If you haven’t noticed, I’m rather obsessed with the concept of escapism. It is the primary reason why nothing gets done, mostly because we don’t always know when we’re indulging it. I think I first understood it as an object of study back in 11th grade, when I happened upon an anime, Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent.
The show follows a multitude of characters in Tokyo who are experiencing difficulties or tragedies in their lives, and are consequently beaten over the head with a baseball bat by a mysterious roller-blading assailant know as “Lil’ Slugger.” The attacks begin with a character designer named Tsukiko Sagi, who has been struggling with fear and stress under the release of her anticipated new show. However, after the attack, her life and her attitude somehow become immediately improved. After the story circulates, people everywhere fall victim, and simultaneously beneficiary, to similar circumstances. Lil’ Slugger becomes a real entity, feeding off the public’s fear of reality and the truth, and Sagi realizes that all good false things come full circle by the end.
It’s a wonderfully weird show. But what fascinated me most was how popularized escapism was in the show, something that is usually an underscored psychological thirst that instinctual action tends to quench. And then, by doing so to relieve stress or entertain ourselves, we ensure that nothing gets done and complain that we never have enough time to do anything. This sort of thinking is inherent in all of us at some point in time. In fact, you might call it mankind’s natural disability.
“What we think of as “normal” human visuality does not see—and it does not see that it does not see…But we could also be more down to earth and simply note that this “not seeing” is crucial to the human being’s (and to any being’s) organization of an overwhelming flood of visual input into a field of meaning” (131).
Wolfe, Cary. “Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject.” What is posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minn. Press, 2010. 127-14
While Cary Wolfe speaks primarily of an insensitivity to violence when done to organisms outside the human species, as well as the brain’s selectivity and filtration of the reality it perceives, can this not also extend to mankind’s reliance on escapism to blind himself to the reality that prompts the so-called “escape?” We do not have to lose the idea of violence here; anxiety can be considered a violation of emotional or psychological stability, and avenues of escapism are the way by which attention is averted from said violations. It is a stretch, but, with safe spaces and harmless reasons for offense and fear, there is no doubt that the stability of the healthy, happy, purposeful individual has been mauled in some way.
When I speak of escapism, I refer to any exercise of enjoyment or fulfillment that lays outside the immediate realm of the human themself. It usually involves the rudimentary entry-points of the posthuman: T.V., social media, tribal group affiliations, video game guilds and discords, etc. Essentially, a fantasy that absorbs the human’s self-consciousness, with no connection to their reality besides intangible gains or repercussions. One of the definitions of insanity is, according to the twelve-step program of Narcotics Anonymous, repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. If you continuously waste your time on fantasies that don’t make your life any better, only distract you for a few hours, will your life ever get any better?
And yet, then the question of the “violated” mankind’s disability finds itself in a dilemma: is the handicap expressed in one’s inability to recognize and control the indulgence of escapism (addiction), or in one’s vulnerability to outside forces that drives them to consume escapist fantasies en masse?
“One of the major features of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism has always been to assign inferior status to someone in order to exclude him (or her) from the human, to stigmatize him by virtue of physical traits that would place him within the world of animality” (69).
Derrida, Jacques. “Violence Against Animals.”
Again, taking a quote out of context in which Derrida is speaking of man and animal and their rights, I find it perfectly applicable to continue my thoughts and synthesize it with my previous blog post. What causes stress in humans? The external factors forced upon them by other humans. Therefore, in their escapism, the individual is trying to flee the world of a reality where anything human other than the ideal does not exist. This mindset, where humans are not to be engaged as human but as extensions of the individual’s reality to be bent, joined, or filtered according to their need to alleviate stress and fear. Humans are then considered even lower then animals to each other, more like drawings in a sketchbook that occasionally need a limb or two erased.
The worst part is that they escape from even this reality, too. Their brain filters it, filling it with disconnected ideas of universal love and balance/oneness with the rest of the planet. They feel whole, but they don’t feel whole, and in this constant search for feeling whole they don’t realize that the new terms on which they’ve founded human interaction is now a fantasy itself. It has become a consistent illusion, a never-ending interactive form of escapism that never breaks because everyone holds it together for the sake of their fear that the real thing is too much to handle.
Why did this happen? How, when, from whom? I have no definite answer, as even I am partially crippled from this insanity; no one is spared completely. Whatever the case, the rhyme or the reason, there is no doubt that escapism has become humanity’s all-encompassing, mostly-ignored debilitation. But that’s what happens when every single individual is their own Lil’ Slugger, whacking themselves upside the head so many times that fantasy becomes reality, and the truth like a dream.
Morning's Early Dark 