Your money or your (love) life! - Why is money the God of love nowadays?

 

I: INTRODUCTION – FALSE CHOICES

 

            It was German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who first introduced the idea of an apparent disjunction that is actually an indirect forced choice. Some examples of these include: “freedom or death!” or “your money or your life!”. We can see in these sentences that, when you bring life into it, the whole structure collapses with the choice of the other term. In the second example, for instance, if you choose your life, you lose your money, but if you choose your money, you get shot by the robber and you lose both your money and your life. In other words, these are examples of false choices.

            Slavoj Zizek often made a point about how capitalism is full of such false choices that give the illusion of freedom: Cola vs. Pepsi, a corrupt political party vs. a slightly less corrupt political party, etc. With all these into account, I just remembered today that in my childhood, I had one friend ask me “What would you choose between money and love?”. Ever since I first heard that around the age of 8-9 y/o or so, I kept hearing this disjunction being made. I asked myself: why does everyone ask you to make this choice, why is the disjunction always between these two? Why does no one ask what I would choose between hobbies and love, between free time and love, between friends and love and so on, since, after all, it is often that people sacrifice these other things as well for love. Why are you told that you have to sacrifice money?

            It is today that it hit me that it was exactly such a false choice that was presented by the self-perpetuating (“authorless”) propaganda of capitalist ideology: the question is “Your money or your (love) life!” – it was simply a robber asking you for your money or your life, but with “love” added before it. That is: you choose money, you lose love. You choose love, you lose both your money and your love because, in capitalism, money is presented as the only way to acquire love.

            Note that I am not trying to make an argument here that this ideology is actually “true”, that if you don’t get rich, you will die single and so on. But I am definitely pointing out that this is what is very subtly presented in the media, in the pop culture, etc. This propaganda is not a conspiracy, it does not have a centralized “author”, there is no specific set of elites controlling it all. It is a self-perpetuating propaganda of capitalism: individual actors on the free market act in their own interest and simply do what is most reinforced by the system itself and this is what ends up happening. This self-perpetuating propaganda is what Zizek calls ideology.

            In my recently-released book Love, politics, social norms and sex I often made the point that a country’s dating “culture” (what I would now better phrase dating fantasy) is influenced by its macroeconomic policy – more precisely, how economically “right-wing” or libertarian its politics are, where the more economically right-wing the country was, the stronger and more “encoded” the fantasy/ideology of dating is (with USA and the Nordic countries being the two opposing poles I give as examples). However, while writing the book, I was simply observing some correlations and being unsure about the relations of causality that were at play there – why that was the case was not particularly clear to me. It is now clear: the way a country manages its capitalism influences the way that money circulates in the economy, which influences the people’s attitude towards money in general, all while being fed (or, if you allow me to use such a strong term, ‘brainwashed’) media and pop culture that attempts to strengthen this relationship of dependence of love on money – that if you lose love, you still have your money, but if you lose your money, you lose both.

            I should now remind us of Slavoj Zizek’s remark that ideology is always self-referential: it mocks itself (his analysis of “Kung-Fu Panda”, etc.). Do you want to critique capitalism? Then write a book about it and sell it on Amazon. Marx’s Communist Manifesto? Sell it on Amazon too. Do you dislike Facebook? Complain about it on Facebook and thus put money in Zuckerberg’s hands. Do you dislike Reddit? Complain about it on Reddit and thus give them money. Do you dislike how your private data is being sold to China? Then write about it to a friend and watch that conversation get sold to China. Ideology is not like the dogma of an authoritarian regime that does not allow for critique (such as in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, etc.) – inside ideology, the more you critique ideology, the stronger it becomes. It is the same thing in regards to capitalism’s ideology (collective fantasy) of love (dating) – after it tells you on every possible channel that there is no such thing as “moneyless love”, the exact same media has the nerve to ask you: “What would you choose between money and love?”. Let’s look at some concrete examples of this messaging in pop culture.

