Breakfast of Champions and Cultivation Theory (and Free Will)
Content warning: mental illness, fictitious violence, suicide, and a brief discussion of current events
I first read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut when I was in my preteens. I was way, way too young to understand it, but I did recognize that it was probably the best work of literature I had encountered thus far. I had recently come up with the idea of being a writer, and this book influenced my early attempts at fiction in a way that wasn’t especially productive — for instance, I borrowed Vonnegut’s bold choice to insert himself into the narrative and interact with his characters, even confessing to one that he was, indeed, their author. This was before I became aware of “self-insert fic” as a widely derided rookie mistake among amateur authors. When Vonnegut did it, he had already proven his chops as a writer, and that gave him a certain amount of license to do whatever the fuck he wants in his own custom-made universe. When he did it, it worked.
He knew himself and his abilities better than any other writer I’ve encountered before or since. He breaks every single rule of fiction writing I’ve been cautioned to follow, and when he does it, it works. Me trying to emulate him at age 12 was a mistake. But that’s okay. Young writers make a lot of mistakes. It’s how we learn.
Vonnegut was acutely aware of his power as an author, and that power weighed heavily on him. It shows very clearly in the preface of Slaughterhouse Five, where he acknowledges the dilemma inherent in writing a story about war. You can carry with you the purest intentions to creating an anti-war message, but some readers will inevitably latch onto the war and leave behind the anti-.
In Breakfast of Champions, he holds onto that awareness through every page. He writes transparently of his uneasy omnipotence within the world of this book. He talks about the choices he made with the characters and the events they experience, and about the suffering he put them through. His intentions, and his limitations, bleed into every scene. He hides nothing. In the first chapter, he reveals what this story will be about: A meeting between obscure science fiction author Kilgore Trout, and Dwayne Hoover, who is “on the brink of going insane.”
A few pages later, Vonnegut explains Hoover’s mental illness in this way: “Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction.” Hoover would find these “bad ideas” in a sci fi novel by Kilgore Trout, who would then rise to prominence as the one who discovered the link between bad ideas and poor mental health.
In other words, Breakfast of Champions is about cultivation theory.
Cultivation theory is the study of how media influences human beliefs and behaviors, developed in the late 60s and 70s; Breakfast of Champions was published in ’73. That might mean that Vonnegut was at the cutting edge of social sciences, although I don’t think these ideas are especially sophisticated. The idea that media influences people is as ancient as the practice of using stories to teach moral lessons, like Aesop’s fables. Cultivation theory just turns a scientific eye toward the particulars, like whether seeing violence on television can influence people to become violent, and if so, how.
The same cultural trends that influence scientists to take on research topics (and institutions to fund them) also influences fiction writers to choose themes for their stories. I guess there must have been something going on in the late 60s and 70s that made people pay a bit more attention to the ways that media affect our mental health. Perhaps there was some new mass media technology that had recently revolutionized communication and entertainment, and people were concerned about how it was affecting the children who were now entering adulthood without ever having known life without it. Perhaps their parents and grandparents were concerned about this new generation’s behaviors and attitudes, and wanted to know if the media was to blame. I’m not an historian.
Throughout Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut uses his omniscient narrator to describe where people get their ideas from and the actions those ideas inspire. He describes how a flippant joke made by Trout inspires a real fear of an imaginary gang of thugs, which then inspires a group of local youth to name their new gang after it in hopes of benefiting from some of that preexisting fear. He describes how the slogan for the “Robo-Magic” laundry machine company, Goodbye Blue Monday, stemmed from a misunderstanding of working-class slang.
There’s a lot in this story about marketing, actually. Both of its titles — Breakfast of Champions and Goodbye Blue Monday! — are explicitly taken from marketing slogans. A major subplot revolves around Hawaiian Week, a marketing campaign at Hoover’s car dealership. While hitchhiking, Kilgore Trout observes the illogic behind the catchy words painted on the sides of semi trucks, and is inspired to write a new story that pushes this illogic to catastrophic conclusions.
