Can We Help Ourselves?

For those of us prone to fucking everything up, Mark Manson’s wildly popular 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, offers some much-needed perspective: namely, the absolute certainty of death. Death, Manson writes, “is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.” We find out in the next section that Manson is drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, in particular, his influential 1974 book The Denial of Death, which, in Manson’s gloss, says that “we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.” Counterintuitively, here giving a fuck is somewhat of a good thing, and as we learn earlier in the book, mastering the subtle art of not giving a fuck really means choosing what to give a fuck about, what Manson calls “the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one’s life . . . perhaps the only struggle in one’s life.”

Again and again reading The Subtle Art, we are invited to consider the virtues of struggle: “I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory,” Manson says of his youthful dreams of becoming a rockstar, just one moment among many where action takes on supreme importance in the text — here’s another: “negative emotions are a call to action . . . Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.” It’s these insights that in part underlie a third, what Manson says is “perhaps the most important thing I’ve ever learned in my life: Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.” So, action fuels action; action is the key to happiness; actually, “[h]appiness is therefore a form of action;” indeed, “[t]o not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.”

The advice given in The Subtle Art is conspicuously abstract, but it could be more so, as Manson’s few attempts to concretize his audience — when he suggests it’s the people for whom “everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered” is true, or for whom “we realize that we’re never going to cure cancer or go to the moon or feel Jennifer Aniston’s tits” is in any way acceptable — detract from an otherwise indiscriminate and sometimes thrilling universalism. This is arguably one of the book’s less therapeutic qualities: where a therapist would ideally know a bit about your life, and target their responses accordingly, when Manson is at his best, he only knows two things about you: one, that you, being human, will die; and two, that you, having purchased The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, want to live a good life. It’s this desire of yours that makes you an ideal and typical reader of self-help: you recognize that something in your life needs to change, and you hope that you can find the motivation to actually change it.

But you do actually have to change it. This presents one of the bigger challenges for the genre, which must always direct readers outside itself: the demand self-help makes of you is that you do something besides read self-help. In this way, self-help is a bad genre, as “to desire generically” — Mark McGurl tells us in Everything and Less, his study of genre fiction self-published on Amazon — “is to desire repetitiously;” the goal of a genre is to be read, again and again. Reading can be a habit, but even for many habitual readers, something they wish they were better about, and if here, thinking about your reading list, you happen to forget Manson’s advice — “more is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less” — it may be because you live in the world, which is “constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more;” this, Manson explains, following a rare historical materialist impulse, is “because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.” That’s business, we have to assume, like Amazon’s, which relies on you buying stuff, the stuff you need to live what would ideally be a deep, meaningful, and fulfilling life, surely a good goal, especially if you want to be more productive; in that sense, consumption is part of “social reproduction,” what McGurl describes as “the process by which the body of the worker is, as it were, taken into the shop—fed and rested and re-clothed, not to mention reproduced in a literal biological sense in his offspring—before being submitted to the wear and tear of the workday again the next morning.”

Social reproduction is McGurl’s “unheroic” answer to those always haunting questions about the uses of literature, but unlike much literature, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck has heroic ambitions: to fuck you up, to introduce change, to — as Manson says, only somewhat jocularly — “save the world.” And given that the book’s audience is every human who’s mortal, one can imagine it could, were it not for the fact that Manson immediately goes on to say that “[not giving a fuck is] going to save [the world] by accepting that the world is totally fucked and that’s all right, because it’s always been that way, and always will be,” just one instance, among several, where he is forced into modesty by the limits of his political vision. Consider another example, this time from the final chapter:

This is the basic root of all happiness. Whether you’re listening to Aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or the goddamn Beatles, they all say that happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production. This feeling is what people go to church for; it’s what they fight in wars for; it’s what they raise families and save pensions and build bridges and invent cell phones for: this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves.

In refusing to tell us which something greater than ourselves we should strive to be part of, Manson is being characteristically shy: what exactly we should be doing with our lives is far less important than the fact that we should be doing it. The thrill of reading a passage like this is the one of flying far above the concrete, but remember that self-help is a bad genre, and that while it’s fun to fly, you live on the ground. We find the people who read self-help admirable when they actually help themselves. Better still, they might help others: recall that the “basic root of happiness” is “caring about something greater than yourself,” and that you should, as one of The Subtle Art’s section headers instructs you to do, “kill yourself,” that is, you should give up on the idea that you’re special: “[w]hen we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.”

