David Foster Wallace on American Culture and Choices

Lesezugriff

The following is an excerpt from a 2003 interview that was just released with David Foster Wallace.  I made the transcript myself, but the interview can be found here, in ten parts.

I include this as part of Smarter Context as a way to understand why we make the choices we do as a culture.  Hopefully, insight like this will lead to awareness.  Hopefully, awareness will lead to change.

DFW:  To the extent that I understand it, being grown up isn’t a lot of fun a lot of the time.  There’ re things that you have to do, there are things that you want to do that you can’t do for a variety of reasons.  I think for young people in America there are very mixed messages from the culture.  There’s a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtue being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen.  But, there’s also the sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites.  When I’m a corporation, appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self centered and wanting to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things.

And the point that emerges from all of that is, I think, one more example of American cultural and economic systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving, but do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping each other know how to live and to be happy.

Q: Where doesn’t it work?

DFW: One’s reduced to talking about general terms like being grown up.  Or a term that’s rarely used here anymore, and see it’s  . . . now I feel embarrassed because I’m going to sound like my grandfather, but the word “citizen”.  The idea of being a citizen would be to understand your country’s history and the things about it that are good and not so good, and how the system works and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for political office, which means often reading stuff.  Which often isn’t fun – sometimes it’s boring.  When people don’t do that, here’s what happens.  The candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements, because television advertisements are almost all that voters know about the candidates.  Therefore, we get candidates who are beholden to large donors and become in some ways corrupt, which disgusts the voters and makes the voters even less interested in politics, less willing to read and do the work of citizenship.

When I was a little boy, there was this class called “Citizenship”.  Here are certain things about America and America’s history, here’s why it’s important to vote.  Here’s why it’s important not to go in and just vote for who the best looking candidate is . . .

. . . here’s what’s really interesting, and I don’t know if you can translate this.  But talking about this now, I feel ashamed, because my saying all this sounds to me like an older person saying this, like a person wagging their finger lecturing.  Which, in American culture, sets me up to be ridiculed.  It would be very easy to make fun of what I’m saying.  And I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff as I’m saying it, and this is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a western European, is that there are things we know that are right, and good, and probably would be better for us to do, but constantly it’s so much funnier and nicer to go and do something else.  Who cares?  And it’s all bullshit anyway.

One of the things this causes is tension and unhappiness in people.  I don’t think it’s very complicated, and I don’t think I’ve named the only reason for it.  The paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to, because I can say, “Feeling uneasy?  Life feels empty?  Here’s something you can buy and something you can go do.”  The economic word is “inelasticity of demand”; I demand all the time, no matter what the price of it is.  And it works really well in an economic way.  Emotionally, spiritually, in terms of citizenship, in terms of feeling like a meaningful part even of this country – forget the world – I’m sure the US government’s sort of arrogance and disdain for the rest of the world is unpleasant.  But, it’s also a natural extension of certain cultural messages we send ourselves about ourselves that work very well in some ways and that make us very rich and very powerful.  It’s all . . . complicated.