American Halloween is Redundant.
Halloween this year has been underwhelming — a surprise to no-one in my friend circle. Between the recent political climate in the public sphere and Burning Man’s fin-de-siècle licentiousness in the private sphere, Halloween’s promise of pleasure and threat of punishment is now entirely redundant. Halloween this year feels like visiting my middle school and marveling at the cramped hallways, half-hearted teachers, and rusting infrastructure. It’s an echo from a time when we needed to experience the shadow and licentiousness which now surrounds us as a nation, moment to moment.
Halloween exists to air out our collective shadow, and as a nation and as individuals, we’ve been strutting our collective kinks for the better part of the past few years.The shadow is available in public and private for all who even passively seek to taste it. The public holiday is quaint by comparison.
Like most holidays which have stuck around over the years, Halloween evolved to serve a social purpose. Any holiday which evolves into public consciousness has a society-regulating function. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are for family, commerce, and travel. Christmas and Easter align with holidays, with Christmas stoking yearly retail spend as a capitalistic gift exchange, and the Super Bowl advertising for it. Memorial Day, Labor Day, and President’s day stoke nationalism, while Earth Day and Columbus Day yearly challenge each other to pistols at dawn. Halloween is the anti-holiday, the blank space on the calendar. Halloween is everyone’s personal Vegas, the de-repression chamber, the black truth which cannot die, which must be spoken once a year.
Except now it’s every day. Commerce is king, the customer is right, desire reigneth, as the algorithms harvest libidos for sacrifice unto mammon. Towers rise as the commons atrophies, involutes, and self replicates. Marketing wasps disguised as butterfly advertisements lay eggs in the caterpillars brains as the drones of capital emerge from their beleaguered cocoons. Halloween is the HD technicolor horrorshow of our dopaminurgic egosystem, spilling forth to colonize the world culture.
Lurid prose aside, Halloween’s purpose in a puritanical society was to provide a rare exhaust valve for the forbidden, the shadow, while encouraging its latent energies for the causes of economic production and sexual reproduction. People work harder when their demons are working alongside them. They also reproduce more when the sex drive isn’t entirely demonized — unless you’re into that. The shadow expresses both in darkness and forbidden desire, and each avenue must be addressed in turn. Halloween elegantly addresses both in the shortest possible span of time. The harvest has passed. Nature is retreating. Leaves are falling. Decadence reigns in the landscape. The pumpkins are carved and the overripe too-sweet fruits are rotting in the fields. In this yearly reminder of decay, this necessity of gobbling up all before it spoils, enter Halloween. Thus, ‘Trick or treat’ exemplifies the Halloween’s dual purpose, in the turning of seasons, with the exposure one’s inner darkness and decay contrasting with the positive reward of forbidden libidinal desire fulfilled.
Yet, Halloween has become redundant in the consuming decadence of fin-de-siecle America. Halloween has been crippled by the globalization of decadence. Like Atlantic City after Pennsylvania and New York legalized gambling, Halloween is an institution in decline. American retail after Amazon, or manufacturing after China, it’s tricks and treats are more efficiently and abundantly produced elsewhere. This is a poem of late-stage capitalism. Both in public and private, Halloween has lost ground to the inevitable, decadent zeitgeist.
For anyone who has turned on a TV, read a newspaper, or used the internet, you know that the public sphere has become a horror show putting traditional Halloween fare to shame. Trigger warning: The collective shadow rides naked through scorched-earth mediascape of the commons, trumpeting apocrypha to polarized body politic as the economic engine hums ever on. Public figures vying for attention contort their visages into more and more extreme grimaces, as the costumes and rhetoric of the 31st of October have spread virally to fill virtually the entire calendar. On the left, haunting sigils of climate change, global populist upheavals, job displacement rage, while from the right, Biblical admonitions immorality, globalization, impiety, and the breakdown of the family flog partisan zealots to arms. There’s of course a kinky pleasure to the emotional and physical violence continually evoked, the dopamine hit of the evocation of terror, of the forbidden, the threat of the enemy deliberately evoked in the streets. This high, coupled with doped-up tribalization is the silver lining to the curse of ‘living in interesting times.’ However, it bleeds the dopamine rush of the shadow, limiting its expression and consolidation into a single day. America is Halloween, polarized masks, kinks, and howls on display, and the shadow reigns. Any Halloween haunted house, any horror film, is quaint, tiny and outdated compared to the tragedy of the commons in 2018. I would say more, but you might need some MDMA ASAP to treat your re-triggered PTSD.
