Masturbation
Although many oppose masturbation for religious reasons, it would be hard to speak against it as it exists in itself. Who would oppose pleasure? Masturbation becomes problematic only when it distracts us from dealing with the world around us, because when we own our brains, we can choose to deny reality and find pleasures that fit only ourselves.
We can secede from reality, become solipsistic and be happy with our masturbation even though problems develop while we masturbate. We will have to face those problems later, of course, but right now, the individual feels good, so they are ignored. We can ignore the whole of the world and focus only on ourselves and making ourselves feel pleasure. That might be different from "happiness" as we speak of it in the context of a life, but we will deal with that later.
Of course, we're well aware of the tendency to be harmful. Fiddling while Rome burns, and pleasuring oneself while the cows flee the barn are well-known clichés to us. We are slowly as a culture drawing the link between pleasuring ourselves at the expense of the world and dramatic acts of quasi-legal theft, like the Enron debacle or our leaders thrusting us into another war for profit. Distant in our consciousness is the recollection that ignoring problems and trying to buy our way out of them leads to further problems.
 As history teaches us, we are not islands. The society around us acts independently of us, and even if we're doing well, it can collapse suddenly. There were people in Russia who were doing quite well at the time of the revolution, as there were in France. Many got caught unawares by wars or violent government change in Europe and the Americas. As our ancestors in Athens and Rome found out, a society out of control may face a worse fate than war or revolution: it may collapse into a burned-out husk of itself, forgotten to history as it has ceased to produce any noteworthy thought.
We would like to think that we are self-sufficient. Other than the obvious physical sustenance, upon whose crisis-free farms and grocery stores we depend, there is the problem of socialization. We need people like us who share similar (but not exact duplicate, necessarily) values and inclinations. If our goal in life is to have some career we like, to possibly have a family and spend our time enjoying quality music and arts and activities, we need quality artists and breeding partners and friend material from which to choose. A collapsing society offers less of that.
Indeed it is lonely to be in the midst of collapse, so much so that it provokes a desire to simply masturbate and ignore it. But problems do not go away. What is tolerated becomes the de facto standard, and if we tolerate small collapses, a big one is due to follow shortly. As said above, there is nothing wrong with masturbation, but only provided that there's not something else we should be doing, like avoiding collapse.
Yet masturbation takes many forms. The most common in our current society is to ignore the whole and its problems, and to make ourselves feel better by applying aid to those who most visibly suffer. Like a doctor with a terminal patient eroded by an unknown disease, we can target symptoms and alleviate some suffering. These acts however will only abate the small collapses, and can only delay in tiny steps the big one. Our palliative care is also a form of masturbation: we are doing it not for those we "help," but to make ourselves feel helpful, like we are moral people. We are pleasuring ourselves with self-image enhancements.
When we give up on the world, and begin to masturbate, we take up opinions that make us sound good. We are not concerned with realistic opinions that take in the whole scope of problem or solution. Instead, we want to feel good about ourselves. We need to feel better about ourselves because we are conscious that we are ignoring the problem as a whole. We ignore it so we can profit personally, and feel good about ourselves for being smarter than those less forunate, so we then gift them with token aid to make ourselves feel not only successful but also "nice" and egalitarian and moral. None of those feelings have anything to do with the wrong direction our society has taken.
To please ourselves, we style ourselves as more enlightened than others. We stroke our own egos. We raise up the lower and push down the higher. We can become righteous Christians, snooty Environmentalists, or any of a plethora of supercilious Liberal options. We are not thinking of the effects our "reforms" will have. We are thinking of how good they make us look, and from that, how good we will feel about ourselves. We warn our children against the hubris of kings, but cannot see that our own individualistic hubris runneth over.
Historically it has been a problem of democracies, and of nations run by commerce, that the citizens are encouraged to do what benefits them personally, and so they ignore problems until it's too late to do anything about them. While ignoring these problems, they make themselves feel better through forms of masturbation: drink and drugs, fine foods and luxury goods, pompous social events and egalitarian helping of the poor and lonely misfits. Masturbation is ignoring the steering wheel so we can find the right station on the radio, thinking unconsciously that if we're going to drive off the road and die, we might as well be doing it while listening to pleasant (or hip) music.
A healthier time would call this outlook suicidal. Because we can pleasure ourselves and ignore the whole, we do, but it doesn't make us feel better, so like drug addicts we pursue more masturbation so we at least feel better as we die. It is not hard to see how this is selfish and destructive. We can masturbate while Enron steals, we can masturbate while Congress is corrupt, and we can masturbate while parasites below eat our society through a welfare state and above bankrupt it through white collar crime. Soon enough however all these points will connect, and we will be forced to look up from our masturbation and confront the whole of reality that, in pursuit of our own pleasure, we have denied.
by Brett Stevens
February 18, 2007
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