Everything Is F*cked

#FakeFreedom
It  must  be  an  odd  time  to  be  a  super-successful  businessperson.  On  the  one
hand, business is better than ever. There’s more wealth in the world than ever
before, profits are breaking all-time highs, productivity and growth are doing
great.  Yet,  meanwhile,  income  inequality  is  skyrocketing,  political
polarization is ruining everyone’s family gatherings, and there seems to be a
plague of corruption spreading across the world.
So,  while  there’s  exuberance  in  the  business  world,  there’s  also  a  weird
sort  of  defensiveness  that  sometimes  comes  out  of  nowhere.  And  this
defensiveness,  I’ve  noticed,  always  takes  the  same  form,  no  matter  whom  it
comes from. It says: “We’re just giving people what they want!”
Whether  it’s  oil  companies  or  creepy  advertisers  or  Facebook  stealing

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your  damn  data,  every  corporation  that  steps  in  some  shit  scrapes  off  their
boot by frantically reminding everyone how they’re just trying to give people
what they want—faster download speeds, more comfortable air-conditioning,
better gas mileage, a cheaper nose hair trimmer—and how wrong can that be?
And  it  is  true.  Technology  gives  people  what  they  want  faster  and  more
efficiently than ever before. And while we all love to dogpile on the corporate
overlords for their ethical faceplants, we forget that they’re merely fulfilling
the  market’s  desires.  They’re  supplying  our  demands.  And  if  we  got  rid  of
Facebook  or  BP  or  whatever-giant-corporation-is-considered-evil-when-you-
read-this, another would pop up to take its place.
So,  maybe  the  problem  isn’t  just  a  bunch  of  greedy  executives  tapping
cigars  and  petting  evil  cats  while  laughing  hysterically  at  how  much  money
they’re making.
Maybe what we want sucks.
For example, I want a life-size bag of marshmallows in my living room. I
want to buy an eight-million-dollar mansion by borrowing money I can never
pay back. I want to fly to a new beach every week for the next year and live
off nothing but Wagyu steaks.
What  I  want  is  fucking  terrible.  That’s  because  my  Feeling  Brain  is  in
charge of what I want, and my Feeling Brain is like a goddamn chimpanzee
who just drank a bottle of tequila and then proceeded to jerk off into it.
Therefore,  I’d  say  that  “give  the  people  what  they  want”  is  a  pretty  low
bar to clear, ethically speaking. “Give the people what they want” works only
when you’re giving them innovations, like a synthetic kidney or something to
prevent their car from spontaneously catching on fire. Give those people what
they  want.  But  giving  people  too  many  of  the  diversions  they  want  is  a
dangerous game to play. For one, many people want stuff that’s awful. Two,
many people are easily manipulated into wanting shit they don’t actually want
(see:  Bernays).  Three,  encouraging  people  to  avoid  pain  through  more  and
more diversions makes us all weaker and more fragile. And four, I don’t want
your fucking Skynet ads following me around wherever I go and mining my
fucking life for data. Look, I talked to my wife that one time about a trip to
Peru—that doesn’t mean you need to flood my phone with pictures of Machu
Picchu  for  the  next  six  weeks.  And  seriously,  stop  listening  to  my  fucking
conversations and selling my data to anyone and everyone who will pay you a
buck.
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Anyway—where was I?
Strangely,  Bernays  saw  all  this  coming.  The  creepy  ads  and  the  privacy

