Feel Good, Inc.

"So let's pray for something
To feel good in the morning"

Garbage - Parade
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"I'm gonna make a change
It's gonna feel real good!
Shamone!" [sic]

Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror
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"Well, you know, a protest makes sense if it's part of an ongoing activity. A protest which is just of the kind that unfortunately we have too many of -- "I'm gonna out and protest and then I'll go back home and go back to my ordinary life" -- that's a kind of a feel-good protest. [...] So if protests are part of an active, ongoing engagement, they can be valuable. [...] Otherwise it's kind of like... I'll feel good, I'll see my friends, you know."

Noam Chomsky, answering a question after a 2010 speech on Haiti (minute 1:17:30 in this video)

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"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation?"

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
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"Rinse out the ugly and purge every demon
A small step for progress, a leap on a mine
The smoke never settles where everything's even
A poke in the eye, the equation is nil

Violence for inner peace
Bombing for therapy
Terror is everything you need"

KMFDM - Rubicon

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In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a society whose religion and customs are officially being repressed by a brutal dictatorship. A chapter or two later (I hope I'm not spoiling too much) it turns out the oppression is a fabrication. The entire populace practices its religion in modest open secrecy, no-one is actually being punished for it and the leader himself is a devotee. The sham serves them well, however, in promoting unity, as railing against their nominal common enemy (da gummint) allows commoners to set aside their differences and live in more or less harmonious solidarity. If Wikipedia's to be believed, Vonnegut supposedly earned himself a Master's degree in anthropology for so adroitly illustrating the all too human truism that tribal loyalties are defined by an in-group / out-group dichotomy. From the floor of any social club, the world is easily divided into the saved and the damned, the righteous and the fiends out there, somewhere, just waiting to pounce.

In the first and second worlds, two generations starting with WWII grew up wiretapping and informing on each other as decadent capitalist subversives or godless communist subversives. But scapegoating for solidarity in the form of witch hunts long predates national governments and is not likely to abate in the near future. In America in the early 2000s, the success of the "War on Terror" rhetoric in continuing the paranoid climate of the Cold War and its pretext for powermongering did not go unnoticed by social activists. Left-wing populists took their cue from both pro-war propaganda and conspiracy theorists: instead of addressing real or wide-ranging issues, any demagogue can cultivate a power base by fencing off some arbitrary sub-grouping of rabble and feeding their sense of moral entitlement over some nominal "other" out there who has sinned against the faithful.

It was observed that social activism makes people feel good. It allows them to blame their problems on their neighbours, hold themselves up as morally superior and provides them with safe, designated acceptable targets for their aggression. In other words it fills the same psychological role as religious fundamentalism or patriotism or any of the other types of jingoism of previous centuries. On an individual level, this industry of entitlement, paranoia and moral outrage can provide an existential justification to the inchoate masses of simian superfluity who might otherwise need to face their own irrelevance. But as a bulwark against existential despair, modern social activism requires a permanence and absolutism which belies the goal-driven nature of old-school socially progressive group action. The more memorable social movements used to have a specific goal: the end of a war or deposing a dictator or the formation of a nation-state or abolishing the legal basis of racial segregation.

Modern social activism exists to provide good feels for its base and sinecures for its rabblerousers, so it cannot risk defining goals which might accidentally be met. Just as the "war on terror" neglected to define what exactly this "terror" is or when it might be declared defeated, social justice warriors rail against "institutionalized" evils which might be claimed, at any time and for any reason, to be embodied in any target of opportunity. Which suits the actual evils of the world just fine. It's called divide and conquer. Blacks against whites, women against men, gays against straights, Manchester United against Real Madrid, and the overtime never ends, baby!

Women of the world! Your oppressor isn't the trust fund bitch in full Prada epic raid gear and a legendary Learjet mount to whom goes three quarters of the value of your grinding. It's your male coworker who might've made an extra four cents on the dollar last paycheck for proving himself a more obsessive wage slave. Ignore the investors bleeding you dry and attack your conveniently hate-able and visible designated enemy. Oh, but don't forget to also take your rage out on your husband for not making an extra four cents on the dollar next month.

Paradoxically escaping the possibility of ever being upset and stirred by being permanently upset and stirred. Active, ongoing engagement with all the least relevant targets. Weeding out the subversives. Don't it keep you moving? Don't it give you fun? Feels good, don't it?