Y’know, @bambamramfan, I respect you. I think you’re one of the most insightful people on the Blue Hellsite. I especially love the posts where you get Lacanian. The Big Other might just be the most valuable concept for understanding politics in the age of the cultural panopticon.
But I stayed quiet when I shouldn’t have– when you made that introductory post to your philosophy that started be contrasting it with me and my supposed glibertarian ways.
I can stand being misinterpreted… but not when the interpretation is the exact opposite of what I meant.
I should have said all this months ago. And I know– I KNOW– that I’m gonna sound like a whiny little bitch, but here we go anyway.
I’m going to explain exactly what I meant when I said “compassion is a brand, and I’m not in its demographic”
The Blunt Version:
“MAN, THE POLITICIZATION OF THE SELF-HELP INDUSTRY SUCKS!”The Rambling and Excruciatingly Detailed Version:
It starts with this: social media forces us all into the limelight, it turns all online activity into spectacle, and gives everyone in the peanut gallery a direct link to you. Only a psychopath or a saint could remain unaffected by that. And here and now in the 21st century anglosphere, the loudest faction of the peanut gallery only cares about one thing: politics.
What I’m concerned with here is that happens when this process is inflicted on a certain kind of profession: the Guru. Those ersatz-shamanic figures who are supposed to guide the lost through the mists of modernity. Part preacher, part therapist, part “"philosopher”“, they tend to create miniature cults of personality around themselves, and the people in those cults have invested almost all their mental/spiritual well-being in the Guru’s words, largely in part because the poor bastards have nowhere else to go.
So. Culture War eats everything. What happens when Culture War eats a Guru?
And of course, this whole thing is absurd. you CAN’T mass produce spiritual healing. It’s like taking a hundred Beauties and a hundred The Beasts and trying to break all the curses by making them speed date.