 

II: HIP-HOP MUSIC

 

“Kurt Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. For much hip hop, any 'naive' hope that youth culture could change anything has been replaced by the hardheaded embracing of a brutally reductive version of 'reality'. 'In hip hop', Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine: “'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. 'Real' means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising payor improving benefits but by .... downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).” In the end, it was precisely hip hop's performance of this first version of the real - 'the uncompromising' - that enabled its easy absorption into the second, the reality of late capitalist economic instability, where such authenticity has proven highly marketable. Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue - rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfelias and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for 'what it really is': a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, 'To "get real" is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers'.”

(Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism: Is there really no alternative?”, Chapter 2: “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”)

 

            Mark Fisher already pointed out, way before I do now, the rise of the influence of hip-hop music in the 90’s, after the Berlin Wall, and its reflection of the “harsh truth” of capitalist “reality”. Hip-hop has always succeeded in presenting “life” or “the system” as one huge robber who holds a gun to your head and says: Your money or your life! (in other words, capitalism telling you “Make money or die, and if you can’t, it’s your fault!”). What I need to add to Fisher’s analysis is that hip-hop reflected the capitalist ideology of love as well: “make money or die alone!”.

            Never is this more evident than in today’s trap music. The message of a trap song is never “I have women because I am tall”, nor “I have women because I look pretty” nor “I have women because I talk nice to them and I have a charming personality”, regardless of how much those factors are actually important in real life or not. No, instead, the message of trap music is this: “I am short, I am ugly, I intentionally made myself even uglier with face tattoos and golden teeth, I talk in the most derogatory way to women, but I still have a lot of women because I have money”. In other words, trap music is an indirect propaganda that tries to brainwash us into believing that the only thing that will get you loved, as a man, is money (which is only partially true).

            Look at the archetypal “soundcloud rapper”, they look (and talk) like the opposite of the kind of person that you would think would steal your girl. Yet, their songs are full of women and money. Coincidence?

            We see the exact same thing happening in today’s extremely expensive brand clothing that rappers brag about (Gucci, Versace, Balenciaga, etc.). The more expensive an article of clothing is, the uglier it looks. This is no coincidence, it is a feature of capitalism, since the kind of people that buy them seek to intentionally make themselves as undesirable as possible to women (ugly, unattractive, asshole, etc.) in order to make sure that if someone ever sees them with a women it’s just because they have money:

 

 

            We must again understand here that this is not conspiracy, but ideology. Ideology has no centralized author: people promote these kinds of things and behave in this sort of way because that’s simply what the most reinforcing thing is in their personal situation. The reason that trappers make themselves ugly, for example, is that this is what gets them the most views and money. The reason clothing brands make their expensive clothes ugly as hell is because this is what sells the most. In other words, what makes you the most money in capitalism is promoting money itself.

            This is also why the only legal way to get rich quickly, inside capitalism, is to sell guides about how to get rich quickly and convince idiots to buy them. Get rich by telling people how to get rich. With such phenomena, who would have thought that Karl Marx’s formula of “money => commodity => money” turning into “money => money” would still hold today?

 

III: THE PARADOX OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

 

            Last year, I remember telling one of my male friends about a situation in which a man was very romantic, vulnerable and sweet with a woman, and he replied with “That’s gay bro”. This gave me an existential crisis for a few seconds because everyone knows that the most gay thing in the world is a man loving a woman.

            But what if you are with a woman not because you love her, but because you want to brag to your male friends that you have so many women? In other words, what if you seek the validation of women only as a means to an end, because what you actually care about in the end is the validation of other men? That’s absolutely the straightest thing in the world – you are an alpha and a chad!

            This is the paradox of male homosexuality: as a man, the more gay you are, the less gay you are. This paradox will become relevant later when we analyze the relationship between money, power and love in a critical analysis of dating ontology.

