I think one of the ideas of the book is that there’s a particular ethos in U.S. culture, and particularly in entertainment and marketing culture, that appeals to people as individuals; that you don’t have to be devoted or subservient to anything else. There is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness. And that in the book, as best I can recall, characters who become drug addicts there is a form—the root in English, of addict, is the Latin addicere, which means “religious devotion.” It was an attribute of beginning monks, I think. There is an element in the book in which various people are living out something that I think is true, that we all worship, and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different, for example pleasure, or drugs, or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff. Or, in the tennis academy, it’s somewhat different, it’s devotion to an athletic pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline but is nevertheless an individual sport, and one is trying to get ahead as an individual. I doubt this makes very much sense, but whatever the conditions of hopelessness you’re talking about, at least in Infinite Jest, have to do with an American idea and not a universal one, but one that I think kids get exposed to very early; that you are the most important and what you want is the most important, and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. That’s a little crude to say it that way, but in fact, it’s something of the ideology here. It’s certainly the ideology that’s perpetrated by television and advertising and entertainment and the economy thrives on it.
Let me insert one thing, which I bet you’ve noticed, from talking to writers, is that most of the stuff that we think we’re writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight up, question and answer. And in some sense it probably can’t be talked about directly and that’s why people make up stories about it. This is all a big defense because I feel like what I’m saying is so simple and so reductive. To the extent that I understand it, being what you call ‘grown-up’ isn’t a lot of fun, a lot of the time. There are things you have to do, there are things you want to do that you can’t do, for a variety of reasons, and I think that for young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture. There’s a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtues of being grown-up, and having a family, and being a responsible citizen, but there’s also a sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites, because when I’m a corporation, appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things. And the point that emerges from that is that, I think, one more example of the American economic and cultural systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping us help each other know how to live and to be happy, if that word means anything. Clearly it means something different from, whatever I want to do, "I want to take this cup and throw it — I have every right to — I should!" You know, we see it with children, that’s not happiness, that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such though. It’s all “freedom of choice,” and “you have the right to have things” and “spend this much money and you can have this stuff.” Again, saying it this way sounds to me very crude and simple, but that’s sort of the way it is.
I think about general terms like being “grown-up,” a term that’s rarely used here anymore, and now I feel embarrassment because I’m gonna sound like my grandfather or something, but the word “citizen.” But the idea of the word “citizen” would be to understand your country’s history and the things about it that are good and not so good, and how the system works, and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for political office which would mean reading stuff—it isn’t fun, it’s boring. But when people don’t do that, here’s what happens. The candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements, because television advertisements are how most voters know about the candidates. Therefore we get candidates who are beholden to large donors, and become, in some ways corrupt, which disgusts the voters, and makes them even less interested in politics, less willing to read and do the work of citizenship. When I was a little boy there was a class called citizenship, and here are a couple things about America and America’s history, here’s why it’s important to vote, here’s why it’s important to vote not just for who the best looking candidate is. Here’s what’s really interesting about this and I don’t know if you can translate this, but I feel ashamed. Saying all this sounds like an older person saying this, which in American culture sets me up to be ridiculed. It would be very easy to make fun of what I’m saying and I can hear a voice in my head making fun of this stuff as I say it, and this is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now. There are things we know are right, and good, and would be good to do, but constantly it’s like “yeah, but you know, it’s so much funnier and nicer to do something else,” and “who cares, it’s all bullshit anyway.” One of the things it causes is tension and unhappiness in people. The paradox is that that sort of tension and conflict and complication in people also makes them very easy to market to. Because I can say to you, “feeling uneasy? Life feels empty? Well here’s something you can buy, or do.” The economics term is inelasticity of demand, I demand all the time, no matter what the price of it is, and it works really well in an economic way. Emotionally, spiritually, in terms of citizenship, in terms of feeling like a meaningful part of this country, forget the world, and I’m sure the U.S. government’s arrogance and disdain for the rest of the world is unpleasant, but it’s also a natural extension of certain cultural messages we send ourselves about ourselves, that work very well in some ways, and make us very rich and very powerful.
Transcribed and edited by Adam H. From http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/823228/David-Foster-Wallace-im-Interview-%25282003%2529#/beitrag/video/823228/David-Foster-Wallace-im-Interview-%282003%29
