The Joy of Self-Destruction

Sometimes we choose self-sabotage over fighting a battle we can’t win. Giving up is a desperate but effective attempt to convince ourselves that we still have full control: we lost the battle not because we lost it, but because we chose not to fight it. Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves. Defeatism is incredibly convenient: no more exertion, expectation, procrastination, guilt or regret for not having done enough. Surrender has the sweet taste of finality, and reaching rock bottom offers the bizarre reassurance that you can’t possibly fall any lower. So why make an effort when you will probably be disappointed? Ultimate defeat can be just as addictive as victory. In both cases the struggle is over: there is no more nail-biting anticipation, obligation or expectation.

Terminal patients sometimes behave in such a defeatist manner. They will continue to smoke, drink, do whatever they did before they got sick, given that they will soon die anyway. Human civilisation is behaving like a terminal patient who has given up already, before even listening to their full diagnosis. It turns out there were therapy options available. But continuing to self-destruct was admittedly much more fun and took much less effort.

A chain smoker once explained to me how this works: they have no other choice BUT to smoke, because “life is so shit, smoking makes it marginally bearable”. But I don’t want to distract myself with self-destruction. We’re already living in a distraction dystopia. I’m struggling to engage with a reality that becomes less and less attractive by the day as things are, I don’t need another gaslight. This civilisation has trapped itself in a vicious cycle between distraction and destruction. The more it distracts itself, the faster it destroys its future. The faster it destroys itself, the more distractions it needs to avoid facing its predicament.

Self-destruction is the avoidance of fear and trauma through the infliction of further trauma – either on ourselves or others. This is why those who engage in self-destruction often feel invincible. An entire civilisation has convinced itself that nothing can stand in its way, even as it literally pulls itself apart at the seams. The self-deception is so successful that our consumatronic culture has idolized self-destructive behaviour. “Live fast, die young” has become a brave aspiration for many, even though it is the embodiment of the cowardice of Global Capital: fast-moving consumer goods, cheap one-use employees, low overheads, maximum profit and the total abandonment of society. This is how a civilisation chain smokes itself to death.

Our economy long ago decided to die like a rock star: consume, exhaust, and vomit itself to death, choking as it throws up its bloody, tumour-riddled guts in a legendary crescendo. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. These are the figures our economic system emulates, their untimely death a symbol of uncompromising artistic expression, but equally, of the glorified and fatal excesses humans simply cannot stop engaging in.

But self-destruction is most times fatal. Things may begin to improve once the victim has reached rock bottom, so this is where it gets tricky: is it already too late to turn around? Self-harm becomes instantly pleasurable from the very beginning of the addiction journey. It is both the coping mechanism for the self-harm and the self-harm itself. The victim becomes trapped because their cure is also their poison. As pleasure and pain merge, they become indistinguishable. They become identity. The cycle of trauma and reward turns into a downward spiral.

Our civilisation is so addicted to its self-harming behaviours that it has lost agency of the urgency of its situation. When self-destruction becomes part of culture and identity, it is impossible to challenge. Our society exercises limitless imagination in what it creates, yet has little awareness of what it destroys. We have normalised self-destruction within our culture, society and economy to the point where it has become invisible, much like disappearing furniture in a movie set. We are exploited consumatrons preyed upon by the mind-numbing distractions of the psychonomy, seeking healing from one systemic trauma after another only to succumb to further distractions carefully custom-curated for us. This system ensures we remain permanently unfulfilled yet consumed by desire for its products. The more we try to recover from our addictions, the more narcotics are placed in front of us like a line of coke on a coffee table. Every technological cure appears to be worse than the disease itself, as we sink further into this modern dystopia.

We are witnessing the results of a cognitive devolution which started long ago, when we first opened ourselves up to the influence of global capital. The fact that we have allowed this system to exploit us, to fill our bodies with carcinogens and micro plastics and sign under the dotted line, condemning the future of our own children, surely means that we have little agency of who we are, where we are going, and where we want to be. What is most troubling about self-destruction is that it can be the source of immense pleasure, on so many levels. We have opted to take in all the pleasure we possibly can right now, leaving our children to experience none of the pleasure and all of the side effects. But a civilisation who focuses on short-lived benefits at the expense of long-term consequences, can itself only be short-lived.

Self-destruction is always an accelerating process. The more this civilisation damages its sanity, the more it will fail to register the damage it sustains. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison may have been brilliant, but so is aging gracefully, on the one and only planet we have.

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