, a few bookcases, and an old stereo do the job tolerably well for me. Your choices may well differ—in fact, they’ll almost certainly differ, because we are talking about freedom, after all.

We are also talking, please note, about a certain degree of relative freedom. One of the things that makes so many discussions these days run off the rails is that so many people insist on thinking in absolutes. The debates concerning free will and determinism are great examples: nearly all the arguments used by both sides presuppose that if it’s not all the way in one direction it must be all the way in the other. That real life exists in the forgotten middle spaces, where some of our choices are mostly determined and others are subject to varying degrees of wiggle room, is unmentionable in these screaming matches.

In exactly the same way, nobody is ever completely free, and nobody is ever completely unfree. Eugene Genovese’s classic study Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made is a fine study of the ways that people found ways to grasp certain freedoms even in the context of outright chattel slavery. Equally, no matter how free you think you are, certain constraints limit your freedom. Nor is any one maneuver going to give you all the freedom you want. Downward mobility as a practical expression of educated desire can free you from certain of the “mind-forg’d manacles” Blake wrote about, and give you much more wiggle room and many more chances to make your own choices than most people have. That’s what it can do; that’s all it can do; but if you like to make your own choices, it helps a great deal.

It has another feature which bids fair to become even more important as our civilization keeps slipping down the arc of its decline. The slow (or not so slow) disintegration of our built infrastructure, the erosion of standards, the constant drift toward the shoddy and flimsy, and the rest of it: these are symptoms of accelerating decay that the angry posturing on both sides of today’s political conflicts does nothing to stop. The less dependent you are on the tawdry output of a society in decline, the more easily you can navigate the downslope and the better your chances of getting yourself and the people you care about through the crisis periods of that process—and that, too, is a form of freedom worth pursuing.