Walden, Bo Burnham & White Existential Dread

Or; dogs do not eat dogs

“Everything is awful. I didn’t directly ask for any of it. Yet, it all exists for my benefit, and to a great extent, there’s nothing I can do about it… and then, a scary, ugly question pops up. Do I really want to? Or do I just want to feel better?”

This is how a video I recently watched from F.D Signifier presents the thoughts going through white people’s (especially liberal white Americans) heads as they wake up to the reality that the world is built to serve us. The video is a breakdown of Bo Burnham’s Inside (2022) and it perfectly elucidates the journey I’ve been on over the last five years or so, and the existential dread felt in my powerlessness.

Inside is a performance. It is self-aware, clever, and to a large extent gets ahead of its performativity. But does being self-aware mean anything when one benefits off the very system they are critiquing? F.D’s video takes a critical but empathetic view into the “white liberal performative wokeness” that so many, Bo Burnham and myself included, exhibit. Because as much as I am trying to avoid this, there’s no denying that as a content creator, everything I do on YouTube or this Substack is a performance. I am not just writing this for myself, but for the internet. I’ve actually been sitting on this piece for almost a month because of this hesitation. However, I decided to go through with it because A) I think it touches on important concepts that my likely mostly white audience could benefit from, B) it would be silly not to post something because I was worried about being perceived as virtue signaling. But does me being aware of my performance, of how the world is catered to serve me, matter? Do I really want to change minds and hearts? Or do I just want to feel better?

“The world is so fucked up. Systematic oppression. Income inequality… the other stuff.”
Bo Burnham, “Comedy”

My “white liberal performative wokeness,” which F.D defines as the use of liberation ideology as buzzwords and branding, used to be much worse. In 2020, George Floyd had just been murdered and I was among the hordes of white liberals¹ horrified into performative activism and virtue signaling. I wasn’t posting a black square on my Instagram, but I was not engaging with the issue in any meaningful way. My experience of this moment stands in stark contrast to F.D, who as a black man “didn’t have the luxury of being shocked.”

To allow myself some kindness, I was going through some shit at the time, at the peak of my chronically indoors, chronically online, chronically depressed state that had been turbocharged by—get this—chronic pain. But I had finally started therapy, and such was primed to begin my slow and painful “awakening.”

The cultural moment that this event became faded more slowly than the scores of similar police murders that had garnered little to no backlash, but the status quo came creeping back in as it always does, and nothing had been done to address the systemic cause, as it never is.

I moved on, too. I read some articles, attended a couple events, and watched a few documentaries, then patted myself on the back, saying “I’ve done my part!”

I grew up in a Chicago suburb. My high school loved to tout its diversity, but like Chicago, it was still segregated. The black kids hung with the black kids, and the white kids did the same, so while I was exposed to more diversity than say, Bo Burnham, I never really engaged with diverse perspectives. My college was even more white, and though I became entranced by Bernie’s 2016 campaign, I wouldn’t say I understood his messaging as I do now.

My mom, bless her heart, taught us about white privilege far before I think it entered the lexicon of most white people. And look, was this inarguably a good thing? Absolutely. However, it didn’t even come close to scratching the surface of the level of insulation and advantage that our family (and even moreso myself as a man) experience.

Yes, we were insulated from police brutality, but we were also insulated from US imperial brutality, something unheard of to the people of Cuba, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Philippines, Hawaii, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos (to name just a few). Yes, we were advantaged in education by way of our upper-middle class upbringing, but we didn’t talk about where that wealth came from—hyper-exploited immigrants, the oppressed working class, and the pillage of oil and natural resources from the aforementioned imperialism. Yes, our own country is catered to serve us, but the same is true in other countries. When we travel abroad, there are usually restaurants with familiar aesthetics and english-speaking waiters that serve us watered down versions of their cuisine palatable to white Americans (should this be our wish). There are bars, hotels, activities, and the like, all designed with us in mind. It’s not just our whiteness; it’s our place at the top of a pyramid of global exploitation.

Right now, I am teaching English in Hong Kong. Hong Kong students are required to pass an English-speaking exam to enter university, a byproduct of their colonization by the British. So even something like what I am doing, by no means glamorous, is still only possible because of my hegemonic privilege.

Privilege is not just the fact that white Americans don’t have to deal with discrimination and violence in our daily life, or that the majority of us have never had traumatic incidents with police or the justice system, it is the fact that if we want to, we never have to think about it.