 

IV: LOVE ONTOLOGY IS THE MASTER’S DISCOURSE AS WELL

 

            Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once famously said that ontology is the master’s discourse. Ontology is the philosophical branch that deals with the study of being and existence (what is, the verb “to be”). For example, “What is a human?” or “What is awoman?” are ontological questions, because they are questions about being, they use the word “is”.

            Moving on, the master’s discourse is a discourse inside communication in which the speaking person attempts to control the other person who is being spoken to, giving them orders and putting them in a position of subordination. To put it more simply, Lacan viewed the entirety of ontology as sort of a fraud, as a hidden attempt to have power over others. If I have a subjective/biased value-judgment, I can just pass it off as an “objective” truth-judgment about existence and anyone who disagrees with me is simply objectively wrong (ex: “If you disagree with my definition of what a woman is, it is not that we have different values in life, it is that you are objectively wrong!”).

The ontology of love includes questions such as “What is true love?”, “What is the definition of marriage?”, “What is a relationship?” or “What officially counts as a date?”. From a Lacanian perspective, all of these questions hide an encrypted message of “OBEY!”. For example, if you disagree with a conservative that the definition of marriage is “union between a man and a woman”, it is not that you have different values in life about homosexuality, it is that you are “objectively” wrong.

What is the hidden discourse of power in the fourth question in regards to dating, and what does capitalism do with the 69% of Americans who do not know whether they are on a date or not? The answer is a properly Zizekian one: cinema. When we do not know the answer(s) to an ontological question (“What is the definition of X?”), we look to cinema in order to fill in our fantasy (but also to music, books, video games and other pop culture and media…). Zizek correctly pointed out in “The pervert’s guide to cinema” that

 

“Cinema is the ultimate perverted art because it does not give you what you desire. Instead, it teaches you how to desire.”

 

The evolution of the fantasy of love in media shifted dramatically in the past century. More often in the past, books and even cinema were predominated with unintentional love stories (with the implication that the subject does not have power and control over who they love, which is actually correct) – a boy and a girl are put together “by fate” in an unfortunate situation where they have to work together to get out alive and by the end of the story they are in love and live happily ever after.

Cinema nowadays is more likely to fill in the gap in our fantasy of “how love happens” with the ritualized procedures of dating: a man and a woman are on a date in a fancy, expensive restaurant. The man wears a suit, there are candles on the table, a chandelier on the ceiling, the waiter comes to take their order, the waiter speaks in French with English subtitles, the man tells the waiter to bring the most expensive wine. A few seconds later the waiter comes with the food that they did not even order and the man pays it with the money that he does not have and the woman goes home with him and has sex with him without having sex with him (the cutscene is skipped).

Zizek often said that capitalism “takes the substance out of substance” in many products: we have coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, sugar-free soda… (Or to continue with the examples from hip-hop music: Wiz Khalifa has so many rocks on his watch that he can’t tell the time). In other words, the main purpose of why we consume a product is removed from the product and we only consume it for what was “extra”. Since in capitalism, love is a commodity to be bought and sold, cinema also presents us with a “love without love” (“seduction without seduction”, “passion without passion”, “sex without sex”, and so on). The message of cinema nowadays is not anymore “You are not in control, fate will bring you together with your lover when you least expect it”, but instead, it shoves down our throats the illusion of free will that capitalism wants you to believe (“You are in control, you decide who you love”). Our ideals of “perfect love” are dictated by the fictional stories inside cinema and books, and our ideal has now become self-mastery and self-control: “first girl has 3/10 boobs, 6/10 ass, 7/10 face, 5/10 personality; second girl has 5/10 boobs,4/10 ass, 9/10 face, 7/10 personality; and so on and you add up the scores andmarry the person with the most points”.

