The Great Indulgences

Bread and circuses for a global elite

There is a culture of indulgence among the elites. We spend much of our lives obsessing over our appetites and trying to satisfy them. We love our food, we love our drink, and we love our sex.

Much of this indulgence goes under the cover of being “open” and being “free” from social norms or “explore.” There is a radical break from the thoughts or beliefs of the past which held people back, and an unrelenting focus on getting instead—material pleasure. In a world wrought by science, where the dualism of meaning has been erased, utterly lost, and replaced by the singularity of existence, the only thing that matters in this life is enjoying it. Buy the things, yachts. Have the lauded parties. Just go, go, go—enjoy, enjoy, enjoy—until the day you die.

The overindulgence, the decadence, the earthly consequences of consumption has been growing bit by bit, in the West, over the last 100 years. The Scientific Revolution revealed truths of the Universe, and ever since, we’ve been at work putting those truths to work to achieve our own pleasures. We’ve constructed pleasure palaces where you can buy whatever your heart desires, all in the context of air-conditioning and artificial lighting. You can see, or read, or hear and almost anything that has ever been produced. You can titillate your senses, indulge your fantasies. The world is quite literally the human playground.

In the desert, we put up stages and speakers. We inject chemicals “discovered” in a lab to tinker with your desire. We wear costumes, like children, at these dances. We dance, and we dance, and we dance. We say it’s the pinnacle of human experience. An artificial environment, with artificial stimulants, with artificial friends.

We put up tents all over the world. Festivals, we call them. Oceans of sound and substance. A permanent adolescence, lived in full color.

This is art, we say. Look at the sculptures. See the lights. Hear the music. Take it all in. But god forbid, don’t ask, what does it all mean. It is art, it is not the kind meant to have any meaning. It’s not made for the soul (which doesn’t exist, duh) but for the senses. It’s all for the senses. If the senses are all that is, where there is no soul, how can there be meaning?

It is a way of living. That is for sure. But here’s the thing: it’s never enough. No party, no drug, no dance is ever enough. There must always be the next high. There must always be more. A hamster wheel of conspicuous consumption, to match the hamster wheel of achievement, the professional careers we need to pay for all that debauchery.

I’m not speaking as a prudish outsider. I’ve done it, the whole scene. It was all I did for years. I get it. The rush of the music as you’re coming up, the deep bonds of friendship through shared experience, the monkey scream of pleasure when you take a sip of a warm Jäger, when you see your friends, all the screams, the concerts. You just—

The voice in the head stops chattering. Everything is suddenly clear: it’s all so obvious. This right here is living. Everything else is sideshow.

But then it ends. Try as you might, you can’t will it back. You need the whole apparatus, the accessories, to do the trick. It came from without, not within, and it is without you must turn again—to feel it again.

Compare this to the joy that comes from keeping something within. It’s not an high, there’s no peaks or valleys to speak of any kind. It is just peace. A shallow sea of ankle-deep water, the temperature of blood. No stretch and no distinction, as far as the eye can see. Go where you wish, do as you may, it’s all the same, and it’s still that there is.

Is it emptiness? Is it nothingness? No. It’s wiser. It’s there, and it’s warm. And by the very accident that it exists, it has meaning. Meaning, not pleasure. Not momentary, ephemeral highs, spaced out by lows. But a constant, consistent scale of meaning. It is simple and it is boring but it is real.

This is still what drives the other 80% of the world. The ones who cry for family, not carnival. They live in a world designed for meaning, not pleasure. Pleasure is what the rich can afford, not the huddled masses, living the reality that the party in the desert only pretends at. The rice farmer on the plains of India, who lives in a one-room thatched hut, who eats on the floor, sleeps on the floor, has sex with his wife on the floor, and raises his kids on the floor. He doesn’t live for pleasure. He lives for meaning. The meaning he finds in his family, in his work, in the stars above. He grinds, and he toils, for more than a high.

It is these masses who live with meaning, that we, the material class, has cast underfoot. We step above the masses to reach the spires of pleasure. We shove them onto fields and into factories; we tell them lies, we keep the hard-working folk toiling away while we play our games, and indulge our pleasures, the whole time looking away.

For a long time, we got away with it. It’s the greatest bamboozle the world has ever seen—and the world has fallen for it, quite a few bamboozles. Armed with the machinery of material science, a new priesthood emerged. One that can engineer even the world of sensual pleasure. Each day, new innovations for the ever-impatient customer egged on by competition, we try to figure out how to push that sensual pleasure a little further, make it a little better. Step by step, bit by bit, brick by brick, we constructed this world we live in today. A playground for our fantasies and a warehouse for our fun.

Some tried to stand against us. Some writers and artists and thinkers and leaders. Great men and terrible men. Some of the formidable, most, but they all lost. The priests never let their hands on the levers of power.

The control of the narrative, the manipulated mindshare of the masses, yeah baby, we had it. We appealed to the basest instincts within. We promised everyone a chance at the sensual pleasure. We killed the idea that there’s anything more important than this life, any grander reality right before your eyes, any higher purpose than your pleasure.

We killed it, all right, so we could make one of our own. We couldn’t get rid of the idea entirely. It’s necessary to the human experience. It binds us in a shroud we all wear, even if it doesn’t claim to be anything beyond the one we can see, that itself is the seed of faith. A faith that nothing else exists.