And I think that’s very shrewd, as the marketing industry is the best proof I can think of that cultivation theory is both valid and worthy of scrutiny. If media did not influence human beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, then there would be no reason for corporations to funnel millions of dollars into media purpose-built to influence the public to buy their products. Corporations don’t just spend money en masse and in greater quantities each year on things that don’t benefit their bottom line. By centering every detail of this story on the many advertisements surrounding the characters, pushing them that way and this as they wander through their lives, Vonnegut is forcing us to reckon with that fact. We can’t just let it fade into the background, the way we may zone out and hit the skip button or crop the billboards out of our vacation photos. We can’t just pretend our minds are pure of this manipulative cultural junk.
Even Wayne Hoobler, the serendipidously-named man who has lived most of his life incarcerated and thus knows very little of the world, knew about Dwayne Hoover — from ads that were some of the only media he ad access to in prison. What is an incarcerated man going to do with an ad for a car dealership? What do you do with media made to persuade you to buy things you can’t afford and couldn’t use?
That’s a question that I sometimes pondered while I lay on the cushions I arranged on the floor to use as my bed for several months this past winter, listening to podcasts sponsored by Casper Mattresses. I listen to my favorite comedians describe the exquisite night sleep they get while enfolded in their new mattress, masterfully engineered to have just the right amount of sink and bounce for all bedroom activities. The cheapest Casper mattress, with the discount offered through my favorite podcast, would cost me two months’ worth of rent. And I might not be able to make rent this month. But it’s not like I was getting a lot of sleep anyway.
This is just a literary device. I’ll be fine. But if you like my writing and would like to help me spend more time on it, I’ve set up a Patreon you may feel free to contribute to.
When Vonnegut’s omniscient narrator is following the travels of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, he often digresses into synopses of Trout’s novels — either already written, or inspired by his observations during the story. In one, there is an alien planet under the influence of a particularly pervasive advertising campaign:
The eye-catching part of each ad was the statement of some sort of average — the average number of children, the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet… and so on. The ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or inferior to the majority, in this respect of that one — whatever the respect was for on that particular ad.
The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.
And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn’t just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again…
So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in every respect.
And then the earthling armored space ships came in and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.
I would like to take this moment to remind you that this book came out in 1973. Before the invention of the internet, and cookies, and targeted advertizing campaigns that track your internet activities in order to predict what ads will most effectively manipulate you.
Some research in cultivation theory investigates not the direct influences of media on behavior, but the much subtler influence it might have on what people consider “normal” in their society or their world. For instance, people who see a lot of news stories of violent crime might come to believe that violent crime is more common than it really is, which in turn could influence the decisions they make in their everyday lives (what neighborhoods they choose to visit, for instance). This can have ripple effects not only on them, but on everyone around them.
The Kilgore Trout novel about the hacked shazzbutter ads describes a deliberate attempt to influence a people’s beliefs about what is normal in their society, with the ultimate effect of undermining their confidence and making them vulnerable to attack. Interestingly, we don’t need a hostile alien conspiracy for that to happen in our own world. All you have to do is casually glance at the covers of the magazines in the check-out line to see “average” bodies that are distinctly above-average in almost every respect, despite decades of token efforts toward normalizing bodies that are more… well, normal.
In Breakfast of Champions, just a few pages after the summary of the shazzbutter plot, Vonnegut describes Dwayne’s late wife’s fear of having her picture taken. She “would crash down on her knees and protect her head with her arms, as though somebody was about to club her to death. It was a scary and pitiful thing to see.” Vonnegut says that his own mother had this same tendency, and that both of these women would later commit suicide.
He doesn’t outright blame our society’s unfair beauty standards for these madnesses shared by so many women. Like with all the rest of the madness described in this story, it takes a mixture of bad chemicals and bad ideas. The bad ideas can come from a magazine ad. The bad chemicals could come from somewhere else. In this way the ad gets to dodge the blame, despite its unmistakable role in the outcome.
I started writing this essay before a certain disease began to take over the globe, and that demolished my momentum. For weeks it sat, mostly-finished, in my computer, while the book sat, mostly-finished, in my bag. I had developed a habit of doing my reading and writing at cafes and diners, like Kilgore Trout during his trek across the world to meet Dwayne Hoover. But even if that habit hadn’t been interrupted by the wholesale closing-down of these places, I was in no fit state to continue. In the course of my personal life, this disease could not have struck at a worse time. I was unemployed and broke, on the verge of dropping out of school, and about to lose my home for the second time in six months. The next home I moved into is the least safe place I have ever lived, and that is where I am quarantined. Already suicidal, I began making specific plans to end my life, and almost carried them out.
