The Fascinators

In 1963 Ray Nelson penned a little short story titled, “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” about a population under the sway of aliens dubbed The Fascinators. The Fascinators control the people through a type of hypnosis, commanding them to “Work eight hours,” “obey the government,” and “marry and reproduce.” The people cannot recognize The Fascinators for what they are. In fact, the aliens appear to the hypnotized as people worthy of further care and concern, and thus The Fascinators fatten themselves and live off the people they have hypnotized. In the opening of the story, the protagonist, George Nada, somehow wakes up all the way (and is the only person to do so), and sees the Fascinators for the horrific, controlling monsters they are. He is unable to persuade anyone else, and finally seizes control of the command broadcast and by imitating the voice of the aliens he says, “Wake up. Wake up. See us as we are and kill us!” This the people do, obeying the voice command.

For a more ancient version of this story (sans aliens), you might consult Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but Nelson’s story became the basis for John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster. The protagonist in the film is an unnamed drifter who has a unique pair of sunglasses which allow him to see that the ruling class is, like in Nelson’s short story, comprised of horrible aliens who manipulate people through mass media to consume, obey, reproduce, and conform to the ruling class’s desires, to accept the prevailing version of what life is all about, to not question or choose otherwise. Because only the drifter has the special glasses, he alone sees the ads for what they are: a mechanism of control whereby the aliens wrest life from those under their spell. In the short story the aliens literally eat the humans using odd little knives and forks that George discovers on the aliens he kills.

How did I end up thinking about this? On my attention walk I broke out my phone and opened an app called “Seek,” because I wanted to identify a plant. “There’s an app for that,” is no joke. I could download apps to identify mountain peaks, birds, constellations, animal tracks, spiders, edibles, all kinds of things reduced to various subjects. Nature neatly knowable. I rarely use this Seek app, mostly because that kind of knowledge isn’t really what I seek. I’m looking for a deeper connection, something beyond whatever might be facilitated by knowing the plant’s name.

Anyway, using the app got me thinking about Google glass. These glasses were marketed with the goal of displaying information directly in the user’s field of vision, offering an “augmented reality experience by using visual, audio and location-based inputs to provide relevant information.” I’ve never used a pair (they stopped making them in 2015) and newer and, presumably, better makes and models for the “augmented reality” experience are in development, but I’d bet my last dollar that no such glasses will ever be designed to help us see The Fascinators for what they really are, to help us see the mechanisms of control operative in our lives, the messaging and logics that we’ve internalized as knowledge and the way things ought to be, or the illusions which end up consuming our lives.

And wouldn’t such glasses be handy? Would you want them if they did exist? How else might we effect this kind of change in our lives, in our seeing? I mean, George Nada, the drifter, and Plato’s philosopher are unexplainable anomalies: why did George wake up? How did the drifter get those sunglasses? Why, after all that time, did the cave dweller turn around and see the light?

Sometimes, I guess, an event or circumstance invites the question or engenders the ability to see what’s been going on all along. To offer a short personal example, higher education has treated adjunct professors poorly for a long time now while creating an airtight system for exploiting that labor while relying on this labor more and more. Over the last ten years, adjunct pay has not increased at all, not for inflation, not for length of service, not for performance. When I moved into the ranks of adjunct faculty after being full-time, I was less bothered by the bigger picture because my own needs were met: I taught the maximum class load allowable for adjuncts, which is seven courses per academic year. The pay for an adjunct is $2100 per three-credit class. So, teaching the maximum, I could make $14,700 per year. For some reason this past summer, this college I’ve worked at for 15 years, pulled all my classes except one, hiring more adjuncts, and giving us each one to two classes. This happened late July, with classes beginning in August, and without ever mentioning this was in the works. I just got an email, after the fact. Poof, anticipated income, vanished. No recourse. The institution doesn’t owe loyalty to adjuncts at all. This coming fall, I’m scheduled for just one course, down from two. This course runs for 16 weeks. For the attention to student emails, administrative paperwork, course management/development, interacting in discussions, and grading student work for four months, I’ll make $2100. Some adjunct here in New Mexico at CNM might be like, "Oh wow, I only make $1800." And so it goes.

I now see what I should have seen all along. Higher education is a system/institution that cares about making money. It long ago redefined students as customers and education as a business. Administration took over for the faculty who are all just glad to have jobs. Philosophy, as a subject worth learning about, has been barely hanging by a thread, especially when the bean counters come around asking whether such a degree has any utility in the real world. No private companies, it seems, are interested in sponsoring philosophy students. Student debt is at an all-time high. People are questioning the value of a college degree. And there I was, scab labor essentially, allowing the system to fatten itself on me, becaue if I don't want to work for that wage, they will easily find someone willing to take my place. How did I not see it? How did I end up under The Fascinators’ control?

Well, this was my turning-around, waking-up, “oh, look, magic sunglasses” moment. This will be my last semester at the college, the last I knock on the door of any institution of higher learning. And because seeing things now that I should have seen before is embarrassing and disturbing, I’m putting my new glasses to work on seeing through other ideas, systems, and logics I take for granted as inevitable or natural, believe because I was taught, or assimilated through cultural expectations, asking myself questions I hope will prompt further change:

*How do I perpetuate the idea that money is real and should be the basis for how I organize my time, life and relationships (in pursuit of money)?

*How do I give credence to the accepted idea that working for money is “making a living”?

*If the aliens want me to be fixated on somehow securing my individual well-being against an uncertain future, how can I wake up, see clearly, and choose to live otherwise?

*What other areas of my life are under the sway of The Fascinators?

I’ll close with one last insight from Ray Nelson’s short story. The ending isn’t a happy one for George Nada. He dies (at eight o’clock in the morning), though before he does, he seizes control of the broadcast and incites the uprising/awakening of the people who start a war against the aliens. What happens next? Though it doesn’t answer, the story invites such a question, especially if we want to imagine that once the killing was done, something better came into being. You know, a happy ending. Yet, my own imagination resists such a tantalizing vision. I don’t think for a second that violence can achieve peace or justice. The best violence can do is destruction, and then when people are worn out by bloodthirst, there will be a suspension of violence until the next time it becomes the only means we can imagine for getting what we want. Using the same systems and mechanisms of control that oppressors used, even to do so with so-called “good” ends in mind, is a strategy doomed to failure. I’m a “means are constitutive of the ends” and vice versa guy. I’m aiming at an enlarged vision of what’s possible, really putting that imagination to work, but then also understanding that there are no shortcuts. The means matter greatly. Learning to see after being so enraptured by The Fascinators is no joke. I’m trying to undo 50+ years of living in the cave. But I also know this much, it’s the only real way of making a living.