This essay is not about Taylor Swift – or at least, it’s got
far less to do with Taylor Swift than my last essay. But there is a connection.
It’s pretty hard to deny that even though it’s made adequate
bank, Life of a Showgirl has had – at least on parts of the internet I’ve
seen, i.e. my Discord channels and my Youtube and Substack algorithms – a pretty
negative reaction from fans and a lot of critics. The line between “fan” and “critic”
is blurrier than it’s ever been, in this current era of accessible content creation
and platforming. You don’t need to be an expert for your opinion to matter; you
just need to catch the algorithm at the right or wrong time.
Regardless, some people are treating the album, and Swift,
as a laughingstock, and not for the first time.
Now, in my own life, I mentioned in my last essay that I was
running for the local public school board, and while I managed to get over 2900
votes, from a voting turnout of about 18% and about 20k voters or so, I didn’t
get a spot on the school board.
(My shitshow of a provincial
government apparently is floating the idea of just abolishing school boards
anyway. If you’re Albertan, this is a reminder to make a fuss and do your best
to piss off the UCP. Operation Total
Recall is underway, and please check it out, because this government is
attacking our democratic rights and everyone’s interests, regardless of preferred
political affiliation.)
Now – my personal failure here was a disappointment, but I’ve
had a much kinder reaction from people. Partly, I don’t have the expectations
placed on me that, you know, a seasoned political candidate or a world-famous
celebrity like Swift does. And while I’m proud that I made the attempt, there’s
still a certain shadow over any effort that doesn’t bear fruit.
It got me thinking: what does failure mean?
There’s something really interesting about failing these
days. Now, maybe it’s a modern problem, or maybe there’s a historical precedent
here, but at least in my own English-speaking, Western cultural context, it seems
to me like failure has developed this moral weight to it.
A Quick, Dirty History of Success
I’ve alluded to the basic concepts of Calvinism and gestured
at the Protestant work ethic and its resulting trauma before. In a quick, dirty
overview, a prominent strain of Christianity held that some people were chosen
for Heaven and others simply aren’t, and the seats are limited: predestination.
However, and here’s the extra nasty bit, people thought that God would hint at
who was destined for eternal salvation by favouring them with success in their
earthly life.
So of course, people who belonged to Calvinist strains of
Christianity ended up working as hard as possible to try and demonstrate their state
of blessedness. Mix that into the cultural soup of the Industrial Revolution,
and you have an extremely toxic recipe for the future.
This whole belief system has kind of evolved into what’s now
called the Prosperity Gospel, which is a more aggressive focus specifically on
the idea that God will reward you in not only Heaven, but your earthly life,
with actual riches. Immortality in a paradise of fellowship amongst loved ones and
a divine parental figure is no longer enough to satisfy people who are scraping
to make ends meet.
John Steinbeck
did not actually say, “Socialism never took root in America because the
poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily
embarrassed millionaires.” The thing that this popular misquote gets wrong is at
least partly its attribution of blame. It has this implication that damn it,
these poor people are just stupid and stubborn, or ignorant – if only they’d
see what’s gone wrong!
That perspective glides over the extremely intensive
propaganda efforts that have gone into making people believe that poverty is
their own fault. After all, if you just work hard enough, you can be a
billionaire too, right? Ignore the widening legal loopholes for transference of
wealth, avoidance of taxation, and the inheritance chains of property, wealth,
and privileged advantages that directly tie into chattel slavery and European
aristocratic families, of course. It’s just about luck and working hard! Get on
that grindset, girl!
Back to Failure
The thing about focusing on success and The Power of
Positive Thinking, and other similar late-Victorian and early 20th
century self-help texts, is that it doesn’t really account for what the fuck
happens if…you just fail. In The Secret, one of the more recent and
deeply influential permutations of modern prosperity gospel, there’s a whole
thing about “The Universe” wanting to reward you by giving you whatever you
think about most. Of course, that means that worrying about failure will
actually result in failure…because the universe is kind of stupid and bad at
consent, I guess.
Perhaps, dear reader, you can see the direction I’m pulling
you in. The logical corollary of the axiom that success = favour from God or
the Universe…is that failure means God, or the Universe, is disappointed in you.
I haven’t seen this discussed much, but the idea lurks like
an urban legend intruder beneath the bed, breathing and panting damply, evident
but too terrifying to confront directly.
“Bad
Things That Happen to You Are Your Own Fault”
People don’t say this out loud in exactly these words, but
the implication sits there, and turns up constantly, just like that urban
legend slasher. Even after #MeToo in the late 2010s, people still say and imply
that one’s clothing or behaviour could have been responsible for sexual assault
and harassment.
Not attaining the success you expected at work, missy? Clearly
the problem is that feminism has failed, and it’s time to Retvrn to the
(imagined) past mode of life. Be more…traditional. You want a family, don’t
you? Wouldn’t it be relaxing to just spend time with your children at home
while your husband takes care of things? All you have to do is the chores, and
you already do those! Why work in addition to that?
This particular message is all over social media, popping up
in different forms like mutating toxic mushrooms around the earthen cellar door
where fascism dwells.
Never in this line of propaganda is there a discussion of,
say, fertility problems. Despite the wide accessibility of fertility treatments
in our current era, having any kind of trouble, say, getting pregnant or
impregnating someone, still carries the sting of humiliation. Never mind the
question of what happens if you find out that you can’t crack it as a parent
*after* you have children, or the constant, pervasive fear every parent has of
failing their child.
