The discarded sign of the homeless person who needed nothing else and so they left behind the only symbol that they were here and had existed for a moment. Of course, it could also be a situation where the fentanyl was disabling their motor skills, and in the process of lightening their load, the sign simply fell to the wayside. Or maybe their Uber driver arrived to whisk him/her/they/them to a new life not defined by begging, which also included the help to deliver them from the nothingness that afflicted them?
When we fall in love with celebrities, we are projecting ourselves into their role, be it sports professionals, musicians, actors, porn stars, or influencers. This obvious attraction due to our own desire to be seen, known, wealthy, and influential is an easy equation to relate to, but what is not so apparent is why we often have such visceral disdain for the homeless.
We can blame the trash and feces they leave behind, or the crime we perceive will arrive with them, or maybe we believe that they are capable of work but are too lazy to find the wherewithal to apply themselves. Not taking into account the specifics of what has led any one person or group of people to homelessness, I want to address where we, the not-homeless, are in this equation.
Witnessing success, we celebrate our hope that we might arrive there, too. The celebrity is the surrogate of our own ascent of the ladder to fame. The homeless person is the nagging ugly reminder that we, too, could end up in their tattered shoes. We need to hide these creatures away from our own neighborhoods as they represent a decay that plagues others but should not influence us or our children.
But this is the all too obvious and most apparent cosmetic delineation between us and them. I’d posit that there’s very little difference between the majority and this rarified margin of extreme success and failure. How many people are as empty as those they praise or despise? In this age of mass deterritorialization where ubiquitous media has insidiously stripped away the unique territory of the individual, many people are bereft of personality traits developed by their own explorations as opposed to those images and ideas of personhood pumped into them from the same hose that was feeding the rest of the herd.
The manifestations of the homeless are only the most obvious refuse of a society that no longer allows for a population of individuals sharing a common space but requires those of homogenous form and character to congregate in mass pilgrimages to consumption. When you fail to fit that mold, you have but a few options in American life: fame, destitution, entrepreneurial struggle, isolation on the margin, or expatriation.
Nobody is part of a community anymore unless you believe that belonging to nothingness is somehow a valid place and identity. Under most circumstances, the vacuous shell of political idolatry worn on a hat, the brand emblazoned on your computer, phone, watch, or your shared loyalty to some sports franchise are but junk food fed to you by the machine. The decades-long programmatic building of a population, according to a select group of California thinkers, has gutted individuality while they have been refining their tools to strip all semblance of meaningful character through social media and entertainment until we are left with the banalest citizenry of nothingness, reducing us to something less than the most useless of insects.
Consider that all modern industrial conveniences, including their environment and intellectual harm, arose from an age where everyone had different backgrounds with a multitude of environmental and intellectual influences from across all geographies and disciplines. From that dis-order, the age of machines brought humanity a bevy of tools and devices that would compliment the comforts of many people on earth, but as convenience pandered to our laziest inclinations, it simultaneously removed the need for us humans to venture out to seek what our minds were hungry for – new stuff. Novelty was brought directly into our homes, and now we can gather new information no matter where we are. Smartphones and the internet allowed the pipeline of intellectual junk food to find the vein into our very souls.
Stripped of individuality and embued with the ever-present need for societal/group acceptance, we work hard to stay current with the newest gossip regarding celebrities, boss fights in video games, conspiracy theories, dramas between reality TV personalities, or some other narratives designed by the powers that be in order to find the excited enthusiasm of others who are lost in this non-sensical trivia that does nothing to help define a person. In another age, it was the sharing of anticipated weather conditions or who was getting married in the community that held the glue of being present in one’s surroundings. Today, we must be atop the news of Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian dating, the verdict regarding a kid killing demonstrators with an AR-15-style weapon, the release date of the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, or the sexual orientation of a Marvel Universe character.
So, should we all be intellectuals? Not in the least, but one cannot be an authentic individual if they are merely a clone, fractionally different from those around them. Just as there are not a billion people on earth having conversations regarding deconstructionist ideas from Jacques Derrida, there shouldn’t be a billion people discussing the merits of a Korean TV show that snuffs out the life of those trying to escape crushing debt as is found in Squid Game.
According to Google, there are more than 135,00,000 million books written that they know of. Obviously, not all of them are in English, but even if only 1% of those were in English, it would relate to a boatload of books read by Americans with a million different stories to share. But, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), only about half of American adults can read a book at an 8th-grade level. Well, that means there are only about 130 million Americans who can reasonably be expected to be able to even read a book. Compare those who could read a book with how Squid Game reached 142 million households and that the average household measures in at about 2.5 members each, which could imply that 355 million people have watched this program. Possibly the best-selling science book of all time, A Brief History of Time, written by Stephen Hawking, sold over 10 million copies, but it took 33 years to reach that number, and you can easily see that we want our content to be easy to consume and about as mindless as can be.
Why does any of this matter? We are facing a crisis of civility, pandemic, and environmental chaos, but the societal cohesion and collective intelligence required to wrestle with what amounts to purely intellectual problems is sorely missing and likely cannot be remedied with any quick fixes as there’s no amount of money that can repair stupid. From the vapid heights of celebrity to the person shitting on our streets, we are living in the midst of a mediocrity brought about by our own idiotic doing, in large part due to our desire to be entertained to death. The strata of dumb we must climb out of to begin understanding our dilemma is likely insurmountable, so just throw away your signs, enjoy the rest of your nothingness, and realize you were never really at home within yourself. You, me, all of us, are already homeless, but at least we’ll be celebrated as the most uncaring, superficial species ever to wreck the good fortune we once had.