A Plea: Don't Be That Person
The Fashionable Stance of Total Cynicism
There are levels to perception and to wisdom. A low one might be the oblivion of the complete dullard. You don’t have any grasp of anything that’s happening on the national or regional level and even the most basic principles of economics and sociology escape you. You don’t know much and you don’t even know how much you don’t know. This huge and abstract realm of human existence is altogether incomprehensible to you.
Somewhere above that is a kind of dutiful obedience. You understand enough to know society’s expectations and the basic rules of operation of institutions and the economy and you accept them without