Vicarious; adjective, experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.
"this catalogue brings vicarious pleasure in luxury living"
Vicarious, to experience something through someone else. Second hand experience of a sort, originally referring to the act of the Christ in Christian mythos to mean ‘substitute’, and taken from our clergical term ‘vicar’ (a deputy replacing a higher clerk) and the latin ‘vic’, to mean change or turn.
When you watch sports, you’re experiencing sports vicariously.
When you watch porn, you’re experiencing sex vicariously.
When you play violent games, you’re experiencing violence vicariously.
All of these things characterised in their stimulation by being risky and difficult; in a word ‘scary’. We circumvent the terror of risk and gambles and real loss by substituting ourselves for some man or woman on a screen or in a stadium a thousand miles from us. Through their transcendence and ecstasy we exude some filtered form of their pleasure, from the howling hordes in pubs cheering each goal to the blank stare of a teenager at their phone to the false testosterone rush of a man experiencing the sorrow of the battle of Mogadishu. We’re perfectly safe, projecting our experience onto some abstract experience without context that we truly desire to experience but are kept from by whatever madness life has thrust upon us.
People are addicted to vicar, addicted to the low risk regular hit of victory and achievement without the risk of getting there themselves. We’re surrounded by children addicted to games, unable to understand how to deal with loss or damage or pain. We as a culture are spoon fed little doses of dopamine by our surrounding screens, kept docile and contented by our alignments to sports teams, having violence bred out of us by easy, victimless killing and becoming apathetic and asexual whilst blowing our loads over a plastic icon from Hollywood. The idea of experiencing things directly and actively experiencing things that have risk or pain involved is being removed from us.
If you need examples we need look no further than the domesticated middle class, glued to fifty inch televisions hooked up to the latest TV streaming so they can travel, to the latest games console to hone their self defence, and to pornhub so they can see their significant other. Their children grow up with sedentary and confused parents, learning morals through soap operas and comedy through the canned laughter of the latest sitcom. Obesity is everywhere, children are being prescribed therapists for trying to learn how to act in moral ways and violence is universally warded against and understood only as a taboo relegated to those ‘who must’.
Slowly and systematically we as a culture or species are forgetting how to live in the real world.
In the past those civilisations that once great and strong became fat and distended as the difficulty and required skill of their lives diminished slowly moved away from warrior thought and transcendent strife, toward appreciating pleasures of the flesh and vicious politics more than the values that made their tribe great in the first place. Other tribes, forced to harsh living by the ascendance of the now overfat culture would have been fighting for survival, hard times making the members strong and powerful individuals to carve out their paths amongst the unwanted land of the area. To these smaller, ruder tribes uncultured in fine wines and sedentary lifestyles we have seen even roman marble trodden under the sole of a coarsely made, but functional boot.
To throw off the shackles of forced docility I predict will be the toughest part of any man returning to the path of his ancestors from this vast desert we have wandered into of late. For modern men to turn from the glossy covers and bright lights back to the forest and wood axe seems impossible, and yet many of us are characterised and admired purely for our forsaking of this vicarious life.
No progress can be made in ourselves through the deeds of another. In order to improve ourselves, our standing, our bodies, our intelligence, our wisdom, our learning (I could go on) we must endure the risk and pain and strife ourselves. Without sacrifice to ourselves in the form of comfort, safety and happiness we cannot reap the rewards that we seek. It doesn’t take long in the winter to realise that watching your neighbour chop firewood does not heat our own homes.
In the Havamal we see Odin hang himself from the tree of knowledge and pierce himself with his own spear in order to learn how to know the runes; representing the primordial truths. To many this may seem like nonsense, why would we stab ourselves to learn to read? But the symbolism is clear. Odin hangs himself from the tree, surrendering himself, removing his ego in his attempt to learn. He pierces himself with his own weapon, sacrificing himself. In the next part we see the verse ‘I trow I hung on that windy Tree, nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to mine own self given, high on that Tree of which none hath heard, from what roots it rises to heaven.’ He has sacrificed himself to himself. He suffered for himself.
He sacrificed, caused himself pain and hardship alone, refusing food and water, that he might learn more about the way the world works. When we learn we are and must do the same, we sacrifice our old understanding, our time and our old safety of assumption in order to learn greater truths beyond the frail and failing body of thought we had before. We must slay our own misconceptions, weaknesses, pains, by striking inward with the same weapons we solve outward problems.
Through rejection of the vicarious and the hollow we can regain some of the nobility that we have lost in this age of mass nonsense.
To quote from Paul Waggener; ‘We live in an age of constant distraction- the thousand lights of illusion that never turn off, all vying and competing for our attention, everything infinitely more convenient and “now” and pleasurable than everything else. Entertainment is a god of the modern world and so is Ease, sometimes called Luxury or Comfort – that insidious convenience of everything “on tap.”’
The more I tear from these feeds and cables feeding my domesticated brain with the sludge of meaninglessness the more strength I find in my limbs to tear from the remaining connections. Each conduit of easy living and contentment I find truly to be chains upon their removal. Through hardship and self sacrifice we can -and should- become more. We can live real lives, experience the rush of a fight, experience the love of a beautiful woman, experience the triumph of understanding something previously nonsensical to you.
Vicarious pleasure is a trap.
We must reverse the conditioning of our brains to be satisfied with watching others take the prizes we truly wish for ourselves.
