Anti Social Social Club
Do you remember the OBEY hats that were popular in the 2010s?
If you did not live in North America around that time, let me recap (re-cap!) These cool hats were meant to signal that their owners were above something. What were they above, exactly, is somewhat cryptic. The hat said “obey”, but was ironically promoting civil disobedience. Perhaps the hat-wearer was above the rest of us sheeple. Except he wasn’t, because the hat was pretty fashionable in the USA, which meant that the hat-wearer was at the very least obeying the fashion standards of his community. “Irony” would be an obey hat which disobeys the mainstream. An obey hat which sells millions is just a convoluted pseudo-culture, I think. So, what is the nature of this alone-together pseudo-culture based on a lack of common values? And what happened to the OBEY hats?
“According to Shepard Fairey, the founder, the word “obey” is used as a method of reverse psychology; instead of following the status quo, or "obeying," this clothing line aims to challenge youth to do the exact opposite and think for themselves.”
Let’s start with an uncontroversial statement: Communities, at least traditional pre-industrial world communities, are comprised of a set of individuals that agree on the important stuff. In fact, most traditional communities seem to be governed by a crushing social incentive towards being on the same page with your neighbors. A group of people living together have to agree on the important stuff, because otherwise they cannot act collectively. And the biggest benefit of living in a community is the connection between the survival of the group and the survival of the individual, colloquially known as “having each other’s back”.
In fact, tons of historical and anthropological insights shows that being accurate in your belief comes secondary to being together in your belief. If we disagree on our interpretation of reality, we fail to work together and ensure the survival of our group. Galileo famously dissented against the Church’s astronomers on the centrality of Earth in the universe. He spent the last decade of his life in house arrest for being right alone, while the Church astronomers presumably lived in bliss for being wrong collectively.
Then, a major social upheaval happened sometime around the last few centuries, and we ended up with quote-unquote communities that violated the nature of what it used to mean to be a culture: We started living in close quarters with individuals that have explicit differences of opinion on the important stuff. If you’d like to nerd out on the idea in spheres of philosophy, a concept that delineates the origin of this change is Nietzsche’s “death of God” — the disappearance of a common set of sacred values that unify the people in a community. Today, when I walk out of my Seattle apartment and come across a group of fellow Seattleites, there is so little I can assume about their lives. From political background to language, from social to gender identity, most things about them is a mystery.
Of course, traditional communities still exist, but not in the pockets of North America where obey hats were in fashion. Without a common interpretation of reality to bind us to our neighbors in secular/liberal worlds, we come to value uniqueness. We create societies based on the idea of individuals being different from each other. And since the inclusion of a value necessarily comes at the exclusion of the opposing value, we learn to antagonize traditional communities, the folks that lived together in agreement. We make communities whose group identity is based on “being above the group”. Enter communities of lonely individuals. Enter OBEY hats. And enter ANTI SOCIAL SOCIAL CLUB shirts. What would a club dedicated to anti social people look like? Well, pretty much like this.
[Inspiration for this line of thinking came from Culture Industry, an essay by Adorno and Horkheimer that examines how Hollywood found a way to target millions of viewers at a time, while making each of them feel superior to the rest of the millions of viewers.]