The Addiction

International wars might not be all that different from the more draconian elements of individual human desire.

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I saw a billboard from a beer company today that said “it’s not a purchase, it’s a reward,” featuring a cowboy hat and rugged boots. First of all, it was so obviously written by ChatGPT. But besides that, it framed beer as a kind of trophy for winning the 9-5 workday. That isn’t to demonize beer, but it’s funny how the advertisement rhetorically associated beer with an entire fantasy fueled by the logic of “hard work pays off, and this is your prize”, that it’s something the employee deserves and earned- the symbolic carrot hanging at the end of the workday, reinforced through advertisements on the side of highways. Not totally unrelated to much of what is going on in this film —manufacturing necessity, and because we are only human, willingly and deliberately falling for it, even if it might be against our best interests.

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The mosquito bite just above the ankle that never heals. Once it’s barely brushed and Becomes Activated, it forces you to scratch the ankle and the tendon to the meat of the bone because of some psychic concoction of relief and pain that are sublated into a higher, indescribable, almost perfect pleasure. Where you find yourself on a bathroom floor, fracking the reddened ankle for just One More Hit. It’s a scary thing, really, that even something as banal as scratching an insect bite releases endorphins into the human brain.

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Hip hop, Heidegger, Nietzsche, addiction, academia, violence, power— “there comes a point when you need to confront what it is you need” (paraphrase). Human desire is a monstrous thing, that we can cathect onto the most banal parts of existence such that we deeply and completely depend upon them. That to be human is to depend on something and to depend upon something is to be unfree and for that reason, it might be no surprise that most murders are domestic. It’s what David Foster Wallace referred to as the Spider — the high of finally feeling confident after a sip of whiskey, of moving up in relative ranking, of earning accolades, getting the trophies. Dependencies on some feature of life we fail to acknowledge we are dependent on; master-slave dialectic with an unconscious master.