Myth of Sizzliphus

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 2 April 2016.



Since I have some time, I'm going to explore a little more about the cult/LGAT. After giving them a lecture on the major themes of existentialism, I showed my students the Sizzler promo commercial and asked them to analyze it.

There seemed to be two major interpretations:

One was that this was a kind of heaven for übermenschen, ones who are capable of facing the full extent of their freedom. I know Sartre said that rational human beings, faced with the full extent of their freedom, rightly experience nausea and anguish. But we entertained the notion that perhaps they had somehow transcended that and were now Nietzschean “birds of prey,” triumphantly reveling in their restaurant within a restaurant, laughing fearlessly as they are confronted its dizzying array of options. There are a few characters in the video that support this interpretation. I think of these two and the dismissive way the Italian guy looks at the camera, showing a Nietzschean scorn for the timid, insipid values of the imagined viewers. Another point in favor of this view is the many vertiginous elements incorporated into the camera work (for instance, here and here), suggesting that, although the inhabitants of this world seem to relish their experience of contingency, we the plebeian viewers are nauseated.

The second and more popular interpretation was that all these people are living in bad faith, that, terrified of the full extent of their freedom, they instead accept “mediated choices” (thus, “Sizzler is the one that gives us choices”). The “restaurant within a restaurant” implies that they have buffered themselves from their freedom and subjectivity even further. The doubling, as mentioned in the previous email, suggests that this method of escaping one's subjectivity can be repeated ad infinitum, as one flees endlessly down this tunnel toward a theoretical dimensionless restaurant within an infinite series of restaurants where one would finally and definitively objectify oneself. The dizzying array of choices available in Sizzler's restaurant within a restaurant can be explained as another attempt by the herd to appropriate the values and prerogatives of the ruler caste. The paradox of fleeing one's freedom while ostensibly embracing an ever-expanding array of options is simply the inherent hypocrisy of the “lie to oneself.” Indeed, following this line of reasoning, the dimensionless restaurant at the end of this long line of nested restaurants would promise an infinite array of choices. The vertiginous camera work can be explained in that, even as they try to situate themselves within the seemingly stable environs of the restaurant within a restaurant, their efforts are doomed to failure: the anguish of repressed freedom can never be fully repressed; they are, as Sartre puts it, “condemned to be free.”

In looking at how any of this could provide inspiration for Knology, I like the idea of Farthington being an übermensch who has found a way to package and peddle the values and lifestyle of the ruler caste to the herd. I honestly think that this is exactly what people like Werner Erhard and L. Ron Hubbard did.

They did it by serving up the paradox of the restaurant within a restaurant ad infinitum.