I transcribed "The Realization of a Failure" essay by Mark McCoy

THE REALIZATION OF A FAILURE

By Mark McCoy of “Youth Attack! Records”

A failure is a hero, a person who devotes his entire life to the proliferation of truthful meaning. Without him, his enemy the opportunist can serve no purpose. One cannot be both a failure and an opportunist, as they are diametrically opposing forces in society. In their never-ending pursuit of power, the dominant opportunists govern the world by championing a narrow view of existence and thriving on unmitigated low standards. As long as anyone can recall, opportunists have employed the idea of culture as a guise for creative and intellectual suppression. A failure sees himself stranded in this oppressive reality, neglecting to understand that it is he, in fact, who creates culture.

The greatest failures are artists, poets, and musicians. Even though their creative efforts are the actual reasons for why a society advances, society in return offers them nothing. The explanation is simple: opportunists control society by creating its self-serving laws and standards, leaving failures with little choice but to accept the unfortunate hand they are dealt. Failures in turn feel a constant urgency to react to their suffrage, only to be immediately stifled by the authoritative opportunist regime.

Struggling with his fatalism, a failure feels consumed by his existential proximity between being and nothingness. He is left confused, immobilized, and vulnerable, surrounded by vampyric opportunists fiendishly siphoning his creativity and ideas for their own benefit. Possessing little or no belief in his faculties, the failure is depleted of his vitality without so much as a passing thought. He is so accustomed to disappointment that he simply thinks nothing of it.

A failure’s greatest preoccupation is his lifelong journey towards becoming his ideal. But since it’s ever elusive, he is left with the relentless inner struggle to tame the urgency of his overwhelming thoughts. For him, beauty exists in all things and life is a constant flood of inspiration. His most critical challenge is sifting through the density of his thoughts to reveal his true self. For most failures, this will never happen. Without focus, they will go round and round trapped in their circles of habit, often for an entire lifetime. Most failures have very limited perspectives of themselves, their abilities, and their value. They fail to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge, choosing instead to lead lives of frivolity and avoidance.

Inevitably a failure’s greatest victim is himself. In his self-denial, he avoids concrete decisions and resorts to a reactionary way of thinking in order to create. He is an idealist without an ideal, projecting a fantasized vision of life so that other failures will empathize and glorify him. By succumbing to the myth of his own enslavement, the failure becomes a martyr to his own indefinable cause. Passive but not a conformist, he is too distracted to contend with the enemy that seeks to exploit him. Reluctant to break out of his comforts, he chooses instead a variety of safer and less effective options to feign revolutionary thought. The more lost a failure is, the more intense the outpouring of his emotion, making art and music the refuse of his defeatism.

In contrast, opportunists attempt to conceal the truth of their shallowness with maniacal streams of pretentious bragging. To mask their mental vacuity and absence of ideas, they will talk at great lengths about their material possessions, job titles, and sexual conquests, further contributing to society’s cultural plunge into a yawning pit of regurgitated delusion. The opportunist develops a parasitic relationship with the failure, whose docile nature allows for easy intimidation. Opportunists never run out of energy; they will devote their entire lives to maintaining the illusion of their worth by stealing the ultimate prize—the failure’s soul.

As long as failures are mired in self-doubt, the dynamics remain unchallenged. Taking full advantage, the opportunist will concoct elaborate schemes to coax his enemy out of his ideas. In reaction, the failure develops escapist habits as shortcuts to happiness. But this happiness immediately gives way to throes of despair since his escapism treats symptoms without offering actual cures. Prone to being overly romantic, the failure lives a life of dramatic emotional highs and lows. He neglects to see that without a defined self, he remains an unstable battleground where his actions only serve to continually punish his unrealized identity.

Fully anticipating the failure’s masochistic yearnings for salvation, the opportunist subjugates the failure by offering the irresistible lure of success. For the failure producing art, his pending canonization is merely an arbitrary anointment. The fate of his success rests solely upon the whims of the demigod opportunist, whose interest in artistic expression serves as a smokescreen for his arrogance and a reflection of his fascist notions of importance. Since his aims are vicious and consumptive, he sees all of mankind as disposable. And there, with one foot in oblivion’s door, is the failure, anxious to be cycled through the cultural meat grinder.

The opportunist is all too eager to impose his arbitrary estimations of the failure’s value, estimations that subsist on the constant stream of trends supplied by an endless line of hopefuls. By appropriating the failure’s art into his own repertoire of cosmetic glass, the opportunist parades his cannibalistic tastes to incite the approval and envy of his governing class in order to crown himself a conqueror of his governing class to keep outdoing everyone around him. Because it is the opportunist’s goal to become veritable graveyards of the living dead.

As a result of his clamoring uncertainty, the failure struggles to comprehend his sudden rise to fame and immediately resumes doubting himself. He knows that through the ravenous eyes of the opportunist, one failure is just as useful as the next. Sensing his days are numbered, he surrenders his aspirations to the system in a desperate attempt to maintain his ever-waning importance. The failure soon finds himself discarded and replaced, for nothing will ever satiate the opportunist’s vanity. In a calculated stride to propel himself as a purveyor of taste, art serves as both his shield and his megalomaniacal ascendant.

The opportunist’s main control mechanism is money. It serves to confirm the dichotomy of success and failure in the eyes of the social system. There is no avoiding money if the failure chooses to live within society, but his true power lies in creating value where he believes it should exist. To do this a failure must assess how he utilizes his time and creative energies and be aware that a culture can only chart its development by propagandizing reactions to its ruling conservatism. Without ideas to suppress, it grinds to a halt. Instead of wasting his energy projecting illusions of final authority, the failure must break from the slave mentality, dissolve the myths of social institutions, and finally answer to himself. If the failure provides his will with a unique sense of purpose, he determines his own value in society, reclaiming control over his destiny.

It is a failure’s duty to realize his personal vision.
It is time failures take credit where credit is due.
It is time for failures to fail society.