In America everything has to be made public, everything must be shared. What is your status, how much money do you earn, how fit are you, how “happy” are you: this is America. There is no room for anything subtle. It is a society built on the surface, leaving nothing deeper for its citizens to root into. All is dependent on the lie of truth, a two-dimensional plane that aspires to be three. This is inherent in the proliferation of self-publicity and the pursuit of fame. Everyone can have some. You can become famous by installing yourself on the hollow surface of society and flailing about in a crazed expression of social dominance and false status, attracting followers to your insanity. Thus, perpetuating the devolution of society into madness. The societal madness then transmutes itself into the individual. A hollow society produces a hollow man.
America is mad. Life has become a hallucination of truth. To the outside world, all is pristine, cheerful, successful. Just as the great cities of America have their districts of decadence, the perception of grandness, so do they have the reality of their slums. Hidden in plain view of the golden towers are the homeless. Underneath the interstates, the arteries of life in America, lies tent cities where the ignored fight to survive. They are shoving the problem under the rug, into the closet, or below the interstate. The omission of these truths from the public’s embodiment of reality further perpetuates the madness.
A girl takes a photo using a selfie stick, twenty dollars of makeup resting on her face, while standing across the street from a starving, homeless man. He takes drugs in order to replace his dark reality with a chemically induced escape. She escapes by creating a thin, digital reality to compensate for her arrant lack of meaning. Just as the drugged homeless man cannot truly see her in his altered state of consciousness, she cannot see him; for if she does then her reality will come crashing down. This thin veil of meaning resides over the entire nation. At one moment, all is perfect, and when turning around there is a dark truth: reality is thin. They ignore the real and perpetuate the lie. They become the lies — walking and breathing propaganda machines. The American dream was once a reality, but it has now been taken over by the American lie. The lie that we are all “cool”, we are all happy, and we are all perfect.
The genuine is lost to the plastification of women and men; plastification literally and figurative. In a literal sense it is the rise of plastic surgery, anti-aging therapies, the perfection of the self in physical and digital forms. In the figurative sense, it is the thinning of the veil of meaning. Plastic personalities arise more and more as meaning falls away to a fading echo of what once was. Americans used to be bound to meaning and secured by purpose, but now they are detached from both, spiraling into a realm of materiality where the only meaning that can be grasped is external. Introspection and the true self is ignored and dejected. The false self is all that there is. You can blame most of this on the success of the marketing and advertising industries. Modern consumerism has succeeded more than the original architects projected in the early 1900s. What originally was meant to create consumers of products ended up creating a runaway consumerism that began to consume itself. This new form of consumption become like an uroboros — that which eats its own tail. The pursuit of materiality bastardized meaning and purpose along the way. Was it willingly done? Perhaps. A way to maximize the sell of products is to replace inner meaning, that which an individual finds within themself, to that which can only be found by purchasing products that are vessels of meaning. The unbridled nature of this process caused society to consume itself, hollowing all meaning into banality. Where yet may meaning be found?
Over the course of my upcoming trip to Australia, I aim to understand the deeper meaning and truths behind the land “down under”. “Down under” will hopefully refer to depth beyond the vacuous nature of western society. The truth may be that in America’s success at exporting their cultural architecture that Australia suffers the same fate — societal lack of meaning. I hope that I am wrong.
Next: Australia: Brisbane
