anguish
there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be
I am having a recurring crisis where each night I spend over an hour on instagram. I watch videos of police chiefs pledging to issue the death penalty to protestors who injure officers, of hundreds of tanks rolling into downtown DC on railroad tracks crossing Virginia, of migrant farm workers being hunted by ICE and DHS officers who stalk them through the crops fields that they planted. When I go to sleep I sometimes dream that, while looking to the ceiling, I swallow a small black spider as it descends from its web into the gaping hole of my mouth. Yesterday I dreamed of the crabs that my sister and I saw on the jagged cliffs bordering the sea, their thousand legs scampering across the skin of my arm and into some unknown crevice of my body.
I started this blog (three posts definitely don’t warrant that title, but whatever) a year ago in the summer because I wanted to write and because I made the time to do so. I stopped in the fall because I no longer made the time, but I never stopped wanting to. This summer I will make more time. I want to live in a world where there is time enough for everything, where people make spelling errors and plunge down rabbit holes and write stupid essays because they have feelings that they want to express.
I have many aspirations for my writing this summer, mostly because I also want to use this space to make my way through my personal reading, my research on data supply chains and contact labor, and my observations living and working for six weeks on a different continent. I also will be away from my friends, my wonderful friends to whom I share most of my theories about the world, and so I want to create a space where I can unravel some of the more mundane aspects of my life and where I can hear all of your opinions and perspectives as I would over a meal that Alice made. More than anything else, I am terrified of artificial intelligence and the world is ending. I wake up to thoracic legs scuttling down my shoulder and arachnids in my throat as over 54,000 people detained by ICE wake up in privatized prison centers run by Geo Group and CoreCivic.
My silly dean told my thesis group that writing is the best method for processing the material that you read. I often have an urge to share what I’m reading, and usually this manifests in me reading it aloud if I’m around people, underlining and dog-earing the corner of the page if I’m not. On Monday on the plane I encountered something that I wanted to share with like ten people, which is not a feeling that I have very frequently. This morning I finished the book I had started on my flight, Existentialism and Human Emotions, a little book of essays by Jean-Paul Sartre that I found on a shelf at home, and I’m not going to tell you how long it took me to finish because it’s better for both of us if you don’t know.
This book is the first full work I’ve ever read by the philosopher, although I wrote a paper this spring on “Black Orpheus” and Sartre’s impact on Arab existentialism. His work deeply influenced the Arab struggle for independence from western imperial domination and the philosophical movement in the Middle East for emancipation from mental colonization and dehumanization. However, after Sartre visited Egypt, Gaza, and israel on the eve of the 1967 war, he ultimately signed a petition on behalf of the Zionist entity, betraying the very people who used his doctrines to advocate for the reclamation of their humanity on the global stage. There’s a wonderful book on this subject titled No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization by Yoav Di-Capua that anyone interested in the subject should read, which one of my favorite professors from last semester recommended to me.
I had to physically stop after I read these passages devoted to the essential meaning of humanism because I knew that I would probably never forget them.
“When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be” (17).
He continues: “Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all of mankind. If I am a working man and choose to join a Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and if by being a member I want to show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man is not of this world, I am not only involving my own case—I want to be resigned for everyone. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all of humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man” (17-18).
One final section, for anyone who senses a counter argument rising in their throat. “Certainly, many people believe that when they do something, they themselves are the only ones involved, and when someone says to them, ‘What if everyone acted that way?’ they shrug their shoulders and answer, ‘Everyone doesn’t act that way.’ But really, one should always ask himself, ‘What would happen if everybody looked at things that way?’ There is no escaping this disturbing thought except by a kind of double-dealing. A man who lies and makes excuses for himself by saying ‘not everybody does that,’ is someone with an uneasy conscience” (19).
The reason these words affected me so much—literally, made me put down my book and stare at the blank television screen two feet from my face—was because they manage to capture all that I have been feeling about my past, present, and future decisions and what I should be doing with my life. They seemed to diagnose the exact problem that afflicts us. I sent photos of these pages to my friends, I told my younger sister when she woke up, I thought about these words more and more as I walked down stone streets and sat on the wall of the harbor beneath a nearly full moon the next evening. What would it mean if we superimposed our seemingly isolated decisions for our lives onto every person in the world? What kind of world would we be living in?
I am not writing this to make moral judgements because I know that capitalism forces the hands of everyone, and money gives people the ability to choose. So many people would make different decisions about their life and their time if they were not bound to their employer, to a mortgage, to hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt and supporting a family in a nation that offers virtually no childcare or familial support. However, I think that Sartre’s words should inspire critical reflection for everyone in the United States and the world over who uses the argument that “not everyone lives like them” as a justification for their choices. In general, I think we all—especially in the Global North—need to accept a little bit more responsibility for the choices we make.
There are themes of passivity among our generation, themes that can be attributed at least in part to many conditions beyond our control that we have inherited: climate catastrophe looming and landed, conditions of late-stage capitalism that permeate our bodies and our personal relationships, political and economic inequality so incomprehensible that people in the west feel a kind of omnipresent spatial disjuncture, alienated from ourselves because we can never fully comprehend the lives in the Global South that are upended to sustain our ignorance and our consumption. Even still, I think most people are not conscious of or do not want to admit to themselves that we have not just inherited this world, but that our choices each and every day either actively uphold and maintain that world, or else contribute to the making of a new one.
