The Myth of Normal 168

Bob Dylan gave on a 1965 tour of England to two desperate autograph seekers. “We need your autograph,” one of them begged through the reardoor window of the singer-songwriter’s limo. Dylan demurred. “No, you don’t need it,” he said drily. “If you needed it, I would give it to you.” And that’s just the point: the social character hatched by our consumerist society confuses desire with need, to the point that the nervous system becomes riled when the objects desired are withheld. Supply, meet demand. As Thomas Merton noted dolefully in 1948, “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”[7] Constantly living at that “highest pitch of artificial tension” leaves many people dissatisfied, on edge, anxious—utterly captured by an addictive process that alienates them from real needs, real emotions, real concerns, real life. If unable to achieve what we desire, we experience this as a personal failure—even if social conditions are arrayed against us so that success is out of reach. “I remember when I was a kid, I used to love to look at Tide soap commercials,” the American actor, director, and political activist Danny Glover told me. “When I look at it now, it was not because I had this affinity to anything about Tide. I would look at it from the vantage point of that I wished my kitchen was like that, I wished my washing machine looked like that, I wished all the things . . . We’re put in this situation where we’re surrounded by all these things that ninety-nine percent of the time we’ll never have, and that creates a sense of valuelessness, because you are not able to have those things.” Glover’s words track perfectly with social critic Neil Postman’s observation as far back as 1985 in his seminal cultural critique, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Commercials full of happy-looking people “tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser