You're gonna have to serve somebody

Netflix & chill & ideological commitments

“I’m giving you a choice—either put on these glasses, or start eating that trash can.”

“I am already eating from the trash can all the time—the name of this trash can is ‘Ideology’”

About 10 yrs ago, when I was living in SF and actively dating, I had a slightly eccentric move.

After a few dates, having reached the exalted level of “Netflix and Chill,” I’d subject my date to one of my favorite movies of all time: Slavoj Žižek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. It’s a series of visual essays, exposing deep philosophical concepts lurking beneath the surface of classic Hollywood films. We’d be lounging on a ratty old couch, watching the Slovenian intellectual wax poetic with his thick, spittle-y accent, habitually wiping his nose and his trademark vocal tics “and so on”.  

The first movie dissected by Žižek is They Live.  The protagonist discovers sunglasses that, when donned, make visible (1) that the world around him is populated by aliens who are secretly brainwashing humans through everyday imagery, like ads and magazine covers; (2) the actual subtext of this brainwashing everyday imagery—the glasses reveal that a 1 dollar bill actually says “THIS IS YOUR GOD” and a billboard for a computer company says “OBEY”.  

To Žižek, this movie was a brilliantly constructed metaphor about “seeing” ideology: it did not depict humanity as stuck viewing the world through distorted lenses that could be removed to see reality objectively; instead, humanity’s natural state was one that was mediated by ideology, a perspective that was distorted by default and could only be temporarily remediated through the deliberate act of donning these special lenses.

Why would I subject potential romantic partners to this heady weirdness? 

On one level, it was probably a sort of test/filter, an attempt to see how much they could tolerate heady, trippy pseudo-intellectualism; but on a deeper level it was also about expressing an important core belief about belief and seeking a meaningful life.  

At that time (as I am now) I was between jobs and struggling with my professional identity. Should I be a corporate lawyer or buddhist monk? Jewish farmer or psychedelic yogi? Sorting out my path forward, I had a deep desire to “put on the glasses” and take real stock of the different directions in which I found myself being pulled.  

I now know that putting on the glasses is only the first step.

David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water” opens with the joke:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

He later continues:

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it [reality]. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. 

DFW goes on to argue that we all can fall victim (often unconsciously) to the blind worship of money, power, beauty, or intellect, all of which eventually “eat you alive.”  Appropriately for a commencement speech, he reflects on the freedom to choose “what to worship” afforded by a quality education, and for stepping back and noticing “this is water”; noticing that our everyday experience is mediated by our (consciously or unconsciously) chosen ideology, our framework for making sense of the world and our agenda for acting in it.  While he makes it abundantly clear that we all have a choice, where he stops, I think, is outright advocating for making such a choice.

I believe that you need to make a choice.  If you want a life of meaning, you have to consciously choose your ideological commitments, and if you don’t choose, they’re being chosen for you.  As Bob Dylan once put it, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody”.  

A meaningful life, I believe, requires the ability to honestly perform both gestures:  the willingness to “put on the glasses,” see “the water” and understand the belief systems that are competing to mediate understanding and guide our actions; but also the courage to take them back off and consciously choose a belief system. To the extent I’ve ever found myself lost or conflicted in life, it’s often because I hadn’t (1) really put on the glasses in the first place and honestly taken stock, and (2) taken the glasses off and consciously made ideological commitments. 

Putting on the glasses is about distancing yourself from your default programming, noticing the ways in which the world is trying to persuade you to act in service of larger agendas.  While we’re probably not under the spell of brainwashing aliens promoting a singular, totalitarian ideology as in They Live, with only a little bit of effort you can notice a number of belief systems competing for your mind, your attention, your labor, your soul.  For some people at one extreme, putting on the glasses can be painful; “freedom hurts” as Žižek says. Some people probably prefer to be on autopilot and either not think about their beliefs or go along with whatever’s being most actively pushed.  Other people might lack the time, energy or freedom to really engage in this sort of inquiry.

But at the other extreme are people who try to keep the glasses on in an attempt to stay “rational” and “objective”. They’re living a life of neurotic distance, stepping back from every experience, every choice, every opinion to try to grasp at some illusory idea of unmediated, objective reality. They’re stuck in a sort of liberal paralysis, constantly assessing a confusing set of possibilities without true commitment or conviction, shopping in a marketplace of ideas without ever really buying the goods. 

Perhaps if you’re like me, or like the Kenyon College near-graduates DFW was addressing, you’ve been taught to keep an open mind, to try to stay objective and not get overly committed to a belief system or ideology.  I’ve spent huge swaths of my life secretly kidding myself that I could live from this vantage point.  

To the extent that I’ve felt paralyzed by possibilities in life, by the paths to take and how I “should” be feeling about any of them, I think it’s been about a failure to really put on the glasses, assess the forces at play, and then ultimately choose.  To whatever extent that I’ve been able to break through that paralysis, I think it’s been by asking some fundamental questions:

Who do you serve?

What do you struggle for?

What is your highest good?

What are your most important commitments?

What is the most important result of a life well lived?

What should you be focused on right now?

Finally, what belief system (or set of beliefs) demands the above answers from you? Can you name it/them? What is that belief system’s agenda? Do you agree with it? Can you commit to it?

Your ability to see and respect multiple answers here defines your classic liberalism; but your honest, personal answers and choices define your actual ideology, the actual agenda you’re serving.  

If you’re only doing the former, and can’t bear the latter, then you’re letting your liberalism get in the way of a meaningful life. If you think you can be wholly “rational” and “objective”; if you think you’re operating from some neutral, secular viewpoint; if you think it’s possible to have a life of meaning or deep understanding that is unmediated by a fundamental set of beliefs and ideological commitments, I think you’re kidding yourself—“this is water”. The vast majority of people I know—educated, western elites—would never consider themselves ideologues.  But it was exactly this sort of people to whom David Foster Wallace addressed “This is Water”.  

Consider that very few of us are truly alone; most of us are living and working in the world, and we’re not only acting for ourselves, but for our families, our communities, our organizations, and ultimately for the ideological agendas that are consciously or unconsciously guiding those actions. 

Everything we do ultimately serves an ideological agenda, and a meaningful life is dependent on intentionally revealing and consciously choosing it.

You’re going to have to serve somebody.