#5 - Desire in the Time of Capitalism (0/2)
Caption: “❤️ CONSUME PRODUCT. WE ALL LOVE TO CONSUME THE PRODUCT.”
Introduction
About a year ago (an anniversary, of sorts), I was at a work happy hour where there were plastic cups, the kind you might see at a silent auction charity event for some vaguely good cause, but with pin holes poked in the bottom. I vaguely remember a coworker had spilled wine on herself and might have tried using a second glorified donut to fix the problem. But I don’t remember if it worked or not.
I’ve taken to calling them “un-cups”, given that they do not serve their claimed purpose and so are by definition worthless. But how is an item like this still being produced? If it were true that consumers did not value un-cups, surely the logic of Capital, slovenly enslaved to the desires of its consumers, would have stopped producing un-cups long long ago. So instead the question is why do people keep buying un-cups? I think it is because it is a trick or a cruel joke: the hole is too small to notice in the split second the person qua consumer of plastic cups, momentary participant in the plastic cup market, makes their purchasing decision in the aisles of a CVS; and if anything, the fact that you need two or three un-cups to approach the utility of a cup is (as the MBAs might say) a revenue driver!
And this is all too true in other markets, where corporations exalt their consumer by degrading them, treating them as money bags to be drained, bodies to fill and cover with consumables of all kinds, and then discarded. We can observe this pattern in US healthcare alone, the one industry, if there were any, which ought to uphold and be able to credibly proclaim its ethical standards. I leave it up to you the reader to imagine how this also might be true in other markets/industries (they are one and the same):
Dialysis: There is no money to be made in managing or preventing kidney failure, or managing and maintaining health in general. So instead, most future dialysis patients are left alone until they crash into kidney failure, and so most patients are forced to sit next to a machine which filters their blood, for up to five hours, three times every week. That’s a part time job’s worth of time, not including getting there and getting back, taken from the rest of their lives. The kidney failure patient’s best alternative is to die over the course of a week or two, as waste fills up their bloodstream. Their gross mismanagement within the healthcare system forces them to become pawns in a complex financial game between behemoths: dialysis providers, questionably funded and highly conflicted charities, private payers who want to “manage utilization”, and Medicare.
Assisted Living: Some light reading. It’s no surprise that PE bros who treat the world like a P&L statement fail to operate assisted living facilities with any sense of human care and decency.
Opioids.
Here is what I will eventually assert in Part 1 of this essay: Capital exploits individuals as consumers as much as it exploits individuals as producers.
But before any of that, what is desire?
Part 0: A rough understanding of desire
First-order desires
A simple working definition: most desires can be expressed in the form of “I want X” or “I need X”. Equivalently, wants and needs are the two most common kinds of desires that come up in daily life.
Next, the kinds of scenarios I imagine to start are ‘simple’ first order desires: the desire to eat an apple, the desire to go to the beach, the desire to talk with a friend. In these scenarios, what characterizes the desire? A typical answer by philosophers might be “a disposition to act to bring about a state of the world which fulfills the desire”. If Arthur the Desiring Aardvark wants to eat an apple, he will find and then go through with the physical actions of eating the apple. If Arthur wants to go to the beach, he is disposed to act in such a way to bring about his pleasureful presence at the beach. He is disposed to buy sunscreen, buy a towel and umbrella, find directions on Google Maps, bring a good book, drive to the beach, sit in the hot sand, etc. etc. And by actually doing all of these things, you might say that he has fulfilled his desire to eat an apple or go to the beach. This model of desire works well for utilitarian desires, which are grounded in a fixed sense of the self: given who I am right now, and assuming that I will be the same an hour or a day from now, what am I missing? What do I want or need that would maximize (or at least improve) the utility I experience, given that the way that I understand and measure utility is the same today as it will be tomorrow and the day after too?
