The Diner.

“Each new existence more DEGRADED than the last!

More hopeless!

More meaningless! NEVERENDING!”

“A Hungarian fellow named Georg Lukacs founded the Frankfurt School because he was trying to determine how to cause massive social changes. 

Lukacs was specifically interested in developing Bolshevism, but the technique works for any ideology. 

Lukacs said that you had to make people completely pessimistic;

You had to make them believe that they lived in 

“a world ABANDONED BY GOD,”

as he put it. 

At the same time, the new social movement that you were trying to create had to have certain key similarities to a religion—but, of course, without a concept of a Supreme Being. 

In fact, Lukacs seriously investigated the Baal Shem cult, a Jewish cabbalistic sect, as well as several medieval Christian heresies, in order to find what he called the "messianic" ideas which could be incorporated into Bolshevik organizing.

Freudian theory fit this bill precisely; it was just like going back to the Gnostic cults of the Middle Ages: The demons were back, the evil was being generated in your own mind, and you needed a new priesthood to save you. 

The Frankfurt School's extension of Freud was the major reason why psychoanalysis became so influential in American life after World War II. 

The Frankfurt School helped us all to discover how bad our mental health really was—how we had to “liberate” ourselves from the authoritarian constraints that made us neurotic; that we must resist the imposition of universal values, and embrace a healthy PERSONAL hedonism.”

“Imagine that you have a job as a checkout person in a grocery store. That’s a fairly unskilled job. You can be some miserable, resentful, horrid bastard doing that job. You can come in there just exuding resentment and bitterness, and making mistakes, and making sure that every customer that passes by you has a slightly worse day than they need to. You can pilfer time—and, perhaps, pilfer goods—and be resentful about the people who gave you the position, because they’re above you in the dominance hierarchy, and you can gossip behind the backs of your coworkers. You can take your menial position—self-described—and turn that into a very nice little slice of hell. That’s for sure. 

I always think of the archetypal diner in that way. You guys have been in this diner. There’s a really good opposite diner. There’s a great diner on YouTube. It’s Tom Waits reading a poem by Bukowski. I think it’s called Nirvana. It’s about a good diner that he happened to visit when he was a kid. A diner where everything was going well. You could listen to that. It’s great. But this is the opposite diner, that I’m thinking about. You go into a diner, right. It’s seven o'clock in the morning. You order some bacon and eggs and some toast. You look around the diner, and you think, it was like 1975 when the windows were last washed. There’s this kind of thick coating of who-gives-a-damn grease on the walls. The floor, too, has got that sort of stickiness that you really have to work at to develop over the years. The waitress is not happy to be there. The guy behind the counter isn’t happy that that happens to be the waitress that he’s working with. And then you walk down the stairs to the washroom, and that’s its own little trip. You come back, and you order your damn eggs, and you order your toast, and you order your bacon. It comes, and the eggs are too cooked on the bottom, so they’re kind of brown, and then they’re kind of raw on top. They’re cold in the middle. You really have to work to cook an egg like that, man, but you can master that with like 10 years of bitterness. It will teach you how to cook an egg like that. And then the toast—here’s what you do with the toast. You take the white bread—the pre-sliced stuff that no one should ever eat—and then you put that in the toaster, and you overcook it. You wait, and then you pop it out of the toaster. Because it’s overcooked, you scrape it off. You knock off the crumbs so that it doesn’t look too burnt, and then you wait until it’s cold, and then you put cold margarine on it. First of all, it’s not butter. But, if you put cold margarine on it, you can also kinda tear holes in it. Then it has lumps of margarine in it, and it’s really dry, except where it’s too greasy. That’s like its own little work of art, man. 

You put that on the side with eggs. And then you have the potatoes. This is how you cook the potatoes properly: the leftover potatoes—and you keep dumping new leftover potatoes into the old leftover potatoes, over weeks. Some of the potatoes have half returned to mother earth. Then you flap them on the grill, and you sort of burn them a bit, I guess. And then you slap them on the plate. Jesus. You don’t want to eat those, man. That’s for sure. That’s the point. 

You have the bacon, and you want to make sure you buy the lowest possible quality bacon. That’s how you start. Then you throw it on the grill—and your grill has to be overheated to do this—and you have to cook the bacon so that it’s raw in places and burnt in other places. It has that delightful pig-like odor that only really cheap, badly-cooked bacon can provide. Or maybe you use those little breakfast sausages that no one in their bloody right mind would let within 15 feet of anything living. And then you serve that. And you serve it with the kind of orange juice that is only orange is color, and with coffee that’s…Agh…What would you say? It was started too early in the morning. That’s the first thing. Bad quality coffee started too early in the morning—got cold once or twice, and has been reheated. And then you serve that with whitener. It’s like, here’s your breakfast! It’s like, no, man. That’s not breakfast. That’s hell, and you created it. And then what you do if you have a diner like that is—because you have a miserable life if you have a diner like that, and you really worked on that—you go home, and you curse your wife, and you curse your kids, and you fucking well curse God, too, for producing a universe where a diner like yours is allowed to exist. And that’s your bloody life. Also, that’s what God’s trying to point out, here. 

"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door." Well, I looked at lots of translations for this. Actually, the next line is, "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." 

Yes. What God actually says is something like this…Things aren’t going so well for you, but if you were behaving properly, they would. But, instead, this is what you’ve done. Sin came to your door, and sin means to pull your arrow back and to miss the target. Sin came to your door. But he uses a metaphor. The metaphor is something like, sin came to your door like this sexually aroused cat-predator thing, and you invited it in. And then you let it have its way with you. It’s like you entered into a creative—he uses a sexual metaphor. You entered into a creative exchange with it, and gave birth to something as a consequence. What you gave birth to, that’s your life. And you knew it. You’re self-conscious, after all. You knew you were doing this. You conspired with this thing to produce the situation that you’re in.