The famed polemic by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos is the title of this post because it resonates more than ever in a world that is so decorated and ornamented as to have lost itself beneath it all. But, equally, it might just as well have been called 'Please Think Responsibly!' for the cognitive dissonance that is at the root of this ornamentation, and which lends itself not to an awareness of this as exploitation and 'crime' but to a delusion of it as 'culture of wealth and legality'.
The whole basis of the self-fragmenting capitalist machine is to ornament and decorate and convince the consumer that he is she is a better person for it. The implication of this is arguably worse than the actuality: that if we fail to consume we are less of a person for it. Whether its titles or awards, clothes or costumes, the capitalist machine thrives upon ornamentation, and covering the self up. Advertising, let's face it, has never actually had to convince us to buy anything that we truly needed: water, shelter, food, clothes. They have complicatedly fragmented these goods, and in doing so simply provided us with the illusion of choice, making us all the more the fool for falling for it. They, the advertisers, literally see us coming, then pave that way with messianic messages so powerful that they themselves, despite knowing all the tricks in the book, fall for these messages too. The magician, who is actually a charlatan if not entirely a snake-oil salesman, effectively falls for his own misdirection. The most aggressive attribute of the post-human, aside from his propensity for self-delusion, is his gullibility and tendency to be merrily led down the garden path.
This gullibility is a result of a lack of questioning - at the root level a lack of responsibility - and a blind acquiescence to all that one is told. I realized some time ago that just because someone was older than you did not mean that they deserved any sort of respect for it. Quite the contrary. It is the older generations (with few exceptions) who have, respectively, in ignoring this responsibility to question, left this world in a worse state than when they found it. Instead of being guardians of this earth, they have, through their kowtowing to the status quo (greed, need and fear), and dressing their selves up in all manner of conventions, allowed this planet and its myriad inhabitants to explode and suffer, and become mad, in spite of our so-called advancedness. And it is gullibility that has been their crutch. It should be a crime, in fact, not to think responsibly. Instead we are approaching an Orwellian nightmare, that is in fact the opposite of this: thoughtcrime, and the almost criminal act of thinking critically, and rupturing the conventional modes of thought.
But of course, man is a herd animal, and to leave the herd-like thinking that has been branded upon him (and which he has duly accepted), is to exile oneself from the herd and invite death. Security and safety are the most primitive instincts known to most living organisms, and man, in spite of his vast brain, is no different. Just look at the people, following a celebrity endorsement, who rush out to buy said product; it amounts to nothing less than mass hysteria. But this is exactly what advertisers prey upon, the hysterical, the neurotic, and the cow-like nature of the cluttered-thinking post-human. It's not that the post-human doesn't think - that might be a blessing! - but that he thinks too much and too trivially; that his brain and Mind like his body have been ornamented to the point of collapse. His mind is filled with the frivolous and the banal, the mundane and the unimaginative. All this of course leads to entropy and atrophy, to the point where like an overweight adult, the post-human's neural network is similarly disposed. Obesity is not just a state of body, but a state too of brain and mind. If only people could see this they might realise how they have squandered their opportunities for development. But man has arrested his development to the point of eco-philosophical paralysis. And one's own stupidity is a terrifyingly difficult thing to see.
Gone is the mature, patient, and non-impulsive human, who realises he is simply a system within systems, and in staggers the impetuous, clambering, completely demented post-human. As the South-African psychiatrist David E. Cooper once said, if you're going to go mad, at least do it discretely. The Scottish geologist David Hutton was noted as having said when faced with idiots imposing their vacuousness upon the landscape, 'let's not impose our imbecility upon nature'. However, now, in l'age du cul, where madness and imbecility are the norms, it seems as if everyone is eager to show how mad they are. We have made a business out of it. Most celebrities are in fact bundles of neuroses, wrapped up in narcissism. In a society that has clearly lost control on culture, and is too far gone with exploitation, fame and fortune, [decorating the self in the most self-destructive ways possible] madness is now a virtue. And the sane ones amongst us, save for becoming a hermit, have to put up with it or else.
