So here’s a question:
How much does any form of, uh, “identity-change euphoria” boil down to the joy of “I asked a bunch of people to do a weird thing for my sake and they actually did it instead of laughing at me or ignoring me?” How much does it boil down to the joy of “turns out that I am actually capable of wreaking noticeable large-scale changes in my own life?”
…I can theorize and speculate, but there’s a lot of relevant introspective knowledge here to which I have no access.
Rod Dreher:
Question for conservatives: If Go Fund Me were being used by a gay-rights plaintiff to raise money to fund his courtroom crusade against an institution, would you seek to have him deplatformed? I certainly would not.
However, I’m guessing few if any of us would object if Go Fund Me refused access to a neo-Nazi raising money for a white power rally.
Also Rod Dreher, from the very same article:
The key thing to do now is to create and sustain cryptocurrency “banks” that can be trusted not to punish people for their religious, moral, and political views.
…there may be something to that, but you’ve just made it perfectly clear that the list of people and institutions who could be trusted to do such a thing does not include you or anyone who thinks the way that you do.
I know a few people who are actually willing to stand for Not Institutionally Discriminating Between Beliefs and Positions, in a consistent and principled way. All of those people, as it happens, are either (a) singular weirdos with home-grown beliefs who don’t map well onto any established ideological faction, or (b) various flavors of “degenerate” progressive leftist. Make of that what you will.
I realize this is not helpful, or only marginally helpful, to otherwise privileged people who don’t fit for hardwired individual reasons (such as being autistic).
But social fit is such a complicated issue and it’s often one more case where identity can be more like a tapestry than a box.
It’s not always you.
I believed that it was me for a long, long time and the real issues were a number of intersecting class and social and cultural dynamics.
Maybe you’re an outsider, because you actually are an outsider. You don’t delusionally FEEL like an outsider (which is how I feel like my therapists treated my social anxiety), and even if you are wired differently than the norm that the school system and industrial culture are built around, you can *still* be excluded or overlooked for being an actual outsider.
And for me (with severe social anxiety and ADHD) it was hard to tease apart what was Society (which prescribes even who is *allowed* to be smart, ambitious, or creative) vs what was my neuro wiring.
“Maybe you’re an outsider, because you actually are an outsider. You don’t delusionally FEEL like an outsider”
This right here is a perfect encapsulation of why i hate the way it’s popular on Tumblr to go “lol hahah you still feel like an outsider? what gives dude you’re not 16 lmaoooooooooooooo”
Sometimes you feel like people are treating you as something alien because they are.
Heh. This phenomenon is, in part – although only in part – a cultural-transition thing, growing out of a particular set of circumstances taking place at a particular time.
The current cohort of adolescents grew up during a period when mainstream Western society was undergoing a massive revision to its canon of stigmatized cultural categories, to the extent that even kids on the playground were deeply affected by it. Things that would have been permanent social marks of Cain in the recent past – ranging from “being gay” to “being really into fantasy books with dragons” – were suddenly being actively valorized. Other stigmatized traits were newly protected by a revised anti-bullying ideology with different type cases. (It’s a lot harder to make fun of someone for being fat, these days, without marking yourself as a bad guy.)
The upshot is that you get a bunch of people who think that they have outsider-y traits, who consume lots of media telling them that in fact they’re surely very oppressed outsiders because they have those traits…but who have in fact never suffered any deleterious social consequences for it.
I would guess that this leads to some pretty weird ideas about what being an “outsider” actually means. It’ll probably become less of a thing once the dust settles and we have a more deeply-embedded sense of who’s in and who’s out, as a general matter.
I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:
It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.
Funny, I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis lately, and it’s your position that strikes me as monstrously impious.
So, to start with: you’re 100% correct about Lewisian Christianity being diametrically opposed to the thing at which I’m gesturing here. Lewis talks endlessly, in basically all his theological writing, about God being the wellspring of health and happiness and all-desirable-experiences in the world – and about godliness being the habit of aligning yourself with the natural laws and systems that will produce joy – and about wickedness specifically being a sort of perverse pride that drives people to cut off their noses to spite their faces, to reject their own welfare and fight for their own misery for (what amount to) stupid reasons.
(This is The Great Divorce in a nutshell: “Some people are literally so crazily egomaniacal that they would rather suffer forever than allow God to make them well, despite God’s infinite willingness to do that, and we should hold this against them rather than holding it against God.”)
And this is certainly the philosophical tradition within which the feelings of the tradcons are resonating. It’s the philosophical tradition that roots most modern Western Christianity with any pretensions to intellectual sophistication, as far as I can tell.
It strikes me as, well, impious. You can make of that whatever you like, I guess.
