Failure
from Crimethinc's Harbringer #5

Failure is disaster on an individual scale. Suffered consciously, it makes everything painfully intense, bringing meaningful and meaningless into sharp focus; faced with courage, it becomes a fortifying draught, a powerful teacher; embraced, it can even become a channel from one destiny to another—and in a civilization which is itself a colossal failure, such channels are exactly what is needed. Feared, denied, or stigmatized, however, it becomes a monstrous enemy and master. In our success-obsessed society, where our horror of failure enables it to rule over us in disguise, we have a lot to learn from failure itself, and the ones we call failures.

DEFEAT, THE GREATEST OF FEATS

True failure, tragic and heartbreaking as it is, is proof that you’ve reached beyond yourself, that you are pushing at your own limits and at the limits of the world. The one who fails in the course of really trying needn’t fear she is failing to live life for all it’s worth. Heroic failure is greatness that does not depend on success or approval—not just greatness, but inalienable greatness, the greatest greatness of all.

Here we are speaking of good old-fashioned failure, such as can be experienced by those trying hard to achieve something worthwhile: in failing to achieve their goals, they achieve something even more valuable, the experience of giving all. But there are other ways to define failure. Failure is relative, according to the standards by which one judges success: and woe to him who does not judge for himself what is success and what is failure, but unquestioningly receives his standards from others.

It is the final night of junior musicians’ camp, and the campers’ parents have gathered at a gala dinner event to see their young prodigies perform. Awkward at the threshold of adolescence, embarrassed in the presence of their families, the fidgeting students count the minutes, each waiting in terror for his turn to come. Most awkward of all is the star pianist, a shy boy with tousled hair and wrinkled clothes whose performance is to be the highlight of the evening.

His instructor has picked a particularly difficult piece, eager to show off his pupil’s rapidly developing abilities—not to mention his own coaching. Nobody has asked the youth what he would like to play—no one has asked him such questions since his mother signed him up for his first lessons: they take it for granted that he knows his responsibilities as frontrunner of a new generation of musicians. For his part, he wants so desperately to please them that he has not thought to consider the question either.

The girl before him is playing her violin solo, and he can’t stop his hands from shaking. What if he misses a note, what if his fingers knot and stumble? There is a minefield in the middle of the composition, a series of difficult chords practically right on top of each other. He would give anything to be on the other side of the next twenty minutes, to have this behind him.

The girl ruefully bows to polite applause, and he takes his place on the piano bench. The hush now in the air is not etiquette alone; all eyes are on him, all ears alert. He opens the sheet music to the proper page, positions his hands above the keys, and begins.

The music that pours forth is elegant and precise. Mothers fold their hands and smile, fathers nod approvingly, silently reproaching their own offspring for failing to apply themselves. Even the instructor looks pleased with himself.

The minefield looms closer and closer; now the boy is in the thick of it, sailing through like a true maestro; and now it is behind him! There remains only the final stretch of the song, a victory march of sorts, a real walk in the park.

But suddenly, inexplicably, he hits a wrong note. Just one—but that’s not all: far, far worse, contrary to everything he has been painstakingly taught about concert performance, he stops cold, freezes.

There is nothing for it: he goes back, takes up the piece again from the beginning of the phrase, playing forward with all the grace and finesse he had been as if nothing has happened—and hits the same wrong note. This has never happened in this piece before, or any piece he has played in years. In shock and disbelief, he breaks off again, then inwardly kicks himself for doing so.

His face burning, he backs up and begins once more—and, once more, hits the note, freezing as if jolted by electricity. In the total stillness of the ensuing instant, he becomes aware of the others in the room—not just the monolithic pressure of their expectations, but their presence as individuals. They too are uncomfortable—they need him to get through this to rescue both the evening and their pride, to protect their faith in the investments they have made. It is up to him to save everybody from the impending catastrophe, to fight his way to the end of the composition and then go home to hide his face forever.

He hits the wrong note again. At this moment he would be grateful if a bolt of lightning struck him down, or he suddenly died of a heart attack. Everything he has built his young life upon—his prospects as a musician, his attempts to do what is expected of him—is in shambles. Faced with the unendurable, the boy must either perish or change. No bolt of lightning strikes; his heart goes on beating in his chest.

