Faces in the street

Substack the second - In which we gaze upon the great Australian ugliness

Shiv Nair beams beatifically from the back end of the bus. His knowing smile and steady gaze a study of calm, confident surety. Orwell described such a gaze as “full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen”*.

But Shiv Nair is not a totalitarian dictator like Big Brother. Nor is he some sage guru, nor a religious, a motivational speaker or even some wellness crank. Shiv Nair is a real estate agent.

And he’s not alone.

The real-estate-agent-as-their-own-brand has become ubiquitous in metropolitan and regional Australia. Hoardings, sometimes as big as small billboards, pollute the main roads and backstreets of our cities, suburbs, towns and even countryside. Featuring one economic vandal or another smiling down on us common sods, offering the gateway to something as magical as having a roof to keep the weather off; acting like they’ve cured cancer while they’re at it.

Like most marketing gimmicks I suspect it originated in the United States. Realtors marketing themselves as a product alongside the jerry-built slums-of-tomorrow they’re flogging off to the financially gullible. What they call ‘building their brand’.

Leaving aside the fact that it is hard to think of a more soulless, antisocial or unproductive industry than real estate, for that is a Substack for another day, it is a hallmark of neoliberalism, and the deindustrialisation of Australia, that we’re left with this orgy of narcissism thrust into the tattered remnants of the public sphere.

We don’t create anything except egos in this day and age.

For this is part of the zeitgeist of our neoliberal age. The age where the individual is the centre of the universe, and the celebrity reigns supreme. Why ask an expert on public health or reports from WHO about the impact of AIDS in sub–Saharan Africa when you can go to Bono instead?

It’s easy to kick old Paul Hewson around, but from the seventies on, alongside the rise of neoliberalism, has been this trope of the wise outsider. The rugged individualism so fetishised by Ayn Rand infused into popular culture through movies and television the idea of the outsider who knew more than “egghead experts”, and who then prevails (mostly). Think of any private detective film, most “action” films, Buffy Summers, The X Files, Being There or even Rain Man.

There is a subtext hostile to the idea of scientific method or at least the idea of peer-reviewed knowledge. An idea so infused into western subconscious it is unsurprising conspiracy theories gain as much traction as they do.

It was the British historian Simon Schama that introduced me to the idea of the latter half of the seventeenth century - Restoration England under the last King Charles - as the age of optics. Fashions that invited ogling, even men flashing their garters. The new technologies of the telescope and the microscope letting us see more and further than we could before.

The Greeks and, as always, the Arabs had known of the powers of lens technology centuries before western Europeans. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo Galilei had improved on the work of the Dutch spectacle makers Metius and Jansenn to develop the compound microscope. But it was under the Royal sponsorship of Charles II that this technology flourished during the Restoration. Yes, there was a great deal of scientific advancement under the Royal Society, but there was also a large degree of voyeurism. For voyeurism to succeed you need an exhibitionist, and for that you need a narcissist.

The Grecian tale of Narcissus is an old one - the Dutch linguist R.S. P. Beekes even suggests that it is older than Greek itself - and it doesn’t end well for the protagonist. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition; the famous DSM5. For all I know it’s also in The Art of The Deal, and if it isn’t, it should be.

Are all these realtors suffering from NPD? Well, I’m no psychiatrist (but I’ve known a few nyuk nyuk), but my answer would be probably. But where’s the disorder? Aren’t these people successful? Aren’t they winners? Well, under the rules of neoliberalism they are, but that’s probably a form of sociopathy as well. Could you imagine being stuck on a desert island with one of these self-made real estate celebrities?

I saw one on a bus in Baulkham Hills where the agent stated his pride in embarrassing his wife and children by putting his face all over norwest Sydney. Childhood trauma, right there.

We are in Restoration England on steroids, where the gaze is not just invited, but demanded. From Instagram, from Tik Tok, and all Teh Socials the faces scream “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” Neoliberalism green lights this carnival of Narcissus as a celebration of the individual as a seething mass of western humanity implore this attention, even to the point where washed up hack writers start scribbling on Substack like some pathetic lunatic yelling down an empty well.

Meanwhile some sad suburban property flipper pulls on a rictus grin and plasters himself over the public sphere. Hell, they probably believe their own inflated worth.

But this is the paradox. We are all individually different, but we cannot survive as individuals. We are collective creatures. Even Ayn Rand had to create sociopathic transactional emotional relationships to make her fantasy dystopias work. For neoliberalism knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

There are two spaces that will give you a visual image of what neoliberalism looks like. One is a tumour of real estate hoardings outside a large block of flats, all featuring the face of a different realtor. All offering the same thing, an overpriced, poorly planned and sub optimal social necessity. The other is an underfunded emergency department in any public hospital.

So Shiv Nair is not our friend; and for invading our public space he’s not even a good guy. But I doubt any intervention would be effective, there are too many Shiv Nair’s out there already. And the way this zeitgeist is headed, there will probably be many, many more before God gets back from Vegas.

If the night is not too dark, and you’re not alone, it may be possible to imagine where this age of narcissism might lead us:

“On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”*

* George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four Penguin Australia (Sydney 2015)