Why isn’t the process utterly chaotic? How is social order generated out of the chaos of selfishness?
The forward-looking entrance of the purchasing individual into the marketplace for goods, services, and myth effectively cures the obsessive introspection and anxiety that consumes the existentialist. The partial solution provided by existentialism is exceeded by the admission that we are gregarious creatures. The solution to the problem of being is being together.
Consensus and its darlings are the answers to all questions. Statements are legitimated by having heard them before. If you are capable of following the leader, and purchasing accordingly, you are inside. Advertising teaches us what, and therefore who, is in and out. The sports-spectacle industry provides us with teams of heroes battling teams of enemies as we conveniently calibrate our hatred to fit within the limits of our personalities.
The madness inherent in youth is channeled into socially acceptable occupations and diversions. Escapees from the process are sent to prison. The few individuals that actually create move up a level in design-responsibility.
To be secure in your tribe, repeat its narratives. Translate them into new expressions. Appoint infidels who dare question their obvious validity. Improvise corollaries. Propagate good examples and suppress the bad. Ridicule the identified enemy. Beat the hated. Sin to succeed.
Boomer has identified the enemy and it is not Boomer or any of his friends. It is the lazy and the seditious, domestic and foreign, as well as the stupid and insane people who do not support Boomer’s solution. Although he has never in his life met any of the enemy or their supporters, he knows who they are and will never forgive them.
Silently, Buffy thinks Boomer has it all wrong. He can more or less run his own life, however unglamorously, but has no experience in the geopolitical solutions he espouses so fervently.
On the personal level, he wants to take her off, take her away. He wants her for his own. But it’s not about him. It never was. It’s about something larger, much larger, something that transcends the individual desire. It is a desire that hungers across the generations. She knows that he cannot know this. She also knows she is not strong enough to do it alone. Is she strong enough to do it at all? She would need all the help in the world and she has none.
She looks out the window at the people walking by, lost in thought, thinking of moving to San Francisco.
Boomer sits back and picks up his latte, convinced that he hates the right people.