This gullibility is a result of a lack of questioning - at the root level a lack of responsibility - and a blind acquiescence to all that one is told. I realized some time ago that just because someone was older than you did not mean that they deserved any sort of respect for it. Quite the contrary. It is the older generations (with few exceptions) who have, respectively, in ignoring this responsibility to question, left this world in a worse state than when they found it. Instead of being guardians of this earth, they have, through their kowtowing to the status quo (greed, need and fear), and dressing their selves up in all manner of conventions, allowed this planet and its myriad inhabitants to explode and suffer, and become mad, in spite of our so-called advancedness. And it is gullibility that has been their crutch. It should be a crime, in fact, not to think responsibly. Instead we are approaching an Orwellian nightmare, that is in fact the opposite of this: thoughtcrime, and the almost criminal act of thinking critically, and rupturing the conventional modes of thought.
But of course, man is a herd animal, and to leave the herd-like thinking that has been branded upon him (and which he has duly accepted), is to exile oneself from the herd and invite death. Security and safety are the most primitive instincts known to most living organisms, and man, in spite of his vast brain, is no different. Just look at the people, following a celebrity endorsement, who rush out to buy said product; it amounts to nothing less than mass hysteria. But this is exactly what advertisers prey upon, the hysterical, the neurotic, and the cow-like nature of the cluttered-thinking post-human. It's not that the post-human doesn't think - that might be a blessing! - but that he thinks too much and too trivially; that his brain and Mind like his body have been ornamented to the point of collapse. His mind is filled with the frivolous and the banal, the mundane and the unimaginative. All this of course leads to entropy and atrophy, to the point where like an overweight adult, the post-human's neural network is similarly disposed. Obesity is not just a state of body, but a state too of brain and mind. If only people could see this they might realise how they have squandered their opportunities for development. But man has arrested his development to the point of eco-philosophical paralysis. And one's own stupidity is a terrifyingly difficult thing to see.
Gone is the mature, patient, and non-impulsive human, who realises he is simply a system within systems, and in staggers the impetuous, clambering, completely demented post-human. As the South-African psychiatrist David E. Cooper once said, if you're going to go mad, at least do it discretely. The Scottish geologist David Hutton was noted as having said when faced with idiots imposing their vacuousness upon the landscape, 'let's not impose our imbecility upon nature'. However, now, in l'age du cul, where madness and imbecility are the norms, it seems as if everyone is eager to show how mad they are. We have made a business out of it. Most celebrities are in fact bundles of neuroses, wrapped up in narcissism. In a society that has clearly lost control on culture, and is too far gone with exploitation, fame and fortune, [decorating the self in the most self-destructive ways possible] madness is now a virtue. And the sane ones amongst us, save for becoming a hermit, have to put up with it or else.
The antithesis to all this neurosis and decoration is the nirvanic body, which having derobed the ornamented self, seeks to work not for others, not even for oneself, but to work-play on the self/no-self. If there is any selfishness, then it is the self as the whole and healthy 'synergy of synergies' (and not as the shrink-wrapped segregate). The nirvanic body needs nothing, is nothing, fears (and hopes for) nothing. It is, simply and resolutely, itself, at once whole (and thus holy) and sacred. Any attempt to thus decorate it would be like pouring water on a duck's back. The nirvanic body becomes impervious to artificiality, becomes bulletproof to death (for you cannot kill what is already dead....), is immune to desecration; glitter and bawbles will not take hold.
In an age when we are urged to behave responsibly, to drink responsibly, to drive responsibly, surely to hell, the first port of call should be to think responsibly? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, himself a proponent of 'persistent, courageous thinking', writes at the end of his essay The Question Concerning Technology, 'questioning is the piety of thought'. This dutiful conduct, in the age of the ass, has sadly been relegated to the scrapheap with all our other waste products. It has been smouldering there for centuries, maybe even millennia. The real question we should be asking before all else is, is it not time we put the fire out? And begin again to question what on earth is going on?
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'The Quest is the Question...' - The Crane at Stobcross Quay
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