Once again he backtracks and plays up to the note again—but this time when he reaches it, he plays it wrong deliberately, blasting through all his deepest fears and values to redefine the meaning of the previous sour notes. The audience is none the wiser—they are too overwhelmed, mortified at having to witness this fiasco. Every father in the room is on the edge of his seat, every mother holds her breath; they would give anything to be elsewhere, to be spared this. Every note the boy plays wrong, every successive time he tries and fails, it is as if that failure reflected upon all of them, upon all humanity. Mediocrity they can stomach, even the professional musicians in the audience; outright failure is a contagion they fear worse than death, a harbinger of utter breakdown.

He botches the part again—and again. The dynamic is reversed, now: all the pressure that bore down upon the boy, the weight of the expectations of parents and teachers and students and by extension the whole civilization they represent, is turned upon them. The boy is in total control, free for the first time in his life, and they are helpless, paralyzed in a situation for which nothing has prepared them. The tension is absolutely unendurable. There is a nervous laugh, coughing, helpless fidgeting. The recalcitrant note sounds again and again, like a skipping record, like a fire alarm.

A few feet from the stage, the violinist’s eyes light up: she understands. She turns and looks back at the anguished faces behind her: it is truly a vision of damned souls in hell. Peering around the room, she catches the eyes of another young girl a few tables away—they are shining like hers. The two nod to each other, grinning from ear to ear.

FAILURE AS EXERCISE, SUCCESS AS OBSTACLE

Let’s look at failure in a vacuum, if such a thing is possible, to see what associations it carries today.

If you want to subject yourself to a real test of mettle, try failing. Struggling to succeed can be really trying, it’s true—but failure is trying, too. Attempt an impossible task everyone around you considers senseless and stupid—you’ll be surprised at what a challenge it is to exist in exile from the world in which people can make sense of one another. Commit yourself to a project you know to be beyond your powers; note how hard it is to bear your own hurt pride when things go awry, even if you knew from the start they were bound to.

Failing that, start out small: make a habit of telling jokes that fall so flat people flee your company, announce in a public square that you are a juggler of great expertise and then try to juggle for the very first time before the crowd that gathers. Even frivolous exercises like these, which seem mere child’s play from a distance, can be excruciating in practice. This seems senseless—failing should not be difficult, unless one is invested in success. That it is so hard for most of us to fail in even meaningless ways reveals how much we pursue success for its own sake. Being able to fail fearlessly before others is one of the hardest skills to master; being able to fail before yourself without shame is harder still.

But readiness to fail is a prerequisite for being able to do anything great. Pride, self-consciousness, insecurity, cowardice, the qualities which demand triumph after triumph and nothing else—these are the same qualities that impede the total freedom of action needed to achieve any genuine triumph. Artists, for example, must be prepared to abandon everything they have learned to do well and begin failing again, and repeat this process over and over, if they are to evade stagnation. Fearing to fail, one cannot accomplish anything—not even failure.

Too much success makes you weak, anyway. As a success, how can you know how you stand up under the ultimate duress of disaster, or for that matter what your motivations are in the first place? Failure, for the one who needs to think of himself as successful, is truly an enemy to be feared. But a person familiar with misfortune and disappointment is less likely to be unnaturally afraid of failing; if she has not yet given up, she is stronger and knows both life and herself better than the protagonist of any success story. Fail once, and it feels like the end of the world; live through the end of the world a few times, and you’ll learn how much more durable you are than it is.

Some of us have spent years, lifetimes, whole generations in failure and disappointment. We know exactly how much poverty, humiliation, suffering we can take—we’re well-versed in these things, we’ve been getting plenty of practice. We’re not easily intimidated—we have nothing to lose. We persist with a patience that is inconceivable to celebrities, star athletes, spelling bee winners. Just as the homeless man who greets the dawn with his will to live intact after walking around all night to keep from freezing to death is tougher than the most high-powered corporate financial officer, we failures are better equipped than any other class to take the risks one must take to work miracles.

We wanted to isolate failure in its pure form, that’s where it started. Coming from petty middle class backgrounds, all of us had lived in fear of it our whole lives; yet sitting around the table together late one night, we realized that we couldn’t figure out what was at the root of that fear, or for that matter exactly what constituted failure in the first place.

