Sesame Street Values & Suicide
Words of Wisdom From... Russell Brand?
Last night I watched a YouTube video my father sent me from comedian Russell Brand who had, unbeknownst to me, inserted himself into the arena of political ideas, much like other comedians of late. I quite like Russell Brand and particularly enjoyed his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross from 2009. The video my father sent me was about the on-going feud between left-leaning Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on Joe Biden and the left-leaning political pundits who object to it; a feud the majority of average folks know nothing about, to be sure. But, in the video, Brand mentions something even more important; getting back to our “Sesame Street Values.”
What are these and why is Russell Brand talking about them? These are your principles, your personal philosophy of life. Treating people with kindness, integrity, so on and so forth. And in his video, the self-professed a-political Brand makes the same call that has been made for decades by those disenchanted with the political process: one for localization, getting out there in your community, and trying to actually make a difference instead of remaining glued to MSNBC and Fox News. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls it, “[T]he construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained.”
Glenn Greenwald has principles. He follows his principle of free inquiry as a journalist wherever it leads him. These were the same principles that guided the likes of his intellectual forebearer, essayist George Orwell, and the principles that led to Greenwald working to uncover the nefarious actions of the U.S. surveillance state. The consequentialist, in contrast, is not following a principle, per se; the consequentialist’s only principle is worrying about what might result. Thus are born all of the things you cannot say, stand for, or inquire about. Much of political activism continues to embrace “radical style in place of radical substance” (Christopher Lasch), serving as an avenue to alleviate ones guilt of privilege, establish identity, and fill empty lives void of meaning and purpose.
Lasch, an angry pundit defying the left/right dichotomy, said in the late seventies, “As the workings of the modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly inaccessible to everyday intelligence, art and philosophy abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective sciences of society, which themselves have retreated from the effort to master reality into the classification of trivia. Reality thus presents itself, to laymen and ‘scientists’ alike, as an impenetrable network of social relations—as ‘role playing’.” Matt Taibbi echoes these same words today, “The world has just grown so complex that the majority of serious issues are beyond the understanding of non-specialists.” People cease to understand the World and they have ceased to do so because they don’t have to.
If you don’t realize your own life principles, you lose touch with one of your chief avenues for meaning. In the era of modernity, with 7 billion people dependent on bureaucracy and corporations (for better or worse), many people lose contact with their principles, or maybe never even actively develop them at all. What can result? Despair and a lack of meaning in life. In my late 30s, I am constantly surrounded by people who have, are ideating about, are thinking of, seem like they are thinking of, or are actively wanting to kill themselves. Friends. Siblings of friends. Siblings of relatives. Spouses of coworkers. I need more than one hand to count them all, and I don’t even live in the Rust Belt.
Noam Chomsky, who is mentioned in the debates about Glenn Greenwald, obviously has some principles. Chomsky, a Jew, has vehemently defended his principle to the right of free expression and free speech, even supporting French anti-Semitics at one time. But, in a way, he also doesn’t stand for a whole lot. He manages to poke holes in and take cheap shots at the entire establishment, imperialism, government agencies, foreign intervention, what have you, but offers little in the way of large-scale alternative ideas. Anarcho-syndicalism seems good, that might work, he says, it seemed good for a few months in Spain, here check out this old book from Rudolf Rocker. Noam Chomsky is excellent at defining what we ought not to be, but he attempts to chart no better course forward.
Noam Chomsky does think Donald Trump is the greatest criminal in the history of humanity for his crimes against the environment. But, there is really a deeper question at play. The assumption is that we must protect the environment so that life can continue. But what life do we protect the environment for? Do we need to protect it so that people can continue to lead lives void of Sesame Street Values to the end of more material accumulation? Lives that provide meaning for bureaucrats and administrators that continue to define revolution as “not… a movement of the masses with which [technocrats] hope to associate themselves… [but] a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders” (Orwell).
What are your life principles, your Sesame Street Values, and do you live your life in accordance with them? Do you think angry people on the national stage who purport to want to help the little guy, like Scott Galloway, can be bothered to be kind to the guy watering his bushes? I imagine Scott Galloway nearly running pedestrians off the sidewalk in his 7-Series BMW trying to get to his next Ted Talk (maybe I’m wrong, this is hyperbolic conjecture). What do you stand for? Get out there and contribute to the people in your lives, to your communities. People live without personal principles, give nothing to life, and wonder why they wallow in despair. Deep down inside, they know they are owing. The principle of, “This is what The State should be doing” is not a life principle.
If you don’t feel like you stand for anything, maybe it’s time to do some actual reflection and exploration. No one stands for nothing. If you need to articulate your principles, pick up a book, or, Hell, even turn on Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street for an episode or two. You could do a lot worse than Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (open your Bible to the first couple of pages of the Book of Matthew in the New Testament). I think you’ll find that you stand for a lot more than you realize, you just haven’t sat down to think about it.
The World has never been as great as it is now, despite man’s being a creature that goes on two legs and is ungrateful. Anyone who dares suggest that progress has occurred, from Steven Pinker to Matthew Yglesias, is pounced upon with fury by leagues of dissatisfied people steeped in negativity. The World is not a utopia and it has never been so; by the standards of history, things aren’t so bad. Prosperity does not come from nowhere, as Thomas Sowell points out, “If prosperity could come only from the united efforts of upright and noble-minded people, all of mankind would still be sunk in poverty.” That doesn’t mean there is no injustice and that the World cannot get better, but the World’s getting better will not manifest solely via fiat.
The political establishment that has produced “the way things are,” for better or worse, also produced President Donald Trump. But, the response of “anything but Trump” is not a political principle. Like aimless individuals, our political process flails, grasps at straws, and comes up short with contests between Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich, as designed by those who planned it. Christopher Hitchens pens a good commentary on the importance of political principles over politics: “But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that views do not really count; that it matters not what you think, buthow you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”
David Foster Wallace, who nonetheless also killed himself, articulated in his fantastic Kenyon College graduation speech the need for principles on a personal level. “[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”
Living a meaningful life starts with you; the more people who lead lives in accordance with something genuine, their Sesame Street Values, however those manifest, the better off we all will be. This is my own version of a pretty good Sesame Street life principle, from the much-maligned Jordan Peterson: “Serve truth above all else, and treat your fellow man as if he were yourself – not with the pity that undermines his self-respect, and not with the justice that elevates yourself above him – but as a divinity, heavily burdened, who could yet see the light.”