As mentioned, the dominant cultural milieu in the West is flavoured
by both capitalism and Christanity. Both the wealthy and the super-wealthy
benefit from having the broad working class focused on aspiration rather than
justice. If people are trying to grind their way to the top, and fighting each
other for scraps, they won’t target the people actually holding the reins of
power and wealth. Furthermore, if people see wealth as a blessing from God or the
Universe, poverty indicates either withholding of a blessing, or failure.
Failure and poverty are thus made uncomfortable housemates,
necessary to each other. Any type of failure risks the danger of poverty, and
poverty itself is a form of implied failure.
Let’s Make It Worse
So, this is pretty bad, right? Like if you take apart the
idea that failure is always your own fault *and* a result of not being good
enough for the Divine Parent (whether that’s God or the Universe), it’s pretty
scary and daunting. It’s a damn hard standard to meet.
Now put that in the context of our panopticon society. Speaking
of 19th century morality that’s stabbing us in the ass, the panopticon
was a prison design meant to allow constant surveillance of prisoners, to make
sure they were reforming properly. Constant scrutiny and an absolute
destruction of privacy is clearly the way to stop someone from hurting people,
right? Of course, if we’re talking about people breaking the law, we should
probably allude to that whole “poor people commit crimes because they’re poor”
thing that tends to happen. So basically, if you surveil and shame people
adequately, it should be possible to fix their unfortunate moral defect of
poverty.
The best part is, now we have the thing where user
interfaces on social media treat every person like a content creator, people
feel both social pressure and algorithmic pressure to post regularly. Between
the data exposure required for social media and actually posting stuff about one’s
personal life, we’ve developed a societal system of self-exposure and peer
surveillance.
Now, peer surveillance has always been kind of a thing –
people have been up in each other’s business for as long as we’ve been social
animals, and in fact, other animals are nosy, too. But the current mode of peer
surveillance transcends previous social models. Before, you’d have to be seen or
heard doing something you weren’t supposed to; your thoughts, at least, were sacrosanct.
But now we share our thoughts as well, and present the world
with an entirely new path of judgement.
And, in a world where the middle and lower class are
collapsing together, rather than forging class solidarity and focusing on our
mutual opposition, we resort to cannibalism, in hopes of temporary catharsis
and relief. After all, if we can root out the class traitors, the “Treatlers”
who still order snacks from food delivery services, surely we’ll be able to
defeat our enemies, right? Somehow, people bullying each other on social media
platforms has failed to trigger the revolution.
How the fuck do we fix this?
The thing is, this situation isn’t unfixable. In addition to
plain compassion and critical thinking and asking ourselves questions – should I
*really* repeat this or engage with this content? Am I being too harsh on other
people? – we need to practice both self-compassion and compassion towards
others.
This sounds extremely boring and un-fun, so if you find
yourself with superfluous hostile or mischievous energy, direct it towards the
real targets: people in power. You have a right to be angry for what they’re
doing to us, so write angry, ferocious letters, make art, or find other
creative outlets to express your anger. People in power are so much more
fragile than we think they are. We should make them scared again. For legal
reasons, I am not directly advocating violent action, but I am advocating protests
and strikes, and whatever forms of disruption you can manage.
Harass politicians and political figures who are trying to
strip your rights away. Cover for your coworkers when they’re sick or “quiet quitting”.
Ignore shoplifting customers, especially if you’re a fellow customer. Buy food
for homeless people (and also just give them money). Find out what your
neighbours’ names are and actually say hi to them. Be nice to random people on
the internet, especially when you don’t want to. And above all else, reframe
how you see failure.
What failure really means
Not everything we try to do is going to succeed, but instead
of seeing failure as the end of a story, see it as part of a cycle. We can’t learn
what works without failures along the way. Like death, failure is an
inevitability. Also like death, it tends to be terrifying until you actually
encounter it, and realise that it’s an essential part of living. In various
ways, we will fail over and over – so the trick is to see how long one can keep
going before the next failure; as well as to stop treating failure itself as a
moral judgement on everything about us in our lives.
This is hard, slow work, and sometimes being nice to
yourself is harder than being nice to other people – so turn your compassion
outward; towards friends, family, and strangers, even celebrities.
(Compassion doesn’t mean blind defense, but if you don’t
know the difference, maybe go spend some time sitting with that before you yell
at me. There’s your first lesson: stop wasting your time yelling at random
people on the internet when you could be trolling and harassing CEOs of large
corporations.)
With practice at turning compassion outward, it gets easier
to ask, “Would I say this to my partner? My best friend?” when dealing with
negative thoughts and judgements rooted in the Christian/capitalist paradigm.
The other thing to do with failure is to see the freedom in
it. If you’ve already failed, you’re already “a sinner”, and “damned” – so what
comes next?
Well, actually, anything you want. If you’re already lost,
why not go further? Modify your approach. Find a new goal. Instead of waiting
for happiness later, find small happinesses now. Instead of longing to be a billionaire, or
waiting for heaven, ask yourself – what were you hoping for from those things
anyway? To help your friends? You don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Life
only gets better when you realise that the metrics of success were impossible
anyway. To quote a song I like, “we’ll
never get to Heaven ‘cause we don’t know how.”
Now, do I actually succeed in living by all of these
precepts? It’s a work in progress. But hey, the more I fail, the more I have a
chance to try again.
***
A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB
with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in
her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking
as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky
* Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook
