Confessions of a Holy Whore

Extract from Curtis White's The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

"It is no doubt that at some level we believe that these things that separate us from the Golden Rule have a payoff: they allow the accumulation of wealth while making the idea that we're responsible for others not so much wrong as irrelevant. And so it's all right if 60 percent of the nation's wealth is owned by the top 4 percent of the population. And apparently it's all right if very little of that wealth is spread about generously, or caring, or even as a tax write-off for charity. As the Newtithing Group (a philanthropic research organisation) reported in December 2005, the least generous of all working-age Americans are those who make in excess of $10 million annually. This group had on average $101 million in investment assets and made charitable gifts equal to 1.5 percent of their assets.

So what's trickling where? Ask Richard Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange, who left his job with a multimillion-dollar payout. Greed begets more greed. Nothing ever really trickles down except suffering, and suffering can trickle a very long way. (That's globalisation!) The idea that capitalism ultimately works in everyone's interest is but one in capitalism's extensive repertoire of scams. Like an original sin, this assumption is capitalism's own original con.

Worse yet, we have bought into this malign logic in spite of it's real and visible results. This, again, is the condition that Kant described as 'radical evil': even though we wish individually to be good people of goodwill, because we lack the principles to unite us, we behave as if we were 'instruments of evil.'

But the difficulty of our situation is even more complex than the mistaken assumptions about our self-interest can explain. Imagine that we were trying to find a place entirely outside complicity, completely uncontaminated by the logic of self-interest, from which point we could attack the plutocratic assumptions of the present with political purity. In short, what would happen if we tried to rise above self-interest in order to return to the sacred? If the 'system' is evil, what options do we have for standing outside the system in freedom rather than servility?

Hamlet, again, is the emblem of this dilemma. Hamlet's gloominess is the consequence not simply of his adolescence but of the fact that he sees all too clearly that in order to restore goodness to the world he would have to become his own enemy and thus make himself a hypocrite, isolate himself from his family and community, become a public menace to those he loves (especially poor Ophelia), and ultimately participate in his own defeat. If his efforts only lead to the ascendance of Fortinbras, he might as well have left old Claudius where he was - on his father's throne and between his mother's legs. Hamlet 'can't win for losing,' as the folk saying puts it. He can't win because every effort to win has the opposite effect. Hamlet understood, with a pertinence that is powerful to this day, that the only means available to him for confronting his enemy made his enemy stronger. Hamlet's dilemma is prototypical of what German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder called the Holy Whore."
~Curtis White, 'The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work'

Curtis White is an American essayist and author. Most of his career has been spent writing experimental fiction, but he has turned recently to writing books of social criticism.