But there is a second subliminal message here too. The archetypal cinema first date is a fancy restaurant, but what does fancy mean if not expensive? This is how capitalist ideology answers the gap of what Lacan called “the neurotic uncertainty of the desire of the other”: 69% of America does not know whether they are on a date or not, and cinema answers: “You are on a date if it is expensive, and the more expensive it is, the more you are dating”. Since the neurotic social anxiety is a fear that you might be “wrong” about the status of your relationship and that everyone will laugh at you that you gave out the “objectively wrong” answer, you will accept the most readily-available answer.

The implications for this when it comes to a, let’s say for a lack of a better word, Marxist analysis of the situation, are incredible: the class divide is accentuated. The subliminal message here is: “If you are poor and/or if you live in a poor area, you do not love ‘properly’, by the book”. If you live in the countryside, there are no cinemas, no malls, no restaurants and perhaps even no parks, so I am sorry, you have no dates. This is another example of how the self-propagating ideology can be summed up by the message: “Your money or your (love) life!” – if you don’t have money, you lose both.

What is, then, the relationship between the paradox of homosexuality and the uncertainty about the status of your relationship? Well, if “masculinity” is defined by obtaining women just to impress other men, then defining the relationship can also be a way to seek recognition from what Lacan called “the big Other” of society, but not to the person itself you are in a relationship with (“the small other”). In simpler words: if it is official, then I can officially brag about it to others. The anxiety-ridden neurotic man who is uncertain about both his own and the other’s desire needs to know from culture/society/the internet what is and isn’t a date in order to be able to properly brag to his other male friends about how many dates he’s had. This is why I often say that ideology functions by the principle that the thing that is affecting you the most is the thing that you are paying attention to the least (ex: the background of a selfie unconsciously influencing our perception of the person in a selfie, etc.) – the thing that you thought would connect you to the most to the person in front of you is often actually the biggest distraction.

 

V: THE JOB INTERVIEW

 

            I have repeatedly said in past books and articles that capitalist ideology propagates the notion that love must be alike a bunch of job interviews where you do a cold and logical calculation of compatibility. This is no surprise since if “job interviews” are capitalism’s answer to “how does work happen” or “how does capital happen”, then “dating” is capitalism’s answer to “how does love happen” and you would expect the two to coincide.

            I talked about the paradox of male homosexuality, but what is the paradox of the job interview? To quote myself:

 

“It is the exact same tendency that we see across job interviews in all cultures: you do not know whether you want to work for your company or not, and it is impossible to know yet, you will only find out later, retroactively (maybe the real reason you chose them is because your other company that you liked more rejected you after all the interviews) – but you still are asked by the HR: “why do you want to work for us?”

(Source: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/10/capitalism-america-relationships-and.html)

 

            In other words, here we are presented with a paradox: if I am at a job interview, then I want to work for your company, and I may even be asked why I did so. But simultaneously, I can only know why I want this job only after the interview is finished: maybe I don’t like this employer, maybe they had too many red flags in the interview, maybe I go to another interview and they have a better offer. Then, how can I tell them why I want to work for them if I will only find out myself after the interview ends (and maybe even later)?

            This is also related to what Jacques Lacan calls a “quilting point” – the signifier which retroactively determines the meaning of all previous signifiers that came before it. And since desire (“what you want”) is shaped by the language we speak, we can only expect it to follow the same rules, hence, desire is also constituted retroactively: I cannot know what I want now, but I can later find out what I now wanted. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a month, I will find out what I wanted today, but your own desire is constantly at least partially enigmatic whenever you are a speaking subject (as the famous quote from Freud: where "it" was, there I shall be...).

            We can now see one of the mistakes that I’ve made in my previous book, “Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex”: I saw that American/Hollywood media presents the same paradoxical vision of dating, where you have to simultaneously know what you want and find out what you want, and simply called America an obsessionally neurotic culture and ended the discussion for the most part. Now that I got myself deeper into the philosophy of Hegel, I realized that if you reach a paradox/contradiction, it doesn’t mean that your reasoning was wrong, it could also mean that maybe reality itself is paradoxical and you are right. In other words, I made the same mistake as Imannuel Kant did when dealing with metaphysics and epistemology:

 

“Since the analytical method leads to oppositions or contradictions, he argued, if we use only analytic judgments, “we not only do not get very far, as Kant says; we do not get anywhere at all” . Without the synthetic concepts or judgments, we are left, as the classic reductio ad absurdum argument suggests, with nothing at all. The synthetic concepts or judgments are thus necessary to get beyond contradiction without leaving us with nothing.