To some extent, it strikes me that way because of the faith tradition in which I was raised, and its attendant forms of casual chauvinism. Y’know: Lewisian thought is for lame casuals who have to be bribed with warm fuzzies in order to do their duty, those who truly honor their Lord spare no thought for their own well-being when they do so.
To a greater extent, it strikes me that way because of the epistemic contortions that Lewisian philosophy allows and demands. Everyone wants health and happiness and meaning. If your way of staking a claim to those things involves calling upon the alleged prime telos of the universe…well, there’s an enormous incentive to decide that the prime telos of the universe wants the same things that you independently want for other reasons. This taps into a lot of things that, from a secular intellectual perspective, I can’t help perceiving as wicked sins. It’s a really good way to blind yourself to the truths of reality, and indeed to your own psychology; it sends you down a spiral of ignorance. It is also a kind of defector’s move in the game-theoretic politics of human coexistence, in that it places your needs on a metaphysically higher plane than your opponents’ needs.
It’s very easy to tell which things are “natural,” as opposed to “unnatural.”
They’re the ones that happen.
What if the plausibility of wireheading above the level of sign-flipped depression is an illusion?
That is, we know that long-term drug use can damage the brain, and that it can be cripplingly addictive. What if the blissgasm pod just melts your brain as higher and higher stimulus levels are needed as the sections necessary for continued sapience atrophy away from lack of use?
In this scenario, you could still tile the galaxy with VR pods, but it would be necessary for them to simulate a wide range of experiences such that there was still a person inside.
…is this not the default scenario?
Like, my impression was that few people think that wireheading is a promising path towards improved human welfare, for precisely this reason.
I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:
It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.
Yup. Prosperity theology is wrong in so many ways. It’s selfish, it’s materialistic, and it has the point off religion ass-backwards: worshipping God is supposed to help you find happiness in what you have, not bring you more things to make you happy. I 100% agree with this analysis.
I appreciate the note of support, but for the sake of maintaining a clear argument rather than inviting readers to fight over confusions, it’s worth spelling out some things explicitly:
* The people about whom I’m being grumpy, here, are not “prosperity theologians” by any stretch of the imagination. They are almost exclusively Catholic or Orthodox. Most of them have enough knowledge and sophistication to know what doctrinal orthodoxy looks like, within their churches, and to care about it.
* My point – which may not align with your own views, of course – is definitely not that “worshiping God is supposed to help you find happiness in what you have.” It’s that worshiping God is not supposed to help you find happiness, period. It’s not done for your own benefit: not materially, not emotionally, not socially, not in any way. It’s something that you do for God. If you’re doing it right, it will probably just make you a little more annoyed with the world and a little more miserable with yourself, and that’s OK, you’re paying that personal price in order to do something that you think is right. The closest analogy I can offer, outside the realm of explicitly religious thought, is @nostalgebraist‘s concept of “Mundum.”
The tradcons often have stories about how they came to their faith because they despaired of the empty soulless hedonism that they found in the secular world (or whatever), and how they were looking for meaning and health and contentment in some transcendent place. To which the remaining religious sentiment in my heart replies: Why the fuck do you think it’s God’s job to give you meaning and health and contentment? You’re just as selfish and grasping as the guy who’s praying for a winning lottery ticket, you just have a classier sensibility underlying your self-obsessed greed.
But, like, wanting your religion to provide meaning and health and contentment is not actually identical to praying for a winning lottery ticket.
I will concede that the concept of cultural appropriation has any moral weight in the moment when the Woke Left decides to hand the word “Lesbian” back to its original users.
I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:
It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.
**********
I grew up as a Conservative Jew, on the observant/scholarly side of that movement. Which is to say: I was raised to honor my creator. Eventually I gave it up, through a process that basically amounted to tearing my heart out, because I could not reconcile my religion’s metaphysical assertions with the truth of the universe around me. (And, contrary to what some people will tell you, metaphysical doctrine does matter – or should – even if you’re Jewish.) But there were a number of years in there where I took it very, very seriously.
The thing that most people don’t realize about traditional Jewish observance is how impressively unrewarding it is. Worship has neither the aesthetic grandeur of high-church rite nor the personal emotional intensity of low-church faith; it consists mostly of mumbling your way through long sections of formulaic Hebrew at a breakneck pace, much too fast for the meaning of the words to really register with you, let alone with anyone else. The tunes, when there are tunes, are almost comically atonal and un-melodic, at least in old-timey Ashkenazi synagogues. All the constant rituals are finicky and arbitrary and inconvenient, as though they were carefully engineered to make you roll your eyes in annoyance rather than falling to your knees in awe. And everything comes together in a religious worldview, a day-to-day theology and psychology, that is intensely unsympathetic to its adherents. There’s no focus on heaven or on divine love or any of those warm-and-fuzzy things. There’s no sense that anyone up there gives a shit about your fucking feelings. The only outcome that you get promised for all your observance, apart from maybe some end-times messianic stuff, is that God will kick you around slightly more.
