The Idea Of A Superfluous Man

        "People .. What a bunch of bastards!"

Roy, The IT Crowd

         A superfluous man (in Russian лишний человек – lishniy cheloviek) – a term which comes from classical 19th century Russian literature refers to a person who doesn’t do anything useful in his/her life, stays usually at home and is non-productive for the society. The life of such a person is wasted and in wider horizon we can say useless.

       Why am I writing about superfluous man now? I´ve been thinking about this topic for longer time by now, but in slightly different sense. In Russian classical sense these people (like Oblomov, who is probably the best example of such a kind of man) are aware of their position but they are so passive that they don´t want and maybe can´t do anything about it. They wouldn´t change their situation on their own and they aren´t even interested in doing so. The sense I am thinking about is more pushed into the sphere of wasted and useless life. And I don´t even mean it in the wider discourse of society, because it´s doubtful whether somebody wants to be useful just for the sake of society nowadays (I don´t.). I mean it strictly in the sense of one´s own personal life and it´s developing.

       I am thinking about so many wasted lives, so many wasted people who – and this is the difference from classical superfluous man sense – think that their lives actually are meaningful, or they even don´t think about meaningfulness of their lives .. they just are. They just are and don´t know or better, don´t want to assume that their life is wasted. But what do they do to defend their position? Can they do anything useful to develop themselves? Can they do anything useful in order to help another people or animals who need help? Do they have any hobbies, interests, activities? If you know somebody who would answer to all these questions “no” and still think about him/herself that the life they are living is worth living, we have to stop here and discuss.

           People have to act. People have to do something worth doing. People should create, and if they can´t create, they should work on something meaningful (and doesn´t matter whether it means something only to themselves), and if they can´t work on something meaningful, they should help each other, and if they can’t help each other, they should have at least some interests that help them develop. And if people can´t develop, their lives are useless.

           When people let the system chew and eventually swallow their selves, they become identified with the grey mass. They wake up every day, go to work, return from work, play PC games and eat pizza, every week they go shopping, they maintain heterosexual couple relationships, they have two kids, mortgage, and they die of cancer or heart attack. This is a profile of an average people who vote, go for romantic dinners and family holidays, collect supermarket coupons and always smile on photos. They think they are happy, and maybe they really are happy, but does their life mean anything itself? I don´t want to generalize but in this profile you can find at least one feature that matches to the “crowd”.

          José Ortega y Gasset called this type of man a “mass-man” (hombre masa) and he stated clearly that this kind of people is the majority in the society and that these people are seriously threatening the status of the educated and noble people.

            So I moved from the original idea of a superfluous man to the mass-man – something between these extremes yields an unnecessary, needless man that I described above. A man who probably serves as a government target (because a government is not a society – when someone says he´s serving the society, it´s usually a government he´s serving). From this point of view, we can see people as a whole and consider that there are many who fulfil the requirements to be useless.

         All great philosophers of past times described somehow the mass people – e. g. those who forget when they are sleeping, but don´t remember even when they are awake (Hérakleitos). This classification of people was the reason why Nietzsche (who was sceptical about all ancient philosophy) actually liked Hérakleitos; because Nietzsche´s philosophy is in its nature based on the dichotomy of “lower” and “higher” man.

And when we consider it from the today´s point of view, we don´t have to do anything but agree. We live in the world, where a considerable space is occupied by superfluous, useless, wasted, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it people. We can´t do anything about it, because when we start to educate them, they would response aggressively. Their brains are not designed to process useful or important information. What they think is important, is the most useless stuff ever. We can´t do anything because if we do so, it would be an attack to their rights.

However, what is remarkable and not very common to consider in this case (and I found it accidentally by dealing with the issue personally) is that this profile also matches very well to the people who actually aren´t a typical mass people described above (and they usually don´t even want to be a part of a system), but they waste their lives in another ways like doing drugs (but not for their own enrichment of the mind but in a sense they are not productive at all, they are just hanging around, dedicate themselves to small size criminality, play stupid games, watch monotonous porn movies or even gamble seriously, they don´t develop at all and they mostly end up in completely the same scenario as if they were the mass - when you start to educate them, they would response aggressively attacking you for your thought flow which obviously can´t be perceived within their range of intelligence that is constantly going flatter and thinner).

These examples are actually strong opposites which is quite interesting discovery – one group comes from the core mainstream of the society, the other one from it´s very edge. Still they both can become useless mass anyway. Different means but the same result. And still we can´t do anything because if we do so, it would be an attack to their rights.

Therefore, the Declaration of Human Rights should be slightly modified by adding one item: “Everybody has the right to be useless.”