This model assumes a direct and central link between actions and desires, and there is an immediate intuition about what this link is: desires come into the world unfulfilled by default, and are fulfilled through actions. When Arthur feels hungry, he desires to not be hungry, and so he goes to find and eat food. If he desires to own a house, he would also go and do what he thinks is best to achieve that goal: maybe it’s finding high paying and stable employment, or building the house himself. As philosopher Alex Gregory has succinctly put it, “desires are states which give us reasons to change the world”. Of course, this is true only to the extent that the desiring agent is materially able and sufficiently motivated to act towards fulfilling a particular desire. You might imagine someone who wants to go skiing, but lacks skis; or, a painter who wants to paint but is depressed. Putting it all in a sentence: desires motivate actions by coming into the world unfulfilled, to the extent that the desirer is materially able and sufficiently motivated to act.
These desires can arise, for example, from “instinctive” biological signals like hunger or thirst, from more complex emotions like guilt or kindness, carefully considered decisions towards specific aims, or devout adherence to one religion or another. You might also consider: a human’s desire to sing, a bird’s desire to find worms, a dog’s desire to play fetch. A bird calls and a dog barks; every living thing eats; humans play, and many other animals play too.
Second-order desires: desiring specific (kinds of) desires
But desires are not this simple. Imagine something which might be called a “desire factory": mental states which are little alchemical factories that take in inputs of all kinds and output a continuous stream of first-order desires. Examples of these include: lack, devotion/duty/discipline, belonging, being seen as good or praiseworthy. There are probably others. The production processes within these factories are second-order desires, which produce the first-order desires of everyday life.
Second-order desires break the utilitarian assumption! Second-order desires are intimately tied up in the directed and intentional (re)formation of a sense of self: to desire specific desires is inherently an ability to desire otherwise, to be someone different than who you are today.
Consider devotion as an example of a second-order desire. If I am not currently a devoted partner to my spouse, but I want to be, I will desire other desires in light of this. I might want to listen to my spouse complain after work every day out of devotion, even if I have other first-order desires to nap or to talk about myself. Or discipline: if I am addicted to one drug or another, I may want to refrain from taking the drug out of discipline, even if I have a screaming physiological need.
As another example, the idea of “lacking something” can be applied very broadly, beyond objects or experiences: I was looking at this emotion wheel recently after a friend of a friend had mentioned them, and noticed that I could instantly relate in some way to every section of the wheel except for the one with joy in the middle. Relating to those words was more cognitive instead of instinctive, and mostly imagined memories came to mind, stolen from the future.
I use these concepts kind of like classes in object-oriented programming, where the specific second-order desires of any particular individual are completely contingent on that individual's particular psychology and the interaction between their psychology and social/relational environments. The desire to be included exists very broadly, but what it specifically means to be included depends strongly on the cultural and specific social context. Two people may both aspire to be good students, but study different subjects, and so come to desire different first-order desires. But the concept describes the same function in both of their brains.
Forming second-order desires in the presence of others
“Who/what do you want to be/become? What is missing in your life right now?” These turn out to be profound questions with answers which are sometimes instinctive, immediate, and obvious, and other times are uncomfortable and hard to articulate. There are at least three kinds of inputs into these factories related to being in the presence of another/others. First are the patterns, behaviors, and advice of those who are around you and came before you. This is the territory of religion, of the family, of literature and philosophy, of the school and university, of friends, of coworkers and classmates, celebrities and influencers, of memes and popularity/virality. Second is an internal process of being and becoming, of articulating and understanding a lived experience, of changing and staying the same, and learning and showing up in different ways to those around you. Third are the interpersonal relationships you inhabit, the roles you play with others in your life, the unique particularities of each relationship, and the specific ways in which those relationships evolve. And, even as second-order desires mold first-order desires, the second-order desires themselves are molded through this process of “bumping into other people”, roughly speaking.
So I claim that:
First-order desires are produced by particular second-order desires
Second-order desires are molded and defined through habituation, socialization
The first-order desires which appear as qualitative evidence over the course of a desirer’s life can be understood as the product of a particular set of second-order desires, which can change over time, developed in a particular social and relational context
I think these three claims are true regardless of whether the second-order desires are instinctive or explicitly chosen.