Were you to truly internalize all its lessons, you might never need to read another book like The Subtle Art again, and it’s this suicidal gesture that makes Manson’s project fundamentally anti-generic, even somewhat radical. But revolutions have to start somewhere: The Subtle Art is still a work of self-help; like other radical projects, it must begin within the limits of its genre and ascend to a higher form — as Fredric Jameson puts it in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,

For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organization; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism.

Yet The Subtle Art is not a Marxist text, nor even a particularly Leninist one: the genius of Lenin — says Georg Lukács, in his Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought — being precisely his capacity for “the concrete analysis of a concrete situation,” what Lenin himself calls the “soul of Marxism.” As we’ve seen, this is one challenge The Subtle Art faces: that of the abstract reader. The kinds of interventions self-help tries to make tend to be more effective when they come from people you know. In an interesting passage, Manson figures himself as the superhero “Disappointment Panda,” who would “tell people harsh truths about themselves that they needed to hear but didn’t want to accept.” But if it’s hard to imagine that most people would listen to Disappointment Panda, it’s in part because, in Manson’s figuration, he “would go door-to-door like a Bible salesman and ring doorbells” to deliver his harsh truths. Interventions, especially political ones, generally require a shared context to be successful, which is why many of them, like Lenin’s, have historically taken place in the context of a political party.

This is the uphill battle all commercially published political authors have to fight: their book — like The Subtle Art, and almost every other — will be a commodity, and because this commodity is going to be sold in the free market, the author can’t know in advance who’s going to buy it. Writers can of course create an audience simply by choosing to write a certain way about a certain thing, but to reach a lot of people and raise their consciousnesses, everyone in the country, say, they will encounter a significant risk of abstraction: get too abstract trying to appeal to too many people and risk saying something hollow; get too concrete and risk no one reading you. It’s sometimes assumed that readers will be able to apply what they’ve learned abstractly to the concrete situation of their lives, but this requires sufficient motivation, which commercially published political writing typically takes it upon itself to provide. This motivation often comes in the form of a narrative, with the writing building to a decisive call to action, usually something besides “read more books,” which makes most action-oriented, narrative nonfiction a bad genre: it has to direct readers outside of itself.

One problem works of action-oriented, narrative nonfiction face, then, is how to write a narrative compelling enough to make you want to go out and do things without making you feel like you already have. This feeling of already having resolved the problems is one way to understand what Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, that “the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions.” It’s a problem that presents itself to anyone writing narratively, everyone from Lenin to Manson: how to write something real? “Real” self-help, like “real” criticism, like “real” art, unsettles us; that’s precisely what’s real about it: it carries some part of reality that it hasn’t fully assimilated, something that hurts, something we know could only be resolved by doing things. To force you to fully accept that truth is the task of any writer who wants their writing to be more than generic entertainment.

What does Manson want from this book? That’s one of the bigger questions hanging over The Subtle Art: what larger-than-self cause is this book dedicated to? The advice proffered here is abstract enough to be politically mobile: lines like “[c]ommitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous” could be as useful to a soon-to-be committed fascist as they could to a soon-to-be committed communist, even a well-to-do capitalist, looking to strengthen their death grip on the status quo, may find something of value here. Turning again to The Subtle Art’s final chapter for an explanation, we find this representative line, what seems to be the book’s climax: “[t]he more I peer into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes, and the less unconscious resistance I feel to, well, anything.”

Anything?

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Mao Zedong, in his essay “On Practice,” makes the following claim: “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality.” So, he says, if you want to know what a pear tastes like, you have to taste the pear; if you want to know things about atoms, you have to run experiments on them; the same is true for starting revolutions and, we have to imagine, everything from writing novels to being in love: “all genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” If this last line seems uncomfortably close to some of the tenets of mainstream liberal identity politics, it’s for good reason: as Colleen Lye argues in her “Identity Politics, Criticism, and Self-Criticism,“ “identity politics arose as a variety of Marxist politics;” the Combahee River Collective Statement, often understood as the ur-text of identity politics, can be read “as a translation of Mao’s theory of contradiction to US circumstances.” Although both Mao’s ideas and the CRC’s have since been distorted and sanded down into the mainstream liberal identity politics everyone has very strong opinions about, they’re both still, sort of, there.