Of course, you learn to find glory and resonance in it anyway, if it’s what you grow up with and what you associate with the divine.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, inescapably and clearly: You are not doing this because you expect to get anything out of it. You’re not going to get anything out of it, bucko, except possibly as a second-or-third-order knock-on effect. It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to make you fulfilled, it’s not going to make your life easier. You’re doing this because it is commanded. You’re doing this to honor your creator.
He already fulfilled His end of the bargain: He created the world, and brought your ancestors out of Egypt. Your turn.
You learn to take pride in this. And justly so, I think. It’s a healthy and a virtuous attitude, except insofar as it’s unmoored from actual metaphysical truth. You don’t expect something out of your faith that it can’t provide. You’re not arrogant enough to think that your desires represent the cosmic good, or that the ruler of the universe is primarily invested in your personal narrative. You do the things because the things are good to do, because you’re committed to the proposition that they are the point.
(This may help to explain some of the problems I have with atheistic Jews who remain observant because, uh, they think they’re getting something out of it.)
**********
What I see amongst the tradcons is mostly the opposite.
They’re not in it to honor their creator – at least, they never ever talk about that. They’re mostly not even in it to achieve salvation. There’s precious little discussion of Heaven in all their writings.
Mostly, as far as I can tell, they’re in it because they want things. Worldly things. Many of them seem to have come to their particular denominations specifically because they were hoping to find a vendor for certain worldly things. They want the kind of family life, and the kind of society, that feels rightly ordered to them. They want to feel as though their lives and their struggles are meaningful.
And I sympathize with that. I really do. It’s OK to want things. It’s especially OK, as far as I’m concerned, to want meaning in your life; I am all about finding ways for people to live meaningfully, in a fashion that is touched by numinous glory. I’ll even go so far as to say that some of the tradcons’ object-level desires are widespread, and commendable, and that some of their ideas about how those desires might be fulfilled are more likely to do good in the world than not.
But – good God! The sheer unmitigated gall that it takes to make God Almighty into the mascot for your own particular brand of joy and fulfillment! The unfathomable hubris involved in saying that what He wants for the world is exactly the same as what you want for yourself!
I do not, and cannot, believe in the God of Abraham. But if He does in fact exist…well, I would think that this should all be about Him, not about you. Shut up and go pray.
Follower Counts
Many years ago, during the dawn of blogging, the earliest major players had little Sitemeter icons on the sidebar of their page. You could click on it to see how much traffic they received and where it came from. On your own blog, you could see exactly where your traffic came from. As a result, ambitious smaller bloggers would cater to (or pick fights with) larger bloggers in the hopes of more traffic. Was this transparency a good thing? Hard to say. It was all tied up in vestiges of early-Internet norms, so any translation to today is fraught.
Now the big bloggers have gone institutional, the sitemeters are gone and the closest thing we have to early ‘00s blogging is Tumblr. It’s non-professional, wildly demographically unrepresentative of the real world and basically a free-for-all. The difference is that not only are follower counts private, it seems like a nearly-unbreakable taboo to discuss them. The only time I’ve ever seen an actual follower count mentioned is on an aesthetic blog. Once. Sometimes, I’ll read something along the lines of “I don’t care if I lose followers, but I’m gonna say it: TERFs are bad!” But no real numbers talk beyond bravebating.
As someone who is on Tumblr but not really of Tumblr, I’ve gotta ask: how did this taboo develop? Is it different in the corners of Tumblr I don’t visit? Are people worried about becoming doxx targets if they get too big? Does the fact that nearly everyone here is pseudonymous change things?
Or was the Sitemeter culture of early blogging just an artifact of a time when it seemed plausible to one day make a living off writing the sort of stuff they were writing about?
I don’t know how big a deal the Sitemeter ever was, but:
To the extent that there’s been an actual shift, I suspect it mostly has to do with the way that online presence has become intertwined with everyday life – and, therefore, with general social status – in a way that it definitely wasn’t in the early 00s.
Your follower count is not, at this moment, a fun cute thing. Not for many people, anyway. It’s a marker of your success as a human being. Talking about it is like talking about how much money you make; it basically has to result in the conversation developing a power dynamic, one way or the other.
…or that’s my theory, anyway. This is speculation based on the cultural norms of people who are not actually the people with whom I regularly spend time.
forgive me, lord, for I have kinned