A man stumbles into the clearing, suffering from either heat exhaustion or some kind of psychosis, mumbling and pointing vaguely into the sky
What might be understood about a desirer in light of their first-order desires and the actions that arise? It is maybe the only form of empirical evidence available about desires that is anything beyond qualitative testimony. If I can credibly make these three claims, which will have to wait, then a person’s desires are indicative of and (over)determined by their social and relational contexts and is also to some extent indicative of their psychological construction too. Desires are indicative of how the desirer has defined themselves, roughly characterized by either acceptance or rejection, in relation to the social environment and pressures they are in (by force, by birth, by chance, or by choice). Equivalently stated, desires are strongly shaped by the roles a person plays: as parent, child, sibling, friend, employee, and so on. And desires are indicative of how those roles are specifically instantiated too: not all parents are created equal, some friendships will just be better and stronger than others. And maybe this claim is too bold, but even so: there is no such thing as desire independent of identity; what a person desires is only ever as the roles they inhabit.
I like the phrase that a person’s desires “reveal both the turtle and the shell”. Desires reveal both the soft and vulnerable “naked creature”, as well as the instinctive and unconscious shelters and defenses the person has built to survive. What someone desires is indicative of how bold and articulate they are in their imagination. Their desires indicate whether or not and to what extent they allow themselves to feel, think, imagine, and believe.
Are there fourth-order desires? I find it hard to imagine, much less hold, that mental state.
Aspiration as third-order desire
What is the function of the verb ‘to aspire’ that separates it from ‘to desire’? Here are a few possibilities:
Aspiration is about action directed towards bringing about certain values in your internal psychology, not certain objects or states of the world
Aspiration is synonymous with second-order desire: to aspire is to desire specific desires
Aspiration is synonymous with third-order desire: to aspire is to desire specific second-order desires. You might say that to aspire is to desire that you desire specific desires (which you do not currently desire)
Aspiration is about a self-directed change in identity: to aspire is to consider who you want to be, to imagine an image of your ideal self in the future. By definition, you can aspire only to what you are not currently. On this view, aspiring is coming to value specific values, or coming to desire specific desires
Aspiration might also be considered in light of valuing certain values. Because I hold certain values as the result of some practical identity, then I will aspire to value certain other values (or desire certain other first-/second-order desires), in light of what I already value.
Safe to say I don’t have much of a clue. But I think it’s also safe to say that aspiration is a kind of desire: it motivates us to bring about a (primarily moral) psychological change. There are certainly ways in which aspiration is commonly used which is synonymous with second-order desire. If Arthur has certain first-order desires, for example if he is a smoking addict with a desire to smoke cigarettes, but he also has a desire to break his addiction, then you might also typically say that he aspires to break his addiction. But I think that to use ‘aspire’ in this context is to rob the word of its unique meaning, whatever it happens to be.
Consider the six-pack-a-day smoker who does not hold this second-order desire, but desires to hold this second-order desire. And then, after some time and conscious effort, comes to hold this second-order desire. I believe this is a case of fulfilled aspiration. Another example is religious conversion: a devout Buddhist undergoes conversion and now is a devout Christian. Their first-order desires, say to practice specific religious rituals or to hold specific ethical beliefs, were shaped by their adherence to Buddhism, and now are shaped by their adherence to Christianity.
So it’s safe to say that aspiration, so defined, is about a shift in second-order desires, and downstream of this is a shift in first-order desires. The question of what one should desire is a question of morality, and the question of what one should desire to desire is a question of aspiration.
And it’s also safe to say there is a very close relationship between aspiration and morality, and that this relationship is one of desire. I sense some circularity in the following, but nevertheless: a moral individual is concerned with doing what is (considered) good, whatever that happens to be or entails. So desiring to be moral or to act morally is concerned with aiming actions towards what is good. Aspiring then is concerned with reaiming, judging a particular moral direction as no longer good and reorienting action towards a new and (supposedly) better direction. I take it as constitutive of aspiring that the individual judges the new direction/orientation as good, or at least better than the original direction/orientation. Because how else would it ultimately intrinsically motivate a shift in second-order desire? How can you aspire to something which you judge as bad or neutral? I would consider the latter two cases as something closer to coercion.