We decided there was only one possible cure: to take failure to such extremes that fear of it could never have power over us again. We formed a secret society on the spot. Our project was to fail, without quarter or mercy for ourselves and without providing any explanation to those outside our circle, until we got to the bottom of it all.

The next day we set out to mess up our lives. We started by defying our most insignificant fears, like mine of making bad impressions on strangers: I spent the morning on the subway attempting to start conversations about all the subjects no one is ever supposed to speak about. By the end of the week, we were quitting our jobs and setting our belongings on fire. It was kind of crazy, really, how quickly we were able to switch from anxiously safeguarding everything we knew to methodically wrecking it.

To transgress the borders of sanity and propriety intentionally, to engage with a straight face in behavior that provokes others to stare in mute incomprehension or blurt out questions despite themselves—this takes self-abnegation of a high order. But once you pass that frontier, the feeling is intoxicating: being able to act without regard for the consequences is a kind of omnipotence. You don’t have to save up for plane fare to Nepal to climb Mount Everest; in this day and age, to interrupt a stuffy graduation ceremony by shouting out some unwelcome truth is to dare the impossible.

Bound by this secret mission that wrested us from the comfortable acceptance of our peers, we found our togetherness all the more sweet. Once the initial sting of embarrassment wore off, it became a joyous thing to sit around laughing after a day of debacles, comparing notes and good-naturedly competing to outdo each other’s tales of humiliation and disaster. This wasn’t failure, after all—it was something entirely different.

SUCCESS AS FAILURE, FAILURE AS SUCCESS

In this world turned upside down, in which misery masquerades as happiness and truth is simply falsehood with powerful friends, the right kind of failure can protect you from that most insidious danger of all—capital-S Success. It is important to know what battles not to win, what callings not to excel in; some victories are more humiliating than any defeats, some fiascos are triumphs in disguise. The miserable waitress who is promoted to manager and stays at the restaurant long after she had planned to quit might have been better off getting fired, after all, just as the Russian working class could have given themselves a better shot at liberation by losing the revolution of 1917; likewise, it was for the best that Allen Ginsberg didn’t make a well adjusted stockbroker.

This kind of failure is a blessing in disguise. Even when suffered by one who desires so-called success, it can be an antechamber of transformation. In failing at an enterprise of questionable value, the individual’s condition and activity already diverge from the norms set out for her; it only remains for her values and standards to cross that fissure and join her on the other side, in the new world. When this happens, she can redefine success and failure for herself, so she will not be so busy succeeding that her hands are tied when she has the chance to try them at something that really matters.

As we got deeper into our experiment, we began to suspect it wasn’t such an original idea after all. All our lives we’d been taught that the working class was composed of failures, losers who hadn’t tried hard enough or hadn’t gotten enough education or, at best, hadn’t gotten a fair chance to lift themselves out of the pit of defeat—the implication being that anyone would choose to be a success, if only they had the option. Looking around with new eyes now, we saw evidence to the contrary. On-the-job sabotage and employee theft were so common that in-store surveillance cameras always pointed at the cash registers first; no mere economic desperation could explain this—it was insubordination for its own sake, a total refusal of work ethic and ambition. In low-income neighborhoods and trailer parks, middle-aged women wore skimpy clothes fashioned for emaciated models, brazenly flaunting bodies the mainstream media had been denigrating for a century or more. In these heroes and heroines, we recognized the same qualities the shock treatment of willful failure had bred in us. Our middle class mischief was child’s play compared to such transgressive renunciations. Could it be there had been a secret cult, even culture, of failure, lurking beneath our noses all along?

SUCCESS AS IMPOSSIBILITY, FAILURE AS RESISTANCE

It is ironic enough that so many dedicate their lives to succeeding at projects that fail to fulfill their dreams; more ironic still is that it is impossible to succeed at these projects in the first place. Still worse is that, living in denial of this failure, they are not even able to learn from it.

Ours is a civilization of losers. Faced with the impossible ideals of beauty and perfection set for us, we fail without fail. This is an open secret, the open secret of our era: no one, but no one, is a winner. The faster we run to catch up to these standards, the faster they recede from our grasp. That’s why bodybuilders and models are more insecure about their bodies than we are about ours, why millionaires read books about how to be more efficient. If you’re so successful, what’s with the antidepressants?

