Noah Cicero talks to Tim Nogaj about his newest novel, The Insurgent.
Tim Nogaj: All of your books have been published by small publishers. Compared to what is considered ‘mainstream’ you are almost non-existent as a writer. You have cited Sartre as an influence, who claimed that he wrote to change the world. Why do you write?
Noah Cicero: I don’t write to change the world. Sartre is much different than me. Sartre grew up bourgeoisie and went to a good school in France. I grew up blue collar and have stumbled around in life and finally go to a small state university. The sentence, “I want to change the world” has never occurred to me once in life. I’m not sure if I care about the world. I’ve done some volunteer work and plan on working for a non-profit organization after I’m done with college. But I have never thought about changing the world. I mean seriously I work at Red Lobster, what am I supposed to do?
TN: Vasily and Chang both feel alienated and marginalized by society. What is the relationship between these characters psychological perspectives and your own?
NC: I wrote the book three years ago. I felt a lot more alienated then. I’m not so psychological now. I’m probably more sociological or political currently. I still do feel alienated, often when class room discussions I say things that have nothing to do with the other students’ points of view. I still realize that I am different from most people. I don’t really feel like I have much to do with other people. Most people seem concerned with flat screens, talking about their big money futures, about being libertarian or vegan, their new cell phones, and I don’t really feel it.
TN: In The Insurgent, you describe Youngstown as a small third world country located inside America, and say that, “There are no movements for poor people in America.” What do you think is at the root of these conditions and what will happen as they continue to proliferate across the country?
NC: There are no movements for poor people in America because capitalism is now the dominating worldview of the American people, rich and poor. When Marx wrote capitalism wasn’t a worldview, it was an economic system that was just starting. But now, capitalism is like a religion we are raised with and we can’t even see it anymore. The capitalistic worldview is that we are alone trying to get by. We go to work and fight for raises and promotions. We believe in corporations the way we used to believe in religions and our clan or tribal heritage. Most people don’t even know what capitalism is. They think it is “just money.” But it is a system that forces humans to fight endlessly against for their whole lives for raises, promotions and jobs. Americans do not believe in unity or team work of any sort. The don’t even play sports to be part of a team, they play sports to showcase their talents to get paid more or to get more advertizing money. I don’t think this is Adam Smith’s fault. Capitalism has its good points, capitalism brought a better standard of living, capitalism taught that money and standard of living is more important than racism. If learn about other countries and about the south’s history, you will learn that humans will actually consider being racist more important than progress. Which capitalism negates. Capitalism makes money the number one priority and not race, religion or language which is good.
If more places become third world around America because of this depression you won’t see socialism taking hold. You will find people bitching about taxes. Americans have this crazy notion in their head that the government doesn’t matter. But what matters most is the government. We are tied directly to the government. The government provides the roads, sewage, electricity, and water. It is the government that protects us and runs the zoning boards that attract outside business. Most people in America don’t comprehend that.
TN: Wars, global warming and peak oil are discussed amongst the characters in the same tone as getting laid or having an abortion. Vasily watches youtube videos of mass suffering around the world for entertainment. How have these things become so trivialized and what effect does it have on a person to have such an abstract relationship with violence?
NC: People watch movies all fucking day where shit gets blown up and the world ends. Nobody cares peak oil or climate change because everyone just thinks its a movie. It is all one big stupid movie. They also don’t care because they want to believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them. People also want to believe that the economic crisis was caused purely by Human Hands because if only humans did it, then it can be fixed. No one wants to admit that when the economy started crashing oil was like 4 dollars a gallon for a whole summer and no one could spend money on stupid shit. No one wants to admit that people had to pay their medical bills and they couldn’t pay their mortgages. People just want to blame Bush and the bankers and now they are blaming Obama. We have a very big problem concerning oil, the price of gas is sucking up money and we are in two wars to secure the location of the oil. We aren’t exactly in the middle east for THAT oil, but we are there to secure THAT oil makes it to market so the price of the oil on the stock market remains lower.
TN: Vasily has a talk with his sister, Sasha about how people escape from freedom and build artificial cages for themselves. She says that life for most people is made up of a series of escapes. Why are people so scared of freedom, what makes reality so unbearable?
NC: It isn’t that reality is unbearable. It is that Being is unbearable. We are Being in Time to use Heidegger. We project our Beings into the future. When we are unsure where our Being will end up we get anxiety. People don’t like anxiety. They want their lives to be predominately fixed. Humans up until the American experiment or up until John Locke’s Second Treatise never considered freedom important. They considered ‘freedom from’ important sometimes. But people generally just did what their parents did. They lived out the cultural norms and traditions without question. People now have to CHOOSE their fates. They can pick when to have kids, what to major in college, if they want to go to college or not go, they choose who they will marry, they choose where to live. These things that seem normal to us aren’t normal at all in terms of history. Our lives aren’t fixed anymore. Our lives are even less fixed than they were 50 years ago. Young people in America have more freedom than other humans that have ever lived in the history of mankind. We can choose it all. This is terrifying to us. This is why On the Road is so important and still read by so many young americans. It tells the story of people ‘that don’t know what to do.’ They don’t know where to live, they don’t know what job to have, they can’t pick a woman to marry, they can’t just settle down and start their lives. And now that has come true, we aren’t having the same job all our lives like our grandparents, we aren’t living in the same place all our lives, we are moving around, always looking for something better.