Of course, all of this says nothing about whether the direction/orientation of the individual’s aspiration is “actually” good/better, or whether the individual's justification for the “goodness”/“betterness” is valid or exists at all.
There is also an entirely separate question of how someone might desire certain aspirations: a statement like “I want my actions to be motivated by a belief that Christianity is better than every other religion”, or questions like “should I want to believe in Islam or Christianity?”, “should I want to value becoming a parent?”, or “should I want to value dedicating my work towards social causes or want to value maximizing my earning potential?”. I guess these might be examples of questions concerning fourth-order desires, but I’m reaching the limits of my imagination and understanding. I’m not sure what these questions are really asking, I’m starting to confuse myself on whether or not these are actually about fourth-order desires, and I’m having a hard time trying to understand how to even approach constructing an answer.
Desires, freedom of will, and being moral
Looks like that guy left. Hope he’s ok, but moving on.
I think it shouldn’t be a surprise that aspiration, as a kind of desire, is also strongly influenced by the particular social and relational dynamics surrounding an individual. The social dimensions of aspiration and desire immediately suggest a need to understand the formation of desires, especially the special case of moral desires, in the context of social and relational power dynamics. To do this it will be helpful to distinguish between two senses of morality, what I will call “being moral” and “being good”. I’ll start with an exposition of some concepts and arguments as developed by Pennsylvanian philosopher Harry Frankfurt in “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (See also here and here for more digestible references). I promise it’s all related.
Frankfurt begins by investigating the statement “A wants to X”, pointing out that this statement is consistent with statements like “A is unaware that they want to X”, “A believes that they do not want to X”, “A wants to Y and believes that it is impossible for them to both Y and to X”, or “A wants to refrain from X-ing”, among others. To explain this, Frankfurt defines the following concepts:
First-order effective desire: A first-order desire is effective when it motivates an individual to action. Frankfurt identifies a person’s will with the set of their first-order effective desires. Notice how I’ve assumed that all first-order desires are effective before now.
Second-order volition: A second-order desire is a second-order volition when the individual desires a first-order effective desire. Equivalently, it is when the individual desires “a certain desire to be his will”. Frankfurt distinguishes between the unwilling and the wanton addict to explain this distinction. The unwilling addict “hates his addiction and always struggles desperately, although to no avail, against its thrust…he is an unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires.” The unwilling addict has conflicting first-order desires to take as well as refrain from taking the drug. But the unwilling addict has a clear second-order volition: “It is the latter desire, and not the former, that he wants to constitute his will”. The wanton addict, on the other hand, has no such second-order volition. “His actions reflect the economy of his first-order desires, without his being concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved to act.” The wanton addict may hold conflicting first-order desires as the unwilling addict does, but “does not prefer that one first-order desire rather than the other should constitute his will”.
With these definitions in hand, Frankfurt distinguishes between freedom of action, the ability to act in an unrestrained and uncoerced way, of doing as you please, and freedom of will. As summarized by Richard Holton:
Now Frankfurt is in a position to define freedom. He thinks there are two aspects. Firstly, there is the aspect we have already looked at: a person’s actions are free in so far as they stem from their desires; that is, if they had desired differently, they would have acted differently. But for Frankfurt this is merely freedom of action. In addition a person has freedom of will (i.e. their effective desires are free) in so far as they can control their desires. That is, a person has free will just in case they have second order volitions, and they can bring their first order desires into line with them.
Frankfurt uses an example of another addict, the willing addict, to make the point that moral responsibility is possible even when the ability to choose otherwise isn’t. The willing addict has a volition to take their drug of choice, but also would be overridden by their physiological need for the drug. I am interested in the principle Frankfurt uses to assign moral responsibility to the willing drug addict: even though the willing drug addict would always take their drug of choice due to their underlying physiological need, the fact that their volitions and will are aligned towards taking the drug underlies Frankfurt’s assertion that the willing drug addict was “in full control” of acting on their desires, and so is still morally responsible for their actions. Note that I don’t cast any implicit judgment on the willing addict’s drug use, as some might read Frankfurt to imply with his example.