Even someone like Madonna, who presumably represents the pinnacle of status in our society, has in common with all of us that she is not actually Madonna, not the two-dimensional caricature of success and sex appeal that saturates the airwaves. At the end of the day, lines on her face and doubt in her gut, she too turns on the television and feels her heart drop at seeing that flawless superstar cavorting through a digital paradise. In fact, she is worse off than the rest of us: for not only is she not Madonna, but she is also nothing else besides.

Face it—you’re never going to look like the models in the magazines, no matter how much skin cream and lip gloss you apply. Hell, without airbrushing, even they don’t look like that! Once you embrace this failure, you’ll be free to excel at becoming something else. A new revolutionary class, the proletariat of failures, could count even members of the ruling class in its ranks, were they able to own up to the hard truth that they are no more like the satisfied, svelte executives in Wall Street Journal commercials than we are like the brainless, well-adjusted working families next door on Channel 11. Having sought and failed to find happiness according to their prescriptions, having sincerely given it our best shot, we all have something at stake in making it possible to live differently. All that is needed is for us to come out of the closet, to come to terms with what we are and begin to fail at these roles deliberately, to explore the forbidden territory we already occupy.

Of course, there are safeguards in place to discourage us from doing this. In this civilization, failure is the ultimate abomination. Obscenity, drug use, sexual and religious heresy, these may become acceptable—but in our hierarchical society, failure itself will always be anathema. Under capitalism, failure to compete is punished by the severest measures: for if people are to keep on capitulating, non-participation must look utterly undesirable, must be associated with the worst dregs of society and the most unendurable tribulations. The homeless and chronically unemployed play as fundamental a role in our economy as bosses and bureaucrats do: they teach us to equate life off the treadmill with alcoholism and mental illness, they are visual cues reminding us that annihilation is the only alternative to wage slavery. But this intimidation tactic can only succeed so long as the unemployed cooperate by accepting their misery, and the miserable cooperate by accepting employment. As soon as a new class of self-proclaimed failures appears, visibly finding happiness by rejecting both options and making a joyous catastrophe of their lives, the jig will be up.

Pride would hold us forever in no-win situations, insisting we are happy and everything is going according to plan, struggling to prove we are “good enough” to make them work somehow. This is not even tragedy—it’s just foolishness. We’re good enough to deserve to be happy, for once, whether that be called winning or losing.

Enough of being successful failures—let us finally succeed in our failure! From failure to mutiny!

After weeks of sincerely propositioning every stranger we were attracted to, going to job interviews to hold our breath until we passed out, and attempting to sled down shopping mall escalators on cafeteria trays, we felt ready for anything. That was when Mark voiced his concerns to me, as we were riding an elevator to the top of an office building for our first stab at bungee jumping.

“What we’re doing isn’t really failing, Paul. To fail, you have to be totally invested in something, to desire it with all your heart—to believe, with real conviction, that life will be unlivable if it doesn’t come true. We’re not really risking ourselves—we’ve just been getting started.”

“But how could we make ourselves want something that badly?”

“That’s a silly question! You’ve got it backwards. Everyone has things they want that badly, what they call impossible desires—they just don’t pursue them, because it would hurt too much if they never caught up to them. I think most people don’t even let themselves know what they really want, they’re so scared of not getting it. We, on the other hand, should finally be in a position to identify and pursue our truest desires, since after all we’re trying to fail.”

CERTAIN FAILURE IMPOSED BY FEAR OF FAILURE

If a person’s dearest dreams can come true, then real failure, too, is possible. As failure is the most feared of misfortunes, being responsible for pursuing and perhaps failing to achieve precious dreams is everyone’s ultimate terror. On the other hand, if the realization of such dreams is impossible, then we are free of this terrible responsibility: many people find it easier to endure the idea that everything they want is impossible than to face down their terror of being responsible for attaining it. And once they decide that what they really want is impossible, from that moment on they are invested in that being the truth—otherwise they are fools who have thrown away their lives for nothing. They may even work, subconsciously, to prevent their dreams from coming true, to prevent the things they long for from becoming possible. Imagine that, a planet of six billion people working around the clock to push what they want out of reach! It must require that much work—what most of us want is not really all that difficult or complex. It takes a Disaster of billions to hold us back!