It hardly needs to be said that a Maoist might be anxious about being associated with mainstream liberal identity politics, as the latter appears, in Lye’s words, as “the ruination of all universal political projects,” the fragmentation of the proletariat into many competing factions. This fragmentation seems par for the course in advanced capitalist societies, thanks in part to an enigmatic process sometimes called reification, what, in Postmodernism, Jameson describes as “a force whose logic is one of ruthless separation and disjunction, of specialization and rationalization, of a Taylorizing division of labor in all realms.” But if reification is a process of ruthless separation and disjunction, there’s also a parallel one of abstraction and unification — capitalism may invite us to think only of ourselves, but at the same time, in the planetary destruction it’s wrought, and will keep wroughting, it forces us to think at what is presently the highest level of human abstraction: the planet, the very world we’re supposed to save.

On one level, it’s obvious that if we only think about the climate collapsing, we will never be able to do anything; on another, it’s likewise clear that if we only think about satisfying our local material concerns, the climate will collapse. Finding a way forward is less a matter of finding the right level of abstraction to think at and more a matter of moving between them. One way to do so is with something called mediation, what Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, more specifically characterizes as

a process of transcoding: as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or “texts,” or two very different structural levels of reality.

Establishing the identity between two things is what enables us to see how they’re different. I can compare my coffee cup to my other coffee cup by first thinking that they’re both coffee cups; I can compare my coffee cup to my computer by thinking that they’re both commodities; I can compare a commodity to a novel by thinking that they’re both concepts. Traversing levels of abstraction like this is how critics can “break out of the specialized compartments of the (bourgeois) disciplines” and “make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life generally.”

Still, if Marxists have been reticent to make connections with the genre of self-help, it’s probably because, as Andrew Pendakis, author of 2024’s Living a Marxist Life: Why Marx is a Drug You Should Probably Take, says,

self-help begins at an ahistorical conception of the individual as self-transparent and autonomous and limits its model of change to the parameters of lifestyle; Marxism understands the individual as engendered through, enmeshed with and constrained by history and sees substantial change as connected to politics not slight tweaks to your daily routine.

Another way of thinking about this is that Marxists typically operate at least one level of abstraction above the self. Marxist theory generally does not spend its time “focusing on the subjectivity, inner life and daily habits of the Marxist as a particular, embodied individual,” as Living a Marxist Life, “probably best understood as a Marxist self-help book,” does. Accordingly, there we learn that Marxists are sad, angry, joyous, estranged from their families, starting families, straight, queer, “unafraid to mock the things liked by others,” watching Marvel movies, not doing dishes, doing dishes, swimming — you get the idea: part of Pendakis’ goal seems to be diversifying our image of what a Marxist is and attending to Marxism’s “bewildering internal variety,” which, while a good goal, does leave him with the difficult project of mediation. If there “are as many social democrats (and even anarchists) within Marxism as there are outright socialists or communists,” what brings them all together? If “nothing in the fact someone identifies as a Marxist means you can know for sure what kind of politics they adhere to,” what, then, is Marxism?

At the level of abstraction of the particular, embodied individual, Marxism can really only be “the subjectivity of the Marxist” — hence statements like “Marxism is, if nothing else, an unforgettable high.” But this puts Pendakis in the unfortunate position of having to explain what being high is like, something which almost only ever makes sense to other people who have been high and not even always then. I have had a different subjective experience of Marxism than Pendakis, which makes sense, as we’ve lived in different concrete situations. It is not only, as Jameson says in Marxism and Form, “perfectly consistent with the spirit of Marxism—with the principle that thought reflects its concrete social situation—that there should exist several different Marxisms in the world today, each answering the specific needs and problems of its own socio-economic system,” but that at the much lower level of abstraction of Marxist subjectivity, every Marxism will look different, being shaped not just by the Marxist’s concrete situation but their concrete analysis of it.

These very different consciousnesses are brought together by the need to do things, and helpfully, the things that need to be done are supposed to be determined by the present reality, of which there is only one — “we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future,” writes Karl Marx, “but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old.” Divorced from the demands of political action, however, theoretical disagreements never actually need to be resolved, and though this may result in very sharp theories, they only end up cutting each other. Mediating these intellectual disagreements in service of doing something is work done at a higher level of abstraction, the one of political organizations, like unions and parties, which is one reason Marxists are always talking about “Why We Need to Get Organized,” as the title of Chapter 4 of Living a Marxist Life has it.