On this view of morality, “being moral” is not just acting or seeming good, but coming to hold some understanding of virtue through deliberation, and then “fully aligning” your desires (your will, volition, aspiration, and potentially higher order desires) to whatever you have determined to be virtuous, with causal links between each level of desire.
And then, crucially it involves translating your will into actions, with two key constraints:
Only to the extent you are materially free to act. Your free will may not win out among all of the other people with free will around you. Or maybe you live in an authoritarian or otherwise repressive state. Or maybe you want to go skiing, but don’t have the money to buy the skis.
Only in the ways you are disposed to act. By this I mean something like cultural or individual differences. In the sense that followers of two different religions will perform different rituals in fulfilling the desire to worship their different God(s).
I think Frankfurt would agree with these last two conditions, which can be used to account for differences in freedom of action as the result of differences in socioeconomic position as well as socioeconomic dynamics. We should not judge a restaurant worker for “being immoral” because they did not donate millions of dollars to a charity. We should acknowledge that there will be disagreements about what is good, and that groups will have different understandings of what is good based on their position in a society, and that even if two parties agree about what is good, they might disagree about how to “implement the chain” down towards actions, and naturally there will be disagreements about the actions themselves.
But there is a big problem here. Suppose you “are moral”, in the sense I defined, up to the levels of aspiration and potentially beyond, up to some nth order desire that you are able to imagine and genuinely hold. How can you be sure that when you go to sleep tonight, a hypnotist won’t come along and implant an n+1th order desire in you, which constrains or coerces your nth order desires in ways you cannot imagine and are unaware of? How can you be sure it hasn’t happened already? How can you be sure it doesn’t happen all the time? Three additional concerns:
Of course we should be concerned about the manipulative hypnotist, who implants an n+1th order desire towards their own interests and in direct opposition to ours, but what if the hypnotist is benevolent, or at least is trying to be?
The individual acting with “near full moral alignment” is still morally responsible for their actions. Are we to praise them for acting “as if” they have fully free will, and nevertheless are aligning their desires towards virtue as best as they can? Or are we to blame them because they fail to be “fully moral”?
How should a responsible moral desirer respond in light of this possibility?
These are questions I can’t take up here.
Being moral vs. being good
There is another view of morality, which I will call “being good”. I define “being good” as just acting or seeming good, merely doing good things, aligning your actions towards whatever is held as virtuous by the authority figures you look up to.
I’ve tried to construct this definition so that it has the following differences with “being moral”:
What is good or virtuous is externally defined, independent of the individual.
The individual does not necessarily come to hold some understanding of virtue through deliberation. Of course the individual may also construct a set of internal beliefs or desires to rationalize the picture of virtue put on their shoulders, but this is not a necessary condition either.
The individual does not necessarily act out of “full alignment” of their desires with virtue, they only need to act as if they did. There is no necessary causal link from the individual’s nth order effective desire down to their will, nor does the individual need to hold any desires beyond a first-order desire to do what is considered good.
Because nothing grounds the definition of virtue except that an authority figure has called it good, there is nothing in this definition which guarantees that the definition of virtue held by the authority figure is “actually” good.
So “being good” is nothing more than being seen and judged as good or praiseworthy by the authority figure. “People pleasing” is the common term used to describe this sense of morality. The main mechanisms which regulate desires, actions, and behavior are not internal aspirations and volitions, but the norms, expectations, guidelines, and other “oughts” that have been inscribed upon the individual in light of their existence in relation to an authority figure. The learning mechanism is not careful adjustment of an internal system of beliefs and desires, but the psychological conditioning of praise and blame, in the way you might call a dog a “good boy” and use a clicker and treats to orient that dog towards being good and obedient. The outcome is a sense of etiquette, proper behavior, decorum, and poise: Alicent Hightower comes to mind.
How does the meaning of “being good” get shaped by the authority figure for the individual? Without saying anything about the specifics of “being good”, this is just repeating the definition, but it’s worth repeating. It’s up to the authority figure, and only the authority figure. The individual has no say at all. Goodness is given and taken away, earned and lost. It does not come from the inside. Second, the individual is good only to the extent they are able to fulfill their existence in relation to the authority figure; that is, good is ascribed to the individual as a function of their ability to fulfill the persona in which they are perceived and understood by the authority figure. The role and persona that the authority figure imagines and holds the individual against exists before the individual does, and the good individual can be wholly described by the role they have been given to fulfill. “Being good” becomes conforming to the idealized role, at any and all cost.