Fichte’s account of the synthetic method provides Hegel with the key to moving beyond Kant. Fichte suggested that a synthetic concept that unifies the results of a dialectically-generated contradiction does not completely cancel the contradictory sides, but only limits them. As he said, in general, “[t]o limit something is to abolish its reality, not wholly, but in part only”. Instead of concluding, as a reductio ad absurdum requires, that the two sides of a contradiction must be dismissed altogether, the synthetic concept or judgment retroactively justifies the opposing sides by demonstrating their limit, by showing which part of reality they attach to and which they do, or by determining in what respect and to what degree they are each true. For Hegel, as we saw (cf. section 1), later concepts and forms sublate—both cancel and preserve—earlier concepts and forms in the sense that they include earlier concepts and forms in their own definitions. From the point of view of the later concepts or forms, the earlier ones still have some validity, that is, they have a limited validity or truth defined by the higher-level concept or form.”

(Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/)

 

            Thus, the apparent contradiction of desire/intentions in dating does not mean that our premises are wrong, it means that there is something contradictory in the nature of reality itself whenever we are subjects of a capitalist economy. It happens like this: first, capitalism tempts you in a situation in which it is impossible to know what you want. Then, capitalism demands that you know, or even say out loud, what you want, right now, not later, because you may be wasting people’s time. The third step is for you to adopt the desire of the big Other (of culture) – this is how you have been manipulated/tricked into having your own desire shaped by the society you live in. If it is too early, or even impossible, to know what I want, but I also do not want to waste people’s time by being “undecided”, then I will simply let myself be told by media what I should want. And we have previously seen what the media tells you to want: you should want money, and then you should spend it to make even more money.

            This is also why I say, in the preface of my previous book “Love, politics, social norms and sex” that what I call “the libertarian argument” (the idea that two consenting adults should do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone) is always insufficient:

 

“There are certain main themes and questions that I explore throughout the book. One primary one is the question about the cause of desire. That is: you (think you) want all these things, but why, what has happened in this reality that has caused you to want that thing, without which you wouldn’t have wanted the thing in the first place? A lot of people often think of their desires/wishes as “inputs” – you want something for no reason, you do not question why or how, you just seek to obtain whatever you think you desire. This is how a lot of popular debates are structured nowadays, many people often bringing what I call the “libertarian (counter-)argument” into them, my own personal frustration with that argument being one of the things that drove me to write this book. The libertarian argument assumes for granted people’s seemingly unexplainable desires, without questioning their cause, and then states that they should be free to fulfill them between any two or more consenting adults. For example, I saw some debates online recently about whether hook-up culture/casual sex is harmful for society or not. It was impossible to not see at least one person bring in the libertarian argument: “If you do not want to have casual sex, do not engage in it, people who look for serious long-term relationships are free to pursue them with other people who do the same, and people who prefer casual hook-ups are free to pursue them with other people who do the same, I don’t see the problem?”. In many parts of this book, although not all, I am less concerned with taking either side in such debates, and more concerned with the questions about the cause of desire (in this example, for instance: why do so many people nowadays desire casual sex more than monogamy?).”

