No, Self-love is Not the Answer
When Jay Gatsby died in the quintessential American novel The Great Gatsby it represented something significant; it represented perhaps, quite literally the death of the American dream. The entire idea that America somehow was the land of opportunities rose out of the whole discourse which emerged to justify the rise of industrialization and capitalism – and at the back of it all, slavery, colonialism, rape and genocide – in fact, the very existence of America itself.
This should take us back to something Marx talked about; the idea of base and superstructure. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx argued that the ideas that prevail in a society, the various ideologies such as religion, political philosophy, culture and so on are dependent on the economic system which gives rise to them. The economic system underlying it all is what he called the base, and the ideologies rising out of, the superstructure. For Marx, the ideas that exist in a society are never independent of the economic mode of production according to which the society functions, in fact the most prevailing ideologies exist to justify that very system.
So now, understanding ideology as a tool used to maintain the status-quo we can more clearly understand why an idea such as the “American Dream” ever came into being. But instead of going into the details of an ideology which is has lost the relevance it once had, why not talk about something more recent. Now, before I proceed, I would like to clarify that the idea that America is a land opportunities is still prevalent, but more modern day ideologies have emerged to justify modern day capitalism. These ideologies are naturally different because the very nature of capitalism has changed, it has not only developed its capacities for industrial production beyond once imaginable limits, but it has also to a good extent been globalized.
The globalization of Capital entails the rise of a global hegemony which justifies said base. For this to happen, ideas become both, more universal as well as more localized. What I mean by this is that ideologies which have risen in recent times can be observed in most cultures. Though the ideas are similar throughout the world they are localized, by that I mean they conform to more idiosyncratic beliefs (religion, culture etc) exclusive to a geographical region. Now coming to the said ideologies; there has been a sudden rise in the idea of a “self-made man”, the idea that through hard-work one can achieve the same levels of wealth as the top 1% of the world. This can be traced back to the idea of the American Dream, as it is similar to the idea. The difference is that once America was where man went to become self-made, but now it has become as idea which is more universalized and localized. Now, one needn’t move to America to fulfill their dream of becoming a billionaire, they can do so from home.
Another very prevalent idea, specially amongst younger people is the idea of “self-love”. The idea that all that one needs is themselves is not new, but its popularity is something quite specific to our own age. It should be understood that this is an age of growing self-isolation, of the death of meta-narratives that once consoled the human race, and of increasing depression. When faced with depression and trauma, many writers writing for young people advise them to love themselves and value themselves, for no-one else would do that.
The first idea discussed here, that of the self-made man, is an evidence of how capitalist hegemony has been globalized and is now taking over more local ideas and beliefs, by incorporating them into its own core, thus changing their very essence. The second idea is a result of hyper individualization. The belief that the individual is superior to the community is an age old one specially central to all liberal ideologies, it is obvious that this individualism would turn into a hyper-individualism as we fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of neo-liberalism. But something else is at work here to; the phenomenon of alienation. Marx talked of how in a capitalist society the individual is more and more alienated first from his labor and then from the society. For Marx, because the worker sold his labor to a capitalist as a commodity, the labor thus became the private ownership of the capitalist – labor being central to realizing one’s own selfhood – thus alienating one’s own existence from oneself. Religion was identified as a sort of distraction from this life of alienation, something which gave meaning to the lives of the workers by giving them a sense of the self, no matter how abstract.
But slowly the society became more and more secular and atheistic, so religious narratives were to be replaced to fill the unfillable hole that alienation leaves in the soul. So, the idea of self-love emerged as the perfect answer to this; a perfect synthesis of belief in the self instead of God and isolated introspection, which starts and ends in itself. The sense of community which religion and other such ideologies once lent to the people withered, the process of individualism had won. But it really wasn’t a victory for anyone but Capital. Even in cases where religion or other communal ideologies do prevail, they have been tainted, one needn’t look further from Pakistan itself, do people like Qasim Ali Shah – ideologues of entrepreneur culture – not mix religion with their success stories, in order to show this system as something more natural and justified?
In the end, I would just like to say that, we should be vary of where we are going as a people. The above-discussed ideologies are sold as enlightening, modern-day writers and poets are what produce discourse to justify them, so let us be more critical and produce instead that literature, which challenges these ideologies, paving the way for a more human and beneficent world.
written and expressed by Shah Alam Tariq
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