But practically, there are some people who we hold in high regard. They seem to think like we do, they seem to know what they are doing, they seem to know more than we do, and they seem to know where they are going. They have good ideas which just make sense. We want to be like them, and sometimes we want to become them. These are “role models” in the common sense. Whoever these people might be, and whatever values they might hold, we want to “be good” in light of their existence. But how can we be sure that their values are actually good? If they are a close mentor or a manager in the workplace, how can we be sure that their advice is good advice, or that their feedback is good feedback? Ultimately, it is an implicit conversation between the authority figure and the individual. To what extent will the individual trust that the authority figure is benevolent, knows who the individual wants to be, knows something about how to get there, and that what the authority figure thinks is good is “actually” good? In some way the individual becomes empowered only if they are willing to critically evaluate and potentially reject the judgment of the authority figure. But that is not “good behavior”, as defined. And if the expectations are held on pain of punishment, say by a God or a manager, then there is all the incentive in the world to be good.
I think there is a circular assumption which justifies the virtuousness of the authority figure, whatever values they happen to hold. It is the fact that it has survived, that it works. It is an instrumental sense of value: “if you want to survive, follow me”. And so Arthur the Aspiring Aardvark listens to the feedback of his authority figure, orienting his learning towards ‘the good’, aspiring toward who he is told to become. But what Arthur has fallen into is a cycle of reproduction, assuming that what he will tell others to aspire towards is good simply because it already exists.
Part 1: Capitalism and desire
“The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us” - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Finally, here we are. We’ve made it to the base camp.
What are the ways in which individuals can relate to Capital? What roles can individuals play within the structures of Capital? Here are some obvious ones: Owner/Founder (as the Corporation embodied), Shareholder, Funder, Adviser, Manager, Employee, Customer. Just to name a few. The keys which unlock this analysis are understandings first of the corporation-employee relationship, and then of the corporation-consumer relationship. The core of the claim is: as employees, Capital considers individuals symmetric modulo production; as consumers, Capital considers individuals symmetric modulo desire.
The hypnotist
Is this philosophical personification of a raccoon the hypnotist, or his revealer?
(to be continued)
Last Monday, I developed a cough that won’t go away, and I still feel vaguely feverish and fatigued if I focus on it hard enough. I’m not sure if that’s some sort of placebo or actually there, but what’s the difference? It’s a dry hacking cough that I think gets triggered when my chest gets too cold. Then I’m sent into a panicked cycle of shallow breaths and then into some kind of huffing or sobbing. I’m stuck there until I can remind myself to control my breath. But the cough wins a lot of the time, and then I honk honk honk like a goose. Towards the end of last week, I sounded like a lifelong smoker when speaking, and it still hurts to speak and swallow. But otherwise I’m fine. It reminds me of two other times in my life when I’ve had a similar cough, sick enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useless:
In the spring of 2015, on the flight back from a school trip to Italy. I felt a chill walking to dinner after our last concert, and I knew I was done for. On the flight home, I could barely swallow.
In the fall of 2018, going through the on campus recruiting process. I developed a fever and a horrible cough during the afternoon of the first day of interviews. Luckily my first-round interview with the company that I ended up joining was first thing in the morning. And during my day of final interviews in the old office on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, I needed to hold my hand at the bottom of my throat the entire time. It was the only way I could speak without breaking into uncontrollable coughing.
Here’s what I’ve found works:
Deep controlled breaths
A hand across my chest/belly/throat
A sweatshirt with a scarf underneath
Popping cough drops like painkillers
Drinking more water than ever
Zombie-like groaning, half coughs, to scratch my vocal cords
I wanted to include this meme, so on this most spookiest of Halloweens, just before midnight, one of the more spookier hours, I leave you with a modern day benediction:
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Gritty our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.