Weaponized Apathy

A Drill in Memetic Warfare

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have. Life has become a competition to determine what can garner the attention of the masses. The explosion of the advertising industry has created a way for attention to be measured and sold. But what makes attention so valuable?

Recently I’ve been reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and this concept of attention as worship has come back to me. In the novel, the gods of a diaspora of cultures find themselves stranded in America. Insofar as they are known, remembered, revered, feared, and hated, they are powerful. Yet these gods are almost all but forgotten, in such a weakened stated, many live in ramshackle apartments and run con-jobs to put food on the table.

Much of our culture is one of opposition. There is an express thrill at the thought of standing up to a great evil. To be like the rebels in Star Wars, to protest against the war in Vietnam, to plaster a car in bumper stickers denouncing the current regime or hegemony. Our enemies are never small and subversive, they are gigantine, as blasphemous and imposing as that wicked Goliath. From a young age we are taught to question authority and fight the powers at be.

While this may be true on occasion, there is a subtle weakness in this frame. When you frame yourself against something, you give it power over you. If I lash out when the bully slights me, I let him know that he got under my skin. In protesting the government, I may not realize it, but I have admitted that they are my government. While there is a time and a place for this, oppositional framing is a tool. And like any tool, there is a right and wrong time to use it.

I have not been bashful about my complicated relationship with Nihilism. Like many of those who have deconstructed themselves out of religion, I have had to work through the difficult process of deconstructing my Nihilism. One of the most valuable things that can come out of such a deconstruction is a recognition that you took on a belief system that isn’t true for a reason, there is a baby in that bathwater, and your job is to grow strong enough to find it and save it. This was my impetus for writing this today.

“Nothing *really* matters” is a powerful and dangerous spell (not to mention an outright falsehood). However, justified critiques of Nihilism often fail to understand why this flavor of cosmic pessimism obtained any prominence in the first place. Nihilism in practice is the meditative cultivation of apathy. Its the atheism that kills the American Gods that Gaiman writes about. Nihilism says that there is nothing worth worship, nothing worth attention (assuming that attention has worth).

I have grown to have this odd feeling that when people say they hate something, it has a sick and twisted connotation of love to it. To hate something, in the way that we often say it, is the ultimate form of attention. When I say I hate olives, it seems to me that I will seek them out wherever I go, I will root them out of every Greek salad and Combo Pizza. My mind will be consumed by abhorrence for the briny fruit. If there was a god of the olive, I’m sure he would love to be hated with that special passion.

But I am here to teach you what you may already know. In my days as a high school boy, I learned that there was something colder, that hurts more than hate. To be out of mind, to be forgotten. This is weaponized apathy. If you want to discourage something, sometimes the best route is to deny it any attention at all. If you really dislike olives, you don’t hiss in disgust and make your complaints known to the restaurant. Instead in that instance, you remember than they even exist, and mindlessly you roll the little pests off your plate onto a napkin like a wrinkly grape tomato.

In this way apathy can be used not as a nihilistic noxious bomb, but as a severing sword paired with a healthy attention on what is True, Good, and Beautiful. So when you are around your friends and are tempted to spend those precious moments shit talking the latest thing to be angry about, remember how much more effective it can be to just forget it and talk about something good and real, something worth your attention.

- Noah (AKA President Foxman)