So enough of tricks, what about treats? For Halloween, treats are sexual-capitalistic, with some patrician party-loving care. For our sweet American larvae, the candy hunt offers chitluns a rare ability to engage in economically productive hunter-gatherer behavior that we so know and love, and which is usually expressed in video games. The candy hunt offers a side effect of endorphin raising sugar — a prepubecent prototype of libidinal urges. Littluns bustle about like squirrels stockpiling nuts for winter, then rage for weeks off of the Halloween induced sugar high, with the most competitive plotting out routes to amass the largest stockpile of the best sweets to hoard into the Holiday season. The ritual affords American adults a rare opportunity to show generosity in the suburban commons, opening doors to strangers in an increasingly separated public sphere. This generosity is the shadow of our shadow of hypertrophic individuation, a rare burst of kindness amid the wee ghouls and goblins cavorting in the streets below.
Halloween has been sexytime for adults on the prowl — children feed this with chocolate — adults with fuzzy tails, bare muscles, and kitten ears. Halloween has evolved into a place to publically display eroticism, to advertise and try out latent tendencies suffused by the dayscape, to wear all the leather, eyeliner, and cat ears the night demands, to attain a forgivable level of intoxication to consummate those demands, surrender to an alter ego, and ignore the aftermath. Both of these trends are ubiquitous in culture at large. Children can sate their sweet tooth at any time (and cell phone gaming has devoured in-real-life interactions whole, with superior dopaminergic feedback loops). Adults now have Burning Man culture as an aspiration — Halloween 24/7, a rollicking feast of impulses spilling over their halloweekend corset into the entire calendar.
Halloween’s time has come and gone. Like the writings of Ayn Rand, it is so last century, too obvious for its own good. The treats of Halloween either no longer tempt, or have suffused themselves so thoroughly into my normal life as to appear quaint. I now dress in costume for dance parties every week or two, and basic physical maintenance plus a baseline of good manners and intent means I can easily fulfill any sex impulses I have at will here in Gotham. The childhood temptation of preservatives and artificial sweeteners have left my belly indolent of processed sugars and most forms of industrial dairy and wheat — a sack of candy no longer whets my appetite or holds putative erotic appeal. For me and for many in this dreamscape, it has come to the point where any substance I still want, any experience I momentarily desire, is easily within reach — and I don’t have to reach out for it. If my friends aren’t calling, my algorithms know me — the invitations come to me either way, and there are new friends out there with similar desires to fit the moment’s tastes. Like capital, carnality is neither good nor bad, neither a problem nor a solution, but a potential energy in want of kinetic fulfillment. Over the years, I have chosen to remove my repressions so that I could sublimate my sexual energies myself, enhancing both pleasure and productivity, leaving no unanswered questions or regrets. I did this instead of starting a family or a business, writing novels, I am left with an abundance of questions, opportunities, inspirations, with only the steady passage of time and the need for mental stability to gate my passions and coax me towards consistency, stability, family. After national culture has imploded among the liberal set, the only justification for starting a family or a community is love. Yet that comes with its own costs, and the lure of experiences, with their feedback loops, are still profitably expansive, self-inducing, and hard to ignore. As a man, can I afford to wait one more year of experience? Yes, I can. A caveat here: before exploring harvesting these indulgences to deliberately expand my capacity for action in the world (the ‘left-hand path’ of tantriks and Western magick), I have trained in yoga and meditation to modulate my inner experience at will, use psychedelics to induce neuroplasticity in extreme dopamergic states, and have a baseline ability to tolerate and ‘ride out’ pleasures without going too far off course. As long as I can productively hold my pleasure, as an individual, I am probably making a rational decision. When the majority of an entire generation is cuckolded into the same, with varying (and overwhelmingly poorer) degrees of impulse control, capacity to resist temptation, and capacity for world-creation and multi-year planning, they become consumed by these desires themselves, billboards for the devouring machine which has long displaced culture and seeks to replicate itself in flesh, endlessly. That is a real horror story, and the subtext of a growing percentage of life in the west. The new elites exploit these tendencies, and live in towers atop the scorched wasteland commons. Enter the Burn.