TN: Chang says “Society needs people like me to look down on; they need me so that there is always a definition of what crazy is. Without me there would be no sane. I am paid to keep a line between insanity and what is called sane. My insanity… allows people who think that buying a hummer will make them happy, to convince themselves that they’re sane.” What would happen if this line disappeared? How far would Americans go to protect their privilege at the expense of others?
NC: Americans are willing to take over two countries in the name of privilege. America has gone to war with Iraq and Afghanistan not because of the U.S. Constitution and the dream of freedom and democracy. World War 2 and the Civil War those were fought for the Ideals of The U.S. Constitution. But these two wars could be called Standard of Living Wars. We are there to maintain our standard of living. It is great that we freed them from their shitty governments. I personally think that is wonderful on an emotional level. But we had to kill for it, we had to drop bombs on our fellow humans for it, and we did for our Standard of Living or privilege.
TN: Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, is talked about. When something like the VT massacre occurs, the media portrays it as an isolated incident. The person or persons who committed the act must be insane. Vasily and Chang live an abject existence that would probably not be alien to Cho or Ted Kaczynski or Timothy Mcveigh or the Columbine shooters or Joe Stack. What is the relation between the “crazy” murderers and the “innocent” victims?
NC: The strangest thing is that the crazy person sees themselves as innocent. The crazy person considers themselves a victim. But they misdirect and take revenge upon those they consider their victimizers. One Man killers are a symptom of capitalism. They can’t relate to other people because they have been alienated by the economic structure that has been turned into a religion and a social structure. Since there is no REAL alternate voice for the alienated, they end up being alone. When they are alone they start thinking strange thoughts and because they have no friends their thoughts get stranger and stranger. One of the reasons humans talk to each other is to see if our thoughts are strange. Or one of the reasons say Christians or racists only talk to each other is to make sure that their thoughts aren’t interrupted. But the crazy murderer is left alone, with their thoughts getting weirder and weirder. They can’t join a group because groups aren’t really allowed in America so they start to blame all of humanity. They don’t care who they kill because everyone is against them. They consider themselves one man guerilla armies fighting the social contract that keeps them alienated. But Cho killed himself knowing that his battle was useless, he could never destroy the social contract, it was too big and too strong.
TN: If Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama read The Insurgent and discussed it with each other, what would they say?
NC: I think they would understand it. Being a president is a lonely thing. You are the most Powerful human alive with the most choice and possibilities granted to any man alive at that time in history. A president must order people to people other people for the sake other people. They sign in legislation that will affect people greatly. I can’t imagine the existential anguish that must have tortured Clinton and Bush and now tortures Obama. I think they would read it differently than say we would as young people who don’t have great power. We see the characters as people who are figuring out what to do with their lives and the consequences of bad and good choices. A president would see it as perhaps what it feels like to be isolated and how difficult it is to make a choice. I think they would see the mother in the second half like they would see legislation, that a person could make a choice and it could turn out very badly. And how they would love to confess it to the world, “I’ve made a bad choice.” They wait for years until they are in a room with a confident that would never tell anyone else and perhaps confess to them their feelings about past decisions.
But at the same time those three men are men of achievement. They would probably look at Chang and Vasily and think they were lazy and ask why they couldn’t get it together and perhaps think of the characters as bad Americans.
TN: When a copy of The Insurgent is found under a heap of rubble in 150 years, what will be said about it?
NC: They will probably think, “Man, these people were crazy.” I don’t know.
TN: Vasily says, “we are totally moral, godless and moral…” How can someone like Vasily and Chang live a ‘moral’ life in the modern world? What does it mean to be ‘moral’ when you are surrounded by automatons who cannot deal with freedom?
NC: This will sound strange, but I’m going to go with Christianity here. Even though most people are predominately automatons. They do make personal choices, they have their own stories to tell and personal experiences. They like to have a good time, they want a job that offers raises without crazy bosses, they want their governments to work. They want justice and a good court system. So we all have the basic things in common. And people should go with that. You have to forgive people. I personally want people to forgive me for being so weird and people usually do. I get called weird and crazy all the time but people are still polite to me and I try to be polite to them. The most important thing you can do for another person, is if they are stressed out or crying or whatever is say, “Hey, what do you need?” Sometimes all they need is something little, sometimes all they need is for you to listen to their crazy shit.
Here I am going with John Rawls: We are sharing this world, which means that we are sharing the roads, sewer systems, electrical lines, telephone lines, local, state, and federal governments. We are all paying taxes to the same institutions. I’m not talking about the environment or something big and crazy like that. But we are all sharing Taco Bell, the mall, and even the internet. We are in constant state of sharing. And because we are sharing these certain things we should be respectful of each other. We are condemned, fated, doomed to a life of sharing things and to make the whole process easier it is better if you do it as politely as possible.
Yes!
Good interview, guys.