Compromise and Conceit

When I lived in Sydney my kickboxing teacher was Mick Spinx, a master of Karate, Jin Wu Koon Kung Fu and kickboxing. Mick worked as a builders labourer, and spent the 1980s fighting in no-rules martial arts contests around Asia, before he retired, set up a part-time gym and established a builder’s business. He eventually retired from his main line of work, sometime in the 1990s, to devote himself full-time to teaching martial arts. He owns a beautiful house in a beautiful part of Southern Sydney, and fighters from the gym he founded have a storied reputation in kick-boxing, MMA and Muay Thai.

At the same time as Mick was setting up his kickboxing gym Wal Missingham brought Wu Shu and Jeet Kune Do[1] to Australia, somehow managing to collect a fleet of Volvo cars and a big house in the suburbs of Western Sydney while running a gym and spending some time in prison. In the 1970s Tino Ceberano (whose daughter is *that* Kate) introduced Karate to Australia and popularized it. At the same time, stoners and losers across Australia and the USA were dropping out and heading to the beach, turning surfing into a hobby and a sport that everyone now knows about. In the UK, punk, heavy metal and folk metal bands were creating some of the most powerful forces known to modern culture, while living in dodgy share houses and working in minimum-wage service jobs. I myself, for 3-4 years in the 1990s, worked part time in Sydney while I did full time political activism, even regularly donating part of my part-time wage to my collective. In Britain, people doing this built the vegan and animal rights movement in the 1970s, brought yoga to their society in the 1980s, and protested nuclear war and hunting.

Extreme and alternative sports like BMX, break dancing, surfing, base-jumping, MMA, and free-diving were developed in the 1970s – 1990s by young people in the Anglosphere and western Europe who had time, inclination, and no serious impediments to spending their lives devoted to their hobby. Popular music as we know it in the Anglosphere was developed in the same way. Influential bands you know like Crowded House, Guns ‘N Roses, and AC/DC, and influential bands you probably haven’t heard of like Crass, Sisters of Mercy and Dead Can Dance[2] managed to build their entire cultural output while working part time, hanging around in squats and share houses, and doing pretty much nothing useful with their lives for years.

I saw a comedy routine recently in which a man talked about the “rags to riches” story of tech founders like Zuckerberg. He asked how he was meant to be inspired by the fact that these guys built their tech business in their garage. “A garage?” he asked. “I’m meant to see a rags-to-riches story in that? I could never hope to have a garage! I aspire to be able to save the down payment on a 1 bedroom apartment an hour’s drive from the city. As far as I’m concerned those people are loaded. And not just a garage – if they were building their business in there it was a *spare* garage. Nobody today can imagine having access to two garages in their 20s!”

I had a garage when I lived in a share house in Sydney in 1995, when I was working part time and doing political activism full time. I would spar there, with a friend of mine who trained with me at Wal Missingham’s JKD school near Parramatta. He was a heroin addict in remission, but he still had a home and a car, and he would drive me out there. We had a lemon tree in my backyard, between my house and the garage. We lived in inner city Sydney, with cats and a guinea pig.

Who has that now?

People often talk about how it is a unique property of liberal democracies that they build huge cultural power because their liberal political culture makes it possible. Putting aside the fact that an enormous amount of the cultural output of the UK and USA in the 1960s and 1970s was financed by the CIA, and the fact that some of our most famous liberal icons were treacherous arseholes like Orwell, I don’t think this is the reason for our huge output.

I think liberal democracies produced huge cultural output in the 1970s and 1980s because they were the richest societies on the planet, and the cost of living was so low that young people could commit years of their life to a hobby for no more reason than they wanted to. Work culture was also different, so people could take time off, disappear for a while, fuck around, and still come back to a rewarding career. If somebody asked you about the gap in your resume you could just say you were FAFO-ing, and they’d be like, okay, sure[3]. That’s exactly what happened to me: after 4 years of part time work somebody just asked me to apply for a full-time job at the Kirketon Road Centre, and I did, and I got it, and my whole career proceeded from that. There were like five other applicants for that job, max, and they all got scared off by the transgender sex worker in the waiting room who was walking in cocaine-boosted circles telling the staff about how she lost her tongue piercing up her lover’s arsehole the night before.

Now I read stories on reddit about people who submitted 1000 job applications for two years and got two interviews.

The modern economy doesn’t allow lifestyle sloppiness, gap years, time off to find yourself in Asia. It’s a cut-throat world based not only on having experience before you finish high school, perfect scores and elite university degrees, but on the image of being the perfect corporate dog. You have to *explain* the gap in your resume, your hobbies have to be hobbies you would willingly write down on a CV, your travels have to be designed to factor into your statement of purpose for that master’s admission. In place of grainy photos of your back on the trail to Macchu Pichu you need clear photos of yourself surrounded by poor African kids. If you developed a new sport you need to be able to show that you monetized it, not that you enjoyed it. You spent a year in your mother’s basement developing a self-published role-playing game? Loser! You could have been monetizing your writing skills for some dodgy start-up!

The effect of this on our cultural output has been and will be profound. Every aspect of our cultural life is being stitched up by rich people, and the economic environment of the modern Anglosphere prohibits young people from taking time out to explore their cultural and sporting interests unless they’re already rich. This is going to directly result in a collapse in new cultural generation in western societies, because the incredibly thin (and shrinking!) slice of western society that is rich enough to take time off to explore new ideas is simply not large enough to generate anything meaningful. This will prevent the generation of, for example, new musical movements from the UK, which historically has been the number one source of popular musical innovation in the world. Similarly, Australia and New Zealand were sporting powerhouses and a source of a huge amount of the raw talent that fed into the music industry and Hollywood, but the diversion of entire generations of young people from those countries into consultancy businesses and crypto is going to be devastating for the global arts industry. There will be no more Germaine Greers, Mel Gibsons, or Kylie Minogues from a society whose kids have to spend more to rent a single room in a share house in Sydney than I spend on my entire mortgage for a house in Tokyo[4]. They’re too busy working to do it!

If we want to live in societies that are cultural innovators, that produce new sports and art forms and music, we don’t need to have special innovative policies or philanthropy or patronage or whatever stupid idea rich people and their apparatchiks have come up with this week to try and develop a top-down cultural of artistic innovation. We need societies that are cheap to live in, where people can afford to spend years doing nothing economically productive, living on welfare and playing around with ideas. We need a work culture that doesn’t care about gaps in resumes or “unproductive” part time work or “unprofessional” activities and interests. We need a society that rewards people for being people.

That society is gone, and if we don’t get it back, our culture is going down the gurgler with it.

fn1: Nino Pila, who I trained with in Adelaide, would beg to disagree about who brought JKD to Australia, but since everyone involved was a terrific arsehole, let’s not fuss too much.

fn2: I think this band is the single most influential cultural phenomenon of the last 100 years, and one day I will write a blog post on the fact that people all around the world, from every culture and background, who have never been to and know nothing about New Zealand, can instantly recognize Lisa Gerrard’s music

fn3: With the minor caveat, of course, that this freedom was primarily afforded to white men.

fn4: A friend of mine from Sydney visited recently and introduced me to this astounding calculation. WTF! This friend had spent 10 years – 10 years! – in the 1990s working in occasional part time jobs and squatting throughout Europe, doing political activism in the Netherlands, London, and some of the former Yugoslavia on basically no money. Try doing that now!