For it is abundantly clear that Burning man is now Halloween. The decorations and costumes come up and go on, treats are freely dispensed, and no trace of the festival is allowed to remain except in lurid snapshots and freely opened neural pathways, preserving the sense of possibility and forbidden pleasure induced by the spectacle. While the ticket for Burning Man is higher than the price of a costume and a bag of candy, anyone with a few thousand dollars and the leisure time to take a couple weeks off during the harvest season can take part (thus ensuring that Burning Man has the comfortable demographic footprint of Western Massachusetts). There are downmarket options. Regional burns are far cheaper. And the Burner culture, replete with polyamory, costumed revelry, and recreational drug use, is spilling into the mass consciousness. Deconstruct the commons and culture, put it back together in modular pop-up palaces with designer molecules, and get high off the smoke. Temptation is a logical escape in troubled times, where any new answers seem logical to try on for size, for a night, for a decade. This is especially in a world riven by ideological differences, environmental turmoil, and technological disruption, the exogenous and endogenous pleasures of sex and substances are temptations on the make. Burn, Burn, Burn. Halloween as a lifestyle choice: living in the endless moment, documented intensely, a sprawling Instagram-feed as the Great American Novel.
Yet, this lurid fantasy of devaluation, uncertainty, and decadence, is the same practiced by any late stage republic. Roman revelry put American excesses to shame with transgressions extending to bestiality, incest, and murder (though I might sooner trust a horse to rule than some of our senators). British debauchery was the dark cloud (or silver lining, depending on your proclivities) to the hyper-proper Victorian era. Both eras grew more debased as their currency debased — as has ours. Most ominously, Weimar Germany’s gender bending debauchees were the polarized parallel harbinger of Nazi dictatorships — while personally they couldn’t be more different, both enjoyed riding crops and had a thing for young blondes in leather.
The final split happens when values drop out entirely. Bread and circuses for all, yet a dominant world order cannot long live on bread alone, however skillful the use of GMOs. An early state is a strict parent — it represses its children to be productive, putting the ‘fear of god’ into them, forbidding the verboten, channeling it into group identity. The sex drive is cathected into religion, redirected to the military, economic toil, the family, before being spent on the depleted soil of a late stage power, before the next rule comes forth. Yet by the fourth of fifth child, discipline loosens a bit. Without the cathecting of sex, we are weaker as a nation, though we may be are stronger expressed as individuals. Conservatives are right in fearing the depletion of American will to fight and produce economic value. Liberals are right in fearing the growing fascism and environmental depletion at the hands of industry. And China is laughing quietly as it surveills, represses, and harvests the energies of its population with mechanisms which would make George Orwell blush. So long as their environment holds (and their shadow banking system doesn’t catch up with them) they will overtake the US as the pre-eminent global power within a decade. Now there’s a spooky tale worth telling…
Via the goads and prods of economic society I am maturing into a ‘successful’ American adult in late-stage capitalism. After a decade of spiritually seeking, I have been raised atop the a tower of economic clout, to rule all of it, if I but serve the acquisitive force. Perhaps I have succumbed to Christ’s second temptation. My Halloweens are different now. I accumulate capital instead of candy, to spend later at my discretion. I shower my dates with experiences, it brings me pleasure to treat, and I am rarely tricked. My costume in the kabuki theater of late stage capitalism is sublime. I harvest my impulses and route them into price discovery and asset allocation beyond nation or polity, investing in underpriced Chinese securities as the global transition wheels on.
A Halloween ‘poetry brothel’ beckons tonight — the event was advertised nakedly on Eventbrite. The verse I sampled, and the performers I spied both looked promising the hopes of encountering those who are at the very least, free from ideologies and slaves to their impulses. At least there, creativity and true discipline have the possibility of sprouting forth from the soil. Weimar? Why not? So long as I keep learning, take my nootropics and youth-extending nostrums, share my expression, and can handle my dopaminergic ‘liquor,’ the extended adolescence of the early 20s — excuse me, early 30s, yields its own perverse, heady draught of wisdom. This is Halloween, true. But if I miss it, next month’s show will be as good. Halloween is a charming redundancy — the actual date is an afterthought.
