Social Inertia: A Parable

M. leaves for the bar with two pills in his pocket.  He eats the first pill just as he leaves the house and it takes hold before he arrives.

Entering the bar, he finds himself surrounded by animals.  Mammals walking upright.  They are noisy and always moving, but share no tangible connections.  They are discrete organisms.

M. walks around the bar to inspect them.  They are pressing into one another in clusters, clotting the passageways.  Up close they have an ugliness about them.  He notices pock marks and sagging asses and reeking breath and scalps and oil.  Fleshy worms.

Halfway across the room, M. becomes nauseous.  His mind is spinning. 

He orders a drink and eats the second pill.  There must be something more here, he thinks.  To pass the time, he turns his gaze to more appealing objects.  Labels on bottles.  Patterns in the wood of the furniture.  Curling fingers of smoke. 

The moments drain slowly, but after a time the nausea subsides and another shift begins.

Now the animals are concealed and there are only connections.  The scaffolding of action.  All the hidden networks of agreements between the people, once invisible, become an intricate landscape of mechanical engineering.  An infinite maze of circuitry.  Wires.  Wires everywhere, linking everything together and divided by black boxes and hubs of blinking breakers, all buzzing with the electricity of the rule structure.

Now M. cannot act.  He is inert.  His ability to decide is crushed by the complexity of the scene.

A girl, panning, fixes her eyes on him suggestively. 

But he is preoccupied with the circuitry now—its nakedness and intricacy and frenetic flux and, supervening over the whole system, a thin wispy wire gauze of social history—and so he cannot determine the proper response to her gaze.  She is pretty; he knows that.  But he doesn’t know “what one does” when smiled at this way.  The rules for action are hidden in the wires.

He looks around for other men in the bar.  He understands that they have the privilege of naiveté in not seeing the circuitry.  They navigate it perfectly because they don’t take notice of it.  They do not hesitate long enough to see it.  They are devices that are compatible with the network and all plugged in.  Actions purely expressed, without conscious deliberation. 

(Had M. eaten these pills in another age, there would be a stack of books before him, each of them containing thousands of pages of codified rules of response.  In that scenario, he is supposed to index the sector of rules suggested by the girl and follow them, but the books are so vast and suddenly so unfamiliar that he finds himself unable to do so, at least not in the time required, since the response time itself is part of the rules). 

The girl, seeing his terrified blankness, judges him to be insecure.  This judgment flashes across the wiring so quickly that the very fact that she looked at him does not consciously register.  Without a hitch, her glance falls upon others.  She is canvassing.

Her immersion into the system of rules is completely hidden to her.  She can navigate it perfectly and make the response appropriate to her rules community:  “That guy isn’t worth anything further.” 

M. becomes anxious and suddenly lonely.  He knows what this anxiety tells him:  It brings to light his own latent relationship to the structure he sees before him.  I can see it but I cannot use it.  They, on the other hand, can use it perfectly but cannot see it.  I am an invalid here because I am not blind.  I am not even here.

This first event—the failure to properly meet the girl’s gaze—only serves to bolster M.’s feeling of detachment from the crowd.  Searching for a sense of power after having been accused, albeit implicitly, of weakness, he decides to detach completely and make the crowd a specimen of his investigation.  This feeling invigorates him; it is empowering.  His inability to be involved has resulted from the alien authority of his position as the investigator.  They are his specimens, weak, like frogs or mice or fruit flies; objects of manipulation and research.  It is as if he wants to approach the girl and say:  “Do you realize that the look you gave me a moment ago was triggered by social structures according to which I—if interested in your company—am supposed to comply in very specific and complex ways, for instance, that I would return your gaze and look at you a moment longer than I would look at an ordinary person on the street, and that you, in keeping with this set of rules, would reciprocate in the proper way either to continue or end the germination of the relationship-building suggested in my response?  Can’t you see that were are all playing in a complex game with a collective acceptance of rules that act as a scaffolding for the overall structure of the social situation we are taking part in?  If you could only notice this scaffolding, you would see how artificial it really is.  Deep down, we both just feel like fucking tonight, but instead of going straight to the fucking, we participate in this elaborate pair-bonding game that is, as a matter of fact, completely dispensable as regards our deepest aims.”

But this does not succeed in protecting him from the return of his anxiety and loneliness.  He is the last man standing in the world: All others have been reduced to the likes of rocks and grass.  There is no one else, only parts in the system with their blind, determined movements.  Even his own body seems foreign to him.  There is nothing left except his own grief at having been left behind by the others while he, inert and terrified, lays down beneath the wires to wait for a signal or else die, grieving the loss of his world.