For our masterpiece of failure, Mark and I took on the task of realizing the timeless wish of revolutionaries, that all power structures be overthrown and life be transformed into a joyous, carefree game. Myself, I’d always nursed a certain grudge against authority figures and regulations—and in the light of recent wars and mass arrests, it seemed like a project that had some civic value, as well. And talk about fighting a losing battle! Monarchy, communism, fascism, socialism, so-called democracy, all these ideologies had triumphed at some point in history and had their day, albeit to the misfortune of those who fought for them; only anarchism was utopian enough to have failed every time—it was a challenge custom-fit to our needs! That ambition of wild-eyed anarchists, whole generations of failures before us from Siberia to Santiago to Chicago, was crazy enough that we were at least guaranteed a good adventure in the trying.

Steeled by our experience as low-grade failures, it was nothing for one of us to charge into a corporate office and splash red paint across some murderer’s suit, or stand up on a Greyhound bus and present an impromptu course to fellow passengers on how to disable a fast food franchise. Setting out to fail by trying our hardest to succeed at dangerously impossible tasks, we discovered just how much wider the margins between safety and destruction were than we had thought; not only this, but once we were engaged in the situations we had feared most, the constraints those fears had imposed dropped away and we felt more free than ever before. Running from the police was a real relief after years of worrying about whether they would notice us and give chase—at least everything was finally on the table. Laying outlandish plots to undermine equally absurdist orders, seizing intercoms to incite department store employees to riot, we had discovered our true calling; and no longer being afraid to desire or believe in outrageous things, but giving ourselves to them without fear of loss, regret, or disappointment—this turned out to be the only way to live.

BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Here’s an exercise, then, for the impetuous young freedom fighter: try failing at the duties you are most afraid to, and struggling with all your heart to succeed at the challenges you never dared undertake. What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger, whether it be the mortification of not being able to explain to your parents what you’re doing with your life or the utter heartbreak of giving everything to follow a dream only to see it burnt to ashes.

Such a practice sharpens and strengthens, but it also can reveal just how arbitrary most of our deep-seated values are. Ultimately, liberation is not a question of succeeding or failing, but of moving beyond such binary ways of thinking. Our pathological fear of failure exists only by virtue of our superstitions about success; to emancipate ourselves from the former, we must forgive ourselves enough to stop pining for the latter. The mystique of victory gives rise to the fiction of defeat.

To be free of internal as well as external pressures to achieve, to cease to judge oneself by any one-dimensional yardstick of value or success, to be able to do and live anything and appreciate it for what it is, itself, without imposing systems of evaluation—that would be a triumph sweeter than any victory.

After hours of searching, I found Mark at the top of a hill overlooking the city. By that time, the last of the gunfire was dying down below, and the black flag flew from practically every pole. Mark, however, was sobbing into his hands, inconsolable.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Mark—it’s me, Paul.”

He offered no answer, but I couldn’t contain myself: “Aren’t you happy? Our crazy plan worked! The government has fled, the soldiers came over to our side of the barricades, former grocery clerks are giving out luxury appliances in the ghettos right now! The longest of long shots, and we did it, man. You should be down there with us, dancing around the fires.”

“But I’ll never know, Paul. We tried to do something that could never ever happen, to test ourselves—and it all came true! Now I’ll never know if I could have borne it if it hadn’t.”

I paused and thought it over, then squeezed his shoulder again. “No, my friend, you’ve got it backwards,” I said softly. “You took on the impossible, a paradox of paradoxes. You set out to fail—and you did. You succeeded.”

I sat down next to him, and he dried his eyes on the bandanna around his neck. We gazed out over the metropolis; someone had begun shooting off fireworks from the capitol building.

Text by Eugene Debacles. Originally rejected by publisher, revised over and over across a painful period of months until a shaky compromise was reached. Selections printed without permission from the unpublishable novel, Invincible Defeat.

The perfect ones. The beautiful ones. The right ones, the just ones, the noble ones. The ones who never break down crying in restaurants, who never do anything in secret they would be ashamed of. The normal ones. The healthy ones. The ones who always plan ahead. The content ones. The happy ones. The ones who work hard and reap the benefits, who brush and floss after every single meal. The well-adjusted ones. The popular ones. The ones who never disappoint, the little boys who do grow up to be president. The lucky ones. The ones with perfect skin and perfect teeth and perfect figures. The ones who want what they have and have what they want.

They don’t exist. The ones posing as them are even more fucked up than you.