7 Things You Need to Do to Annihilate the Capitalist Whip

While Making it Dance

Okay, so I lied. This is not a listicle. Your fervent hope of having seven neat paragraphs to consume as you see fit has been quashed by this fiendish trickster. And yet I shall not hesitate to seduce you into continuing your march onwards through the monster-infested swamplands that are my writing. Because, you see, there is treasure to be had. An artifact of such magical might as even in your most visionary dreams you could not imagine. Thus, accept the quest, stay the course, slay the dragon, and you will reap your just reward.

Also, you yourself are allowed to dance as you proceed with this undertaking.

First, let me attempt to explain to you why listicles are evil, and should be smitten with righteous fury by the paladins amongst us. For one thing, they cater to the most slothful modes of our thinking, stimulating us to demand less of both ourselves and others while reading. The fast food for thought, listicles provide a quick fix without actual value, fooling the mind into feeding on them, while being devoid of most essential nutrients. Their brief, disconnected points teach us not to expect too much in way of any underlying structure or transcending whole. Thus we’re deviously invited to shut off most of our ability to reason and focus in a trance-like state of mind that is comparable to that induced by television entertainment. We witness a complete loss of the dynamic depth of things in desultory futility, as the world is cast in an illusory image of translucent triviality, where everything complex and ambiguous has been banished so that all may be summed up in bite-sized paragraphs. Disguised as the listicle, a lullaby is tempting us to sleep-walk through its fairy tale of insignificance, wielding the truth to shroud the truth much like the TV quiz does, its close relative.

This general malevolence aside, there is a subtype of listicle that is markedly malicious, which I shall name the commandicle. I am talking of course about those wretched articles which tell us what we should and should not be doing, usually to become more productive and succesful. They are the micro-whips of capitalism, differing only in the number of lashes they inflict upon us to try and convert us into well-oiled cogs in the machine. If you know someone writing commandicles, please take the utmost caution in your interactions with said person, and try to direct them to the nearest mental health professional. She or he may well be suffering from a Moses-complex, a very contagious and as of yet little understood condition which combines features of schizophrenia and OCD.

Now, what’s usually most conspicuous about commandicles, is the way they frame the terms productivity and success. Reading one makes you suddenly feel like a hamster in a running wheel, chasing after a carrot that’s just out of reach. It’s dehumanizing, and to be fair, dehamsterizing as well.

So, for further analysis, I looked up the most general definitions of both words:

productivity: the quality or state of being productive
productive: having the quality or power of producing especially in abundance
to produce: to give birth or rise to

success: degree or measure of succeeding
to succeed: to attain a desired object or end

To put it simply, productivity is the quality of creating, and success is the measure of doing what you’re trying to do.

Yet, in most commandicles, and in the minds of way too many people, there are these more specific definitions:

productivity: the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input

success: the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status

What we see here is a movement from broad, open forms of productivity and success, where we are free to choose what it is we want to produce and succeed in, to narrow, closed forms of the terms, which dictate to us what is valid and what is not. The vast possibilities of our nature are fastened in a straightjacket which reduces the human to the economic, the mechanical and the narcissistic. This is just one example of how capitalism penetrates the private sphere until it becomes the very water we then forget we’re swimming in, where the specific becomes the general defining us. In the same way that personal branding urges us to market ourselves as if we were our own brand, these definitions urge us to streamline ourselves as if we were our own company. From such a perspective, most of reality seems to have become irrelevant.

So whereas once we could entertain notions like the productivity of daydreams, peace of mind and moments of meaning, now all that is left is money, goods and services. Whereas once we could decide our success to lie in the generation of free time, crazy ideas and unprofitable skills, now we are stuck with fame, wealth and social status.

Of course, how we define the terms still remains our own choice, but not if it were up to the commandicles and if we want to “amount to anything” in the eyes of this quantity-obsessed world. Still, any sane person should be able to see that the idea of endless growth on a finite planet is what’s gotten us in our current mess, facing ecocide, after which all that growth won’t mean a damn thing.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell — Edward Abbey

So dear commandicle writers, please tell me how our increased productivity will save us from ourselves, and in case we’re not self-employed, how it won’t just serve CEOs and shareholders to enrich themselves on the back of our labor? And to expound upon the example of our destroying the planetary ecosystem while producing a profusion of mostly unnecessary goods and services, isn’t there tied to every variety of productivity another variety of destructivity? Additionally, when I produce a certain good or service, am I not at the same time promoting a certain ideology and its associated values, and thus repressing different ideologies and their associated values? Aren’t most goods and services just exploiting the average human being, which society has primed to be confused and alienated, to always feel a lack, and thus to be especially vulnerable to anything that promises relief, however temporary? Isn’t there now a misshapen second nature in man that’s been designed for the purpose of more effective manipulation? And from that perspective, how is not most of what humanity is doing on this planet at any given time just an absurd spectacle of vainglorious self-destruction? How very succesful we are at eradicating life!

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.

Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control; the development and satisfaction of these needs is heteronomous. No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning — products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression. — Herbert Marcuse

What if, as a united humanity, we were to decide that starting today the fundamental priority of all human activity would be to secure our future survival through the maintenance of a healthy planetary ecosystem? What if we wanted to produce sustainability, and to hell with profits? How would that change our definition of productivity?

Is the popularity of easy-to-write listicles in itself a sign of the overpowering urge to bolster productivity at the cost of meaning?

And how productive and succesful are these productivity and success commandicles, anyway?

Sure, in their function as clickbait, they possess an unparallelled effectiveness. Yet I cannot help but wonder whether the land of milk and honey they promise is nothing but a fata morgana, just like the person they want you to become is merely a shallow simulacrum. As if practising meditation to boost profits is anything but spiritual prostitution.

So let us be wary of so-called life hacks, lest we turn ourselves into robots, ripe for further infection by the lethal virus that is consumer capitalism. Let us be mindful of productivity’s shadow and the failures of success, by removing the blindfolds convention would have us wear. And most of all, let us strive to be productive and succesful in the development of our true self, so that we become our own masters. That’s the only meaningful life hack out there.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot:

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DRAGON!