But given that most commercially published writers share only a very general political context with their readers, their calls to “get organized” are often too abstract to be helpful. The assumption is that the reader will mediate between the abstractions they’ve encountered and the concrete particulars of their life, but this, again, requires sufficient motivation, and whether the writing trying to provide it does so in the form of a scary high or an uplifting one, it does so in the form of a high. This is not a quality unique to Marxist writing, nor is it possessed by all Marxist writing; the writing-as-drug metaphor is useful insofar as it reveals something about the way writing is produced and distributed. Were writing prescribed, sent directly to you with you and your problems in mind, a writer might be able to concretely address them; as is, they only know that you want to get high.

So what sort of high should commercially published Marxist writing provide? Remember that Marxism is a bewilderingly diverse tradition: “The revolution needs sociologists, economists and historians as much as it needs poets and dancers,” Pendakis tells us, aligning his project with the latter. As you might expect, a work of dense Marxist sociology provides a different sort of high than a work of Marxist self-help. Pendakis figures his book explicitly as a “gateway drug,” with its goal being to get “you to taste just enough to develop an appetite for more,” and in this respect, as in others, Pendakis and Manson have very different projects: if Pendakis’ is trying to be the first book you read in his genre, Manson’s is trying to be the last. But despite this, Manson’s is the less ambitious book, shying away from the difficult demands of mediation and concrete analysis. It’s Pendakis who faces the enormous challenge of synthesizing the many diverse Marxist consciousnesses into a single one, and then making that consciousness seem appealing enough to try and inhabit; as he says, “if those of us on the left want to win, we need to become masters of seduction – to be the kinds of people that others find joy in.”

I am not a very seductive person, but my theoretical understanding is that it’s easier to seduce people when you know things about them, that is, when you can seduce concretely. Put another way, I suspect that if your goal is to turn people into Marxist militants, you’d have more luck seriously struggling with the people already in your life than publishing commercially. This isn’t to say that Marxists shouldn’t publish commercially; it’s just to highlight the perhaps obvious fact that if “[t]he revolution needs sociologists, economists and historians as much as it needs poets and dancers,” it also needs dishwashers; nurses; people writing code; family members, however defined — the revolution needs everyone because only when everyone is living in real freedom can it be said to be complete.

Here, one of the core ideas in The Subtle Art seems relevant: no one is coming to save you. This is what Manson calls “the responsibility/fault fallacy:” there are many people to blame for your situation, but, in the final analysis, “nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.” It is one of the peculiar features of modern life that many people in many different places are doing things for you: people might deliver you groceries, or simply bring them to the grocery store, where, if you decide to go, something you know abstractly may begin to feel very concrete: this grocery store is “the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations,” as a character in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You puts it, having rapidly ascended all the levels of abstraction, from her local material concern of getting lunch all the way to the collapse of the climate. It is likely not your fault that buying lunch entails consuming the products of labor from hyperexploited people in the Global South, but it is your responsibility — as Manson says, “[f]ault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day.” We did not choose the socioeconomic system we were born into, but, in not working to overthrow it, we do choose to perpetuate it.

In Marxism and Form, Jameson claims to “understand revisionism as the act of making a theory comfortable and palatable by leaving out whatever calls for praxis or change, whatever is likely to be painful for the purely contemplative intellectual consumption of a middle-class public.” Nearly forty years before, in “The Author as Producer,” another literary Marxist, Walter Benjamin, would write that the “defining characteristic” of a school of left-wing German literature he found unsuccessful was its “transformation of the political struggle from a compulsion to decide into an object of contemplative enjoyment, from a means of production into a consumer article.” If there is something to praise in The Subtle Art, it is that in relentlessly drawing attention to your autonomy — to the choices you make, the things you choose to give a fuck about — it instills in you the compulsion to decide. Realizing how many decisions we abdicate, how many responsibilities we ignore, is a difficult, ongoing process of self-criticism. The good news about self-criticism, however, is that on the basis of shared context, it’s likely to have the most receptive audience.

“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous.” This is good advice, and to it, I’d add that a commitment to real freedom and the liberation of all humanity from pointless exploitation — a commitment to communism — is also good. Devoting your life to something larger than yourself does not require your self’s annihilation, rather, its evolution. Of course, what that would look like for you, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know you; what I can assure you of is the simple brute fact that in the time you’ve read this essay, little has changed: you’ve sat somewhere; I’ve sat somewhere — the planetary death machine’s rolled on.