Exploiting Our Impotent Rage
Without outlets for our internalized violence, we support actual violence!
By the age of 13 I had memorized the lyrics to all three Eminem CDs. I loved him. His rage, which I also had a lot of as a teenager, soothed me.
What grabbed the headlines those days was the fact that Eminem’s lyrics were incredibly violent. He’d fantasize about killing his ex-wife, about sexually assaulting various celebrities, about beating up gay people. But there was also a nascent politics there—lyrics on, say, The Way I Am, about how people only care about violence when white suburban kids are victims or perpetrators of it. That continued to be a theme for Em on various other tracks—the willful ignorance of white parents who were somehow shocked that American culture was producing violent thoughts or actions in their children. It was impossible for them to understand that their kids liked Eminem and other rap music not because it was teaching them violence, but because it was a mirror and outlet for the violence in their psyches.
One day in 9th grade, I decided to play a few Eminem songs for my parents. I don’t know if I wanted them to disapprove of it, or for them to see what I liked about Eminem, or both. To my surprise (though perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising, as they are both psychoanalysts), they really liked his music.
“Aren’t you mad it’s so violent,” I asked.
“Society is violent,” my dad said. “This is what people, especially white men, are thinking all the time. At least he’s providing a kind of outlet for it.”
The perennial problem of any cruel society—any society which requires the repression of the emotions generated in us by the things it forces us to do (exploit our minds and bodies for the capital gains of others, stay disconnected from each other, be frequently bored), which is to say essentially every society—is that there is a surplus of anger and rage and dissatisfaction within our psyches and bodies. In these societies, art and music and various other forms of sublimation become outlets for those potentially destructive emotions. By discharging those negative affects, we and our society writ large can continue to function.
But, I think, something strange and dangerous has happened over the last few decades: While it may be obvious that part of the reason we all feel like shit is that society’s violence has increased (see: fascism spreading across the globe), I think what’s less obvious is that simultaneously those in power have weaponized the usual release valves for that violence, turning them from forces that are either neutral, like, say, Eminem’s music, or positive, like, say, a protest, into tools to further fascistic agendas.
In other words, by successfully increasing repression while discouraging the use of productive outlets for that repression, the conservative leaders of our society have created a kind of emotional energy store within all of us, a resource that can then be exploited—channeled into revanchist violence, into votes against people’s best interests, channeled into a self-perpetuating system of fascistic thought.
To (over)simplify it even further: if you were a fascistically-inclined politician intent on ensuring the longevity of your cause, it would behoove you to: do violence to people so that they have an energetic store of rage and antipathy within them, then take away, shame, or discourage their productive outlets for expressing that rage, then create new, evil outlets for that rage—i.e. organizing against immigration, or women’s rights, or even against the formerly-enjoyed productive outlets themselves.
If you’re wondering why in the last few years so many people have become anti-art—laughing or scoffing at modernist paintings or sincere movies, and so many people have become trad-caths or adopted other similarly repressive ideologies, and why so many people have become anti-sex or “kink at pride” or whatever, it is because they are all results of the same successful campaign to destroy our normative outlets for the negative emotions induced by capitalism, so that those emotions can be exploited for further rightwing momentum.