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invasion  and  the  lulling  of  large  populations  into  docile  servitude  through
mindless consumerism—the dude was kind of a genius. Except, he was all in
favor of it—so, make that an evil genius.
Bernays’s political beliefs were appalling. He believed in what I suppose
you could call “diet fascism”: same evil authoritarian government but without
the  unnecessary  genocidal  calories.  Bernays  believed  that  the  masses  were
dangerous  and  needed  to  be  controlled  by  a  strong  centralized  state.  But  he
also  recognized  that  bloody  totalitarian  regimes  were  not  exactly  ideal.  For
him, the new science of marketing offered a way for governments to influence
and appease their citizens without the burden of having to maim and torture
them left, right, and center.
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(The dude must have been a hit at parties.)
Bernays  believed  that  freedom  for  most  people  was  both  impossible  and
dangerous. He was well aware, from reading Uncle Freud’s writings, that the
last thing a society should tolerate was everyone’s Feeling Brains running the
show.  Societies  needed  order  and  hierarchy  and  authority,  and  freedom  was
antithetical to those things. He saw marketing as an incredible new tool that
could  give  people  the  feeling  of  having  freedom  when,  really,  you’re  just
giving them a few more flavors of toothpaste to choose from.
Thankfully, Western governments (for the most part) never sank so low as
to  directly  manipulate  their  populations  through  ad  campaigns.  Instead,  the
opposite  happened.  The  corporate  world  got  so  good  at  giving  people  what
they  wanted  that  they  gradually  gained  more  and  more  political  power  for
themselves.  Regulations  were  torn  up.  Bureaucratic  oversight  was  ended.
Privacy  eroded.  Money  got  more  enmeshed  with  politics  than  ever  before.
And why did it all happen? You should know by now: they were just giving
the people what they wanted!
But,  fuck  it,  let’s  be  real:  “Give  the  people  what  they  want”  is  just
#FakeFreedom  because  what  most  of  us  want  are  diversions.  And  when  we
get flooded by diversions, a few things happen.
The  first  is  that  we  become  increasingly  fragile.  Our  world  shrinks  to
conform to the size of our ever-diminishing values. We become obsessed with
comfort  and  pleasure.  And  any  possible  loss  of  that  pleasure  feels  world-
quaking  and  cosmically  unfair  to  us.  I  would  argue  that  a  narrowing  of  our
conceptual world is not freedom; it is the opposite.
The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-
level addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our
Instagram;  compulsively  finishing  Netflix  series  we  don’t  like;  sharing
outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and

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events we don’t enjoy; traveling not because we want to but because we want
to be able to say we went. Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more
stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite.
Third  thing:  an  inability  to  identify,  tolerate,  and  seek  out  negative
emotions  is  its  own  kind  of  confinement.  If  you  feel  okay  only  when  life  is
happy  and  easy-breezy-beautiful-Cover-Girl,  then  guess  what?  You  are  not
free.  You  are  the  opposite  of  free.  You  are  the  prisoner  of  your  own
indulgences,  enslaved  by  your  own  intolerance,  crippled  by  your  own
emotional  weakness.  You  will  constantly  feel  a  need  for  some  external
comfort or validation that may or may not ever come.
Fourth—because, fuck it, I’m on a roll: the paradox of choice. The more
options we’re given (i.e., the more “freedom” we have), the less satisfied we
are  with  whatever  option  we  go  with.
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 If  Jane  has  to  choose  between  two
boxes of cereal, and Mike can choose from twenty boxes, Mike does not have
more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. There’s a difference. Variety is
not  freedom.  Variety  is  just  different  permutations  of  the  same  meaningless
shit.  If,  instead,  Jane  had  a  gun  pointed  to  her  head  and  a  guy  in  an  SS
uniform screaming, “Eat ze fuckin’ zereal!” in a really bad Bavarian  accent,
then  Jane  would  have  less  freedom  than  Mike.  But  call  me  up  when  that
happens.
This  is  the  problem  with  exalting  freedom  over  human  consciousness.
More  stuff  doesn’t  make  us  freer,  it  imprisons  us  with  anxiety  over  whether
we chose or did the best thing. More stuff causes us to become more prone to
treating  ourselves  and  others  as  means  rather  than  ends.  It  makes  us  more
dependent on the endless cycles of hope.
If  the  pursuit  of  happiness  pulls  us  all  back  into  childishness,  then  fake
freedom  conspires  to  keep  us  there.  Because  freedom  is  not  having  more
brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or
more satellite channels to fall asleep to.
That  is  variety.  And  in  a  vacuum,  variety  is  meaningless.  If  you  are
trapped  by  insecurity,  stymied  by  doubt,  and  hamstrung  by  intolerance,  you
can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.