I’m better now.
Word of honor, I am better now.
I’ve had to pause and re-assess not just my own lifestyle and material existence, but the state of the world economy and my place in it. We’ve all been living in a delicate tension between the capitalist forces that control the flow of resources and the limits of our workforce’s physiological needs, and now that tension has been thrown off by this pandemic. Nobody knows to what extent our lives and communities are going to be disrupted, or whether it will be possible (or preferable) to return to the way things were.
Breakfast of Champions also takes place in a world of such forces and limitations. A world of people with power and people with needs, and a vast chasm preventing them from fully seeing one another — until the balance is disrupted, and when it is, the results are catastrophic, even deadly. But there is also hope, or at least that’s what the folks who still believe in living tell me. Let’s see if we can find it.
As the climax of the story approaches, Vonnegut joins the cast of his novel, and attends the Arts Festival where he has arranged for Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout to meet. He has more power in this universe of his own creation than even the corporations and capitalists, the Rosewaters and their ilk, whose money made all this madness happen in the first place. Yet he, despite his power, was still lost in his own mental illness. He was not powerful enough to give himself hope.
He overhears a conversation between a novelist and an artist that gives him hope. He has, at this point, lost control over those characters; he no longer has the power to decide their fate as the author of their lives, because he no longer has the power to control his own mind, which controls them. And so, he is able to let them help him, without even knowing that he’s there. It’s one of the most moving and beautiful scenes in fiction that I’ve seen, and it’s very hard to describe, so I hope you read it someday and see what I mean.
But it’s worthwhile to point out, for the purposes of this essay, that Vonnegut’s revelation in this scene involves recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of other people, as people. Not as a collection of stereotypes and injustices and tragic circumstances. As people. More on this later.
When I reached my most recent peak of mental anguish, I told some of my friends that I was going to kill myself, and I meant it. I haven’t exactly decided against it, but I did have an experience that week that changed my mind a bit, so that I could think about living for a little while longer. It didn’t make anything better, but it made me feel better, and that was powerfully transformative for me.
What happened was I watched a YouTube video about eugenics in the movie Cars 2. I’ve never seen Cars 2, but I like watching movie critics talk about movies I haven’t seen. It’s fun for me. And this video turned out to be surprisingly comforting. I don’t know why, exactly. Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half wrote about having a similar epiphany after seeing a shriveled up kernel of corn under her fridge while crying on the kitchen floor:
If someone ever asks me “what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?” instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I’m going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I’m going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor… it was so alone… and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I’ll get the same, confused look. So maybe I’ll try to show them the piece of corn — to see if they get it. They won’t. Things will get even weirder.
Sometimes you just see something that fits into a blank spot in your brain and connects with things that were already there to create something new. We know it happens, and we have some ideas about why, but there are just so many ideas flying around at any given time that we can’t really predict which ones will matter, or what they will do to us.
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” Words that Kurt Vonnegut wrote on the tombstone of his character Kilgore Trout, and they are a good summation of Cultivation Theory. Our brains supply the chemicals, in response to the environments we live in and the genes we’re given by our parents. The ideas come from somewhere else. We don’t always get to decide where. They may come from a YouTube video about eugenics in a Disney movie. They may come from a shriveled kernel of corn under the fridge. They may come from a science fiction story that a lonely middle-aged man is taking way, way too personally. But they shape us, they feed us, they nurture us, to become who we ultimately will be.
Once we see this, we can choose to read stories that nurture us in healthy, productive ways, or we can choose to read stories that tell us that we’re alone, that life is meaningless, that nothing is real, and that other people aren’t worthy of our respect. Which we choose may determine who we will become, which in turn determines what kind of world we will ultimately live in.
In the climax of Breakfast of Champions, Dwayne Hoover reads the Kilgore Trout novel Now It Can Be Told, and mistakes it for a true story about himself. The book describes a world in which there are no real humans with free will except for the protagonist, and everyone else is lifeless, soulless machines built and programmed just to mess with him in various ways and see how he will react. Dwayne, who has felt supremely isolated and alienated from the world around him for a very long time, takes this idea and embraces it as the explanation for these feelings. And then, since he now believes the people around him are not people, and cannot feel pain, he goes on a violent rampage, injuring many. That’s the climax of the novel Breakfast of Champions. Dwayne finds the wrong answer to his deep existential questions, and it turns him into a monster.