(Source: me)

 

            In the beginning of “The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology”, Slavoj Zizek makes a similar point: We do not anymore live in the “disciplinary society” described by Foucault, where having “too much fun” is forbidden, and if you do, then you are a sinner, a criminal or a madman. Instead, we live in what Byun-Chul Hang calls a “burnout society” where people feel guilty that they don’t have enough fun, that they are ‘lagging behind’ their peers. The messages of commercials right now are: “Follow your dreams”, “Be yourself”, “Become who you want to be”, “Do more of what makes you happy”. Inside our fast-paced, consumerist society, happiness is not simply a positive side-effect, but a moral obligation: “if you are not happy enough, you are a bad person”.

            Yet, blindly following your desire is your best way of giving away all your power. The people in power want you to do whatever you want. If we can even speak of “the elites” nowadays, they are not authoritarians who tell you what to do regardless of what you want. Instead, they are people who tell you to do whatever you want, while they are controlling what you want in the first place behind the scenes.

            A funny observation I made today is a possible explanation of why Americans believe in “the third date rule” (you should have sex on the third date, if she does it on the second date she’s a slut, if she does it on the fourth date she’s wasting your time). If dating is just a bunch of job interviews, then what is the employment process for a senior software developer? You usually go to three job interviews: the first one is the interview with the HR. This is the “bullshit interview” full of politeness and formalities where you try to sound nice (the first date). The second one is the interview with the team leader, here you are already getting into “the meat of the subject” so to speak (the second date). The third interview is the technical interview where you have to demonstrate your knowledge in practice and, perhaps, write code (third date). If you get past the third interview, you’re hired.

 

VI: MONEY IS YOUR GOD

 

            If God created everything, then who created God? Did God create himself? Was there a “meta-God”, a God of the God, and if so, then who created that God?

            I will not actually answer these questions from a literal theological perspective, but I will analyze their relationship to capitalism. In capitalism, if everything revolves around money, then what does money revolve around other than itself? This is why I say that money is our God. Everything is created out of money, but money is not created by anything else other than money itself, just like everything was created by God, other than God, who perhaps created himself, or just appeared out of nowhere. And thus, just like God was simply always there, or appeared out of nowhere, or created himself, so does money in the EU…

            The relationship between money and your love life is the same, since money is the God there. Look up on Youtube, or any social media website, popular “hot debates” around dating and relationships. The most popular questions are the ones involving money, the most popular one probably being: “who should pay on the first date, the man or the woman?” likely followed by something regarding whether both partners should work or whether women should remain housewives. In other words, to debate dating online is simply an excuse to debate money. Everything in capitalism revolves around money, including love. Money itself only revolves around its own axis: Karl Marx predicted this very well. Our society has moved from “commodity => money => commodity” (you sell things to make money to buy other things you need) to “money => commodity => money” (you use money to buy things to make you more money) and finally to “money => money” (you use money to make more money directly).

 

VII: THE BARRED SUBJECT AND THE DOLLAR SIGN

 

            An ironical coincidence: Lacan had a concept of “the barred subject”, also known as “the split subject”, representing the way in which the human is alienated from himself, how we are self-sabotaging and self-destructive creatures with unconsciously masochistic tendencies and inner conflicts (see the (in)famous phrase “I am not myself today” as a good illustration of this). And what a coincidence: Lacanians type it by using the dollar sign on their keyboard, “$”. Hence, the symbol that you get when you press SHIFT + F4 on your keyboard, $, is the symbol that represents both money AND the inner division within humans. Well, what is the most dividing thing, if not money itself? All friendships run smoothly until the friends argue about money. The relationship between the “archetypal man and woman” go well until it is time to figure out who should pay for dinner and then they argue, etc…

 

VIII: ON PROSTITUTION

 

            Everyone knows that prostitution was the first job ever. We also know that there is no capitalism without jobs.

            Well, we also previously established that capitalism creates beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, sugar-free soda, watches that can’t tell the time, love without love, sex without sex… Taking all this into consideration, if “the archetypal date” in cinema is a man paying for dinner in order to have sex with the woman, what is dating if not prostitution without prostitution? This is another way in which you can define capitalism: the economic system which took the very first job that ever existed and took the substance out of it.