Privilege, for me and I’m guessing many of you reading, is not just white privilege; it is cultural hegemonic privilege. It is the privilege of seeing the horrors in Gaza & the West Bank and knowing we can just close the computer screen. It is the privilege of watching the right’s vicious attack on trans people, immigrants, etc. and knowing we can shut off the TV. It is the privilege of being able to insulate ourselves from what is happening in the world because it makes us feel shitty, because the consequences don’t directly affect us (for now). It is the privilege of thinking that supporting liberal politics does anything to address the underlying system that led to Trump.

The predominant cultural belief that what you get is what you deserve, heralded by liberalism and our meritocratic society, tricks us into exploiting ourselves by convincing us that our failings, be it financial or personal, are entirely our own and not based in an inhuman system of inequality and greed. F.D applies this framework to race using a concept called white habitus², which explains how segregation from housing and banking practices leads to white people having a decidedly white-centric view of the world, insulated from the reality of racism and discrimination. We internalize beliefs that social problems are caused by an individual’s decisions rather than systems of exploitation and oppression.

The right uses this conditioning to fear-monger about common enemies, anything to detract attention from the true cause of our collective suffering. DEI practices are taking away jobs that are rightfully yours and giving them to less-deserving minorities. Feminism is giving women an unfair advantage. The woke mind virus is trying to indoctinate your children into being radical Marxists (if only). “Savage illegal aliens” are not only stealing your jobs, but they are making your neighborhoods unsafe. Terrorists and outside aggressors are threatening American exceptionalism and security. Gang members are to blame, not guns. Blacks and hispanics, not the police.

I am one of the people who should flourish under this system. I am an educated, straight white man from a well-off healthy two-parent family in the richest country on Earth. So why didn’t I?

Well, that brings us to Walden and a question that has been weighing on me for some time.

Walden chronicles Henry David Thoreau’s two years of solitude and simple living at Walden Pond in Massechusets, in a small, one-room cabin of his own making. The book released in 1854, about 75 years after Adam Smith laid out the basis of capitalist economic theory in The Wealth of Nations. Though Thoreau never overtly criticizes capitalism, nor is it clear whether he was even familiar with it as a concept, he nevertheless muses about the dangers of consumerism and individualism.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with facitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

I’ve long been obsessed with this romantic pipe-dream of owning a little cottage in the woods and reading and writing and thinking and living a peaceful life of simple joy. It’s actually a wonder it’s taken me this long to read Walden. But when I think about it, even if this were feasible, would it be responsible? In other words, what is our individual responsibility in a rapidly deteriorating American empire? Is it reasonable to fuck off to the woods when our world is burning?

It’s an intriguing question, and to be fair to Thoreau, he has some answers.

What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good.

Thoreau’s whole thing is that by living a life according to principles of nature & simplicity, you are doing more good than any reformer or philanthropist. He calls such charity superfluous and insincere.

The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.

Thoreau is calling out the performative activism of his days, whereas he “demand[s] justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind.” After he left Walden Pond, Thoreau would spend the rest of his days writing works like Civil Disobedience and smuggling escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. So while he was not a philanthropist, there is no denying the net positive he had on humanity. But Thoreau is clear that what works for him might not work for others.

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.

It’s sort of a moot point to think about myself being one of those who would follow in Thoreau’s footsteps, because even though his ethos is incredibly appealing to me, I don’t have that luxury. I am privileged, but not that privileged; not 1852 white intellectual privileged.

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Back in 2020 I was working a job I hated in marketing. I hated it for two reasons, and they both end with -ploitation.

The fact is, even with all my advantages, with all my support, with the world supposedly being set up for me to thrive, I was being exploited. Yeah, I was making good money and didn't need to work more than 40 hours. But I looked at the financials. I knew how much money was going to the top of the top, to the executives and the shareholders.

Perhaps I could have lived with this had I not realized that I was also doing the exploiting. I worked in marketing, meaning I exploited the consumer. I exploited the psychology and the consumerist conditioning drilled into our brains from birth. I was living, in Thoreau’s words, a life of “quiet desperation,” alienated from the products of my labor and my true value as a person.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.

