Freedom and Society in O.N.A.N.

One thing that reading this section has made me think about more has been what David Foster Wallace might be trying to say about American society through his portrayl of O.N.A.N. I think that, ultimatly, the characters in Infinite Jest are living in a totalitarian sociey from which they have no freedom. Their society has become so consumed by addiction and people have come to behave in such surreal and irrational ways that they have no options for interaction with other human beings that are mentally non-traumatic, creating a viscious cycle in which this causes them to develop more of these mental problems and those problems just make them more addicted and, in their interaction with others, surreal and irrational. From reading the book, I get the idea that it would be impossible to stay sane living in it, and honestly that inability to remain sane, just like the inability of individuals not willing to accept great personal harm to remain free under a totalitarian system, is oppressive. By demonstrating that, at least in theory, a society whose political system is a liberal democracy and whose government respects human rights can still be unfree if that society itself it perverse enough to deny humans non-harmfull interaction, I think that D.F.W. shows how unfree American society could potentially become without our even noticing it, and that certainly is interesting.

On another note, considering how we refer to Infinite Jest as IJ so much, I just remembered that the IJ also happens to be a lake in the Netherlands north of Amsterdam that was transformed from the the Zuiderzee, an inlet of the North Sea, into a lake by Dutch land reclaimation efforts. Considering that land reclaimation has caused sea levels in the Netherlands to rise, and how some people now worry that it will not be possible to keep the land from sinking underwater in the long term, I wonder if, in light of the analogous "sinking" that society in O.N.A.N. is experiencing, the name of Infinite Jest could be a reference to the lake. It certainly is obscure, but it would be interesting if it were true.