What bothers me most about Dwayne’s new beliefs is that he believes he is acting freely. The story he read is ostensibly about free will, after all, and how he is the only person in the world who has it. But can one be said to have free will if they’re easily manipulated by misleading information? That’s what makes discussions of freedom so complicated. We may all agree that freedom is good, but to what extent is it even possible?
There’s a lot of talk about freedom these days. I have written about it before, always with an eye toward assessing its practical limitations as well as its idealistic virtues, and balancing our right for freedom against our need for just and functional communities.
But “freedom” is a really hard thing to talk about in a place and time like 21st Century America, for so many reasons. Before I started writing about it in a public forum like this, I was already thoroughly disillusioned with the conversation. On multiple occasions I had tried to explain how one individual’s freedoms could infringe on the freedoms of others, and been accused of not wanting freedom for anyone. On multiple occasions I had tried to talk about my own and others’ basic needs for safety and shelter and support, and been accused of wanting to give up my freedom to get those things. And when I have tried to talk about the myriad forces beyond my control that have forced me into various situations against my will, I have been accused of ignoring my own freedom to make choices that could, theoretically, have led me elsewhere — and thus my personal responsibility to make those choices.
In each of those conversations, I have been frustrated in communicating that these freedoms don’t exist in the way that so many of us would like to believe, and Dwayne’s reaction to learning of his supposed free will demonstrates better than I have before the irony of the situation. When people use their freedom to restrict others’ options, that is an overall loss of freedom, not a gain. When people lack the resources to sustain their lives and achieve their goals, that is a loss of freedom. When people use their freedom to make choices that lock them into restrictive circumstances, that’s a loss of freedom. You can’t have “free will” and “personal responsibility” at the same time, not when other people exist who also have free will.
And that’s what a lot of this boils down to: who has freedom, and who doesn’t? Because we can’t all be free all the time. A middle-class woman isn’t free to go to the salon when the stylists are free to stay home for their own safety. A man isn’t free to carry his assault rifle to the mall when the mall’s owners are free to make rules to protect their customers. I’m not free to walk openly through a town if that town’s residents are free to harass and assault me on the basis of my identity. And none of us are free to make our own choices of how to live our lives if we can be denied access to food, shelter, and medical care at the whims of those who might disagree with those choices. The only way to have absolute free will is for nobody else to exist with free will.
That’s what Dwayne ends up believing, and he still doesn’t act freely. He just does all the things that he’s been taught not to by the restrictive roles he’s known his whole life, because now he finally has an excuse to break them. He beats up his son, in defiance of his dead wife’s love for him. He hits women, acknowledging as he does so the taboo against it. He goes out specifically looking for black people to target, bragging about how he’d been nice to black people up to that point but revealing that he’d secretly never thought they were equal to whites. And then, when he is finally apprehended, he decides to use the most sacred freedom we hold in a democracy, freedom of speech, to shout random slogans he got from advertisements. Because we can only speak on ideas we have knowledge of, and these shallow notions and phrases and half-truths are all he has access to in that moment. He thinks he is most free when he’s bundled into a straightjacket, delusional and raving and destined for institutionalization.
There is something that feels very free about giving up on life. When you don’t care about what happens to yourself or anyone else anymore, you can go wild, break all the rules, act on any idiotic whim that floats through your brain, until inevitably you will be stopped. Because people who are actually paying attention to reality will notice that you’re endangering others, and they will protect one another. And where’s your freedom then?
I think we’re going to have to pay a bit more attention to what kinds if ideas we’re exposing our brains to, especially when our conditions are forcing us to depend more and more on media and less on our ability to look one another in the eye and see the humanity there directly. We need to read stories that let us see other people as people, not as machines. We need to start thinking less about how much freedom we have right now, and more about whether we can hold onto that freedom, and whether we should, as the world changes around us. I think we need to think more about what our media intends for us, whether it’s to inspire brand loyalty, to stoke rage against perceived enemies, or to lull us into illusions of harmlessness in times of great danger.
This conversation isn’t over. But it will be if we decide not to listen to one another.
Thank you for reading.
