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The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

Politics over personal choice: How to make real change in America

There is something wrong with the neo-liberal way of understanding our responsibility toward the environment and society. The question is always framed as a matter of individual action—the dominant superego figure admonishes us for not recycling; for not purchasing biodegradable notebooks; for not eating local or buying the latte thats proceeds are donated to a charity in the Sierra Leone, or what have you.

There is a certain self-satisfaction at “doing our part”. (My theory is that the pleasure one gets out of something like recycling seems to be directly proportional to the amount of effort involved in the task; single-stream might be more convenient, but what could compare to the supreme orgasmic rush of egoism when we manage to separate it out into plastics one through seven?) But the ideological mechanism here is clear–it works to keep us preoccupied with our own guilt, which it will allow us to alleviate only in channels already provided. Within our individualist, capitalist system, this almost always comes down to what one consumes, as if the sole agency we have is in where we spend our money, and the best way to change the world lies in buying the most ethically-produced t-shirt. In effect, we don’t look at the larger systemic issues, the fact that the majority of the pollution is produced by large corporations and factories (increasingly in Asia), and immersed as we are in our own habits and lifestyles, we don’t reach out across the community to do something so basically civic-minded as lobby together for corporate restrictions.

This applies to our obsession with political correctness as well—we can rest assured that we are doing our part to combat racism when we use whatever term is in vogue. However, to actually be effective in regards to environmental protections or racial equality, the narrative must shift from one of personal choice to the broader political sphere. It’s true that individuals can change society, and it often takes a group of strong-willed people to do so, but more often than not, it is society that changes individuals. Contrary to our popular liberal ideology, most of us don’t change because of some deep inner conviction arrived at by our capacity for rational thought and a Lockean acquiescence to a social contract, but rather because the network of relationships we are immersed in changes. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited that the individual is always involved in a hysterical questioning of the other, demands to know what the other wants from him. This “What do you want from me?!” is directed first at the parental authority (as in, “What can I do to please them?”) and then at the societal one.

How that authority answers (in the form of laws and injunctions) changes the way we behave and how we see ourselves. It changes the symbolic network we exist in and respond to. I know that racism is not going to disappear entirely by writing more racial equality into our laws, but by changing law you could codify a value of equality so that, when the subject looks to that legal authority and asks her hysterical question, the law will smile back and tell her she must be nice to her neighbors, or at any rate afford them the same rights that she has.

It might seem ironic that the very people we want to “change” are, in a democracy, the same ones that can cast a vote toward a policy that is, in turn, supposed to “change” them; perhaps so, but American history is riddled with laws that were unpopular with the majority but were pushed through by an enthusiastic minority. Consider the recent windfall of pro-gay-marriage legislation, or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the ridiculously stupid and much-contested Supreme Court decision to allow a few executives at Hobby Lobby control over the reproductive freedom of its female employees. At any rate, this only makes the push to sign underrepresented people up to vote all the more urgent

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The ultimate point is that you cannot work solely on the level of individual nature and habits. We have many valid reasons to distrust the government and hold suspect a Congress that is perhaps the most ineffective in decades, but aside from somehow inciting a massive global proletariat revolution, one of the best ways to take action is still through changing policy.

What is lost on many now is this ability to work on the level of policy, and not just culture, and to be a collective rather than focusing on our own personal actions, despite how titillating that “do-good” ego-boost might be.

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