[I keep thinking of Adela Quested in E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India … the omnipresent ringing in her ears after she visits the Marabar Caves—which operate as an emblem of British imperial rule in India—and falsely accuses Dr. Aziz, a Muslim physician, of rape, destroying his reputation and upending his life … the echo of imperialism haunts the American nation in a similar way and resounds in our daily lives].
This is what I am most curious about, and that has made me reflect the most: in making choices in our daily lives, do we inherently believe that that choice should be a template for all of humanity? In our actions, are we conscious of the fact that we are creating a man of our choosing, that we are providing an example for how man ought to live? And perhaps even more importantly, what would happen if all of humanity made the same choices that we do?
My university, my primary ecosystem and tide pool of observation, is a hellscape nestled in the crook of the elbow of western individualism. Sometimes when I think about the students that I wait with in lines at the dining hall, or when I—on a really bad day—look at the public feed on my LinkedIn, I cannot shake the fear that I am receiving an entirely different education from my peers. Every class I take and conversation that I have with my professors and fellow students in the Culture and Politics or English literature departments makes me more certain that the world is ending and that Georgetown is ushering in its demise. What would happen if everyone in the world chose to attend this university that perpetrates massive injustice in the local community, as I did when I was eighteen? What would happen if everyone in the entire world began to work in consulting or banking, as nearly one-third of Georgetown graduates do?
To work for the US Department of Defense, or in enormous tech companies providing cloud computing services for the Israeli government, or in AI startups that develop drone technology to slaughter god knows how many innocent people, or in a more seemingly innocuous and benign job at Deloitte or PwC, is a choice with implications that reverberate. I wonder if people know or agree that in choosing to provide labor for these enormous corporations, they are also involving all of humanity in their decision. The world would quite literally fall apart if everyone chose to work for a firm. The services that these genres of corporations provide are inessential, indefinable, and opaque at best, lethal and world-ending at worst. In choosing to perform this type of labor, are these people creating an image of man as he ought to be? Are we involving all of humanity in consulting, and not merely ourselves?
This rational can be applied not just to employment decisions, but to everything. At this moment in time, whether or not you protest the fascistic federal government; whether or not you use your purchasing power to support business and brands you believe in; whether or not you put yourself on the line for the people in your community; whether or not you get to know your neighbors; whether or not you lend an egg to a friend who is baking a cake; whether or not you return your shopping trolley after going to the grocery store—every choice that you make is creating an image of humanity as you think it ought to be. It is incredibly overwhelming to consider the implications that every choice that we make has on our community and our world, enough to paralyze someone with indecision, and that is precisely why we do not.
In the realm of personal choice, I am also reminded of the concept of the imperial mode of living, a term coined by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen that I learned about from Kohei Saito’s Degrowth Manifesto (next post I promise). The imperial mode of living refers to the lifestyle of people in the Global North, our unlimited appropriation of resources from the Global South that is sustained by the asymmetric distribution of power between the imperial core and the colonized periphery, defended by our militaries. Our social reality in the west is built off of the excessive consumption of natural resources and manufactured goods from the Global South, and it is a way of life that only functions through exclusion.
If everyone were to have access to the imperial mode of living, it would usher in the end of the world. Our lifestyles, identities, activities, and everything that sustains us in the United States and Europe is only made possible through the exploitation and exclusion of people beyond our borders. Thus, our way of life involves all of mankind, as Sartre posited, but it is a template for humanity that cannot be replicated universally because that would mean certain death, according to Brand and Wissen. If everyone consumed and lived the way we do in the Global North, then the world would utterly fall apart; this in itself reveals that our lifestyles in the United States are antithetical to a universal vision of humanity.
I suppose what I am feeling—and what we in the west should all feel, as the tax taken for our imperial lifestyle—is what Sartre and the existentialists define as anguish, or the deep and total responsibility that afflicts people when they realize that we as individuals are lawmakers, that our choices do not only involve ourselves but all of mankind. Anguish is definitely the right word. It is a tremendous burden to bear, but I know with absolute certainty that we would live in a better world if people in the Global North asked ourselves with each choice that we make: “what if everybody makes the same decision that I plan to?” Of course it is always easier to believe that the world will be fine because not everyone will act as you do, or to believe that your life is wholly independent, and that you must prioritize your own happiness over everything else. In reality, we are all completely interconnected, and no choice is made in isolation without rippling through the chain of human interdependence.
And so I arrive at the title of this piece, that we in the west should all be anguished, every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year of every decade of every century. We must take full responsibility for our choices and choose as though all of humanity will make the same decision, for in being monogamous or in joining a Christian trade-union, you are prescribing a formula for how others should live as well. This anguish comes from the knowledge—even when we do not admit it to ourselves—that our ability to choose is the result of the exploitation of peripheral nations and people, and that our choices carry tremendous weight, for they craft a vision of humanity that we subconsciously believe ought to be.
Please leave me comments or text me because I’m writing this to clarify my thoughts and have no answers or definitive conclusions; in fact I can’t understand any of this on my own. Tell me if you hate Jean-Paul Sartre and want to kill him twice, tell me if you think that we should reorient the human project around consulting and big law. I value your thoughts and opinions deeply and in fact I need them to survive. Also, in offering your opinion, you are projecting an image of humanity that responds to substack posts, and that’s certainly a world I want to live in ⟡