I persevered, not because of some moral fortitude, but because I had support bought by my privilege. When I went through health challenges, which were serious and lasted five years, I had health care. I could afford the myriad of trips to specialists and the bi-monthly therapy sessions for my mental health. When I realized that I hated my job, I had saved up money and could quit and road-trip the US for three months. When my car broke down and insurance wouldn't cover it, my parents helped me financially. When I finished my trip, I was able to stay at home, rent free, with no significant financial burdens, with the luxury of time to figure my shit out.³

Trout Lake, Yellowstone National Park

The trip was the beginning of me finding my own Walden Pond. I discovered the joys of nature, solitude, and simplicity that Thoreau advocates in Walden.

It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves. Nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

Now, here I type, more self-assured but still floundering in a sea of existential dread. I’ve dealt with my own inner turmoil and now I’m faced with the turmoil of humanity. But what we need to understand is that all of this dread and pain means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t lead to action.

“Let this radicalize you rather than lead to despair.” -Mariame Kaba

The Memory Police [SPOILERS AHEAD] by Yoko Ogawa is a dystopian novel which describes the unwillingness to address a problem as it affects those around us until it’s too late. It’s a cutting elucidation of how those in power leverage our fear and self-protecting instincts to turn us against one another. My friend Christian wrote an excellent review of this book in which he summarizes the central conflict as such:

On an unnamed island, people live under the constant threat of forgetting. Not that they care. There is no sadness when an object disappears, instead the object and all memories associated with it begin to slip away. The people gather outside to destroy what is now just meaningless trash. When perfume disappears, they gather to pour their crystal bottles into the river, no longer able to pick up even a whiff of the scent. When birds disappear, the narrator is helpless as the memories spent with her father, an ornithologist, fade from her mind. She is glad that he at least died before the birds disappeared.

Forgetting is the norm, but for some, their memories resist the mysterious powers of the Memory Police. The narrator’s mother is able to hold on to her memories, and begins to hide objects, keeping them in a cupboard in her basement studio. She attempted to share them with the narrator, but even with the object in front of her, she found the object to almost flee from her mind.

The “Memory Police” patrol the island in search of anyone capable of retaining memories, and their brutality is illustrated in the narrator’s childhood incident where they arrested her mother and returned her three days later in a body bag, claiming she died of a heart attack.

As the novel progresses, the Memory Police grow more repressive, aggressive, and violent, and the aura of the island is one of suspicion, isolation, and selfishness. Rather than the terror of a fascist regime leading to some kind of mass revolt or solidarity among the oppressed, Ogawa instead presents a much more realistic and terrifying path, that nobody speaks out or acts against the Memory Police until it’s too late. The book ends with the narrator herself being “forgotten”, leaving her lover R (another character who “remembers”) alone in the world. Christain uses this famous quote by Holocaust survivor Martin Neimoller to parallel the narrator & R’s story.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Memory Police is starkly relevant as a reminder of what happens when we ignore what is happening before our very eyes. Not only is this attitude selfish and privileged, it is also self-defeating. All humans are connected to one another through a common ancestor, so when one of us suffers, we all suffer. We depend on each others’ often invisible labor for everything, from our morning coffee to our drinking water to our groceries to our internet. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured. It is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”

The right’s nativist, white supremacist ideology is an attack on solidarity. Their fear-mongering is an effort to turn us against one another. They are leveraging our centuries of capitalist conditioning that tells us it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there to make us disregard our neighbors’ needs and focus on our own. They are exploiting the hyper-individualism that neoliberalism accelerated (which Democrats supported) to destroy any semblance of communal instinct in favor of “progress” and “growth.”

But believe it or not, dogs do not eat dogs. They work together and hunt as a pack, sharing the rewards and protecting one another. Just the same, humans didn’t evolve to planetary dominance because we competed against one another. As Peter Kropotkin writes in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, “It was not physically the strongest, nor the cunningest but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”

Thus, we would be wise not to fight fire with fire in this moment, but rather with water.⁴ We would be wise to fight fascism with solidarity, to fight hatred with love, growth with degrowth, neoliberalism with community, consumerism with simplicity, selfishness with mindfulness, ego with meditation, anger with understanding, reactionary politics with proactive organizing, and existential despair with radicalization.

1. If you asked me at the time, I would have called myself a democratic socialist, but I was more apolitical, and my actions were decidedly liberal.

2. White habitus is pulled from Racism without Racists by sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva,

3. I feel gratitude rather than guilt about this. But it doesn’t change the fact that most people in this country, because of a lack of health care & social safety nets, are not given the grace and freedom to explore their true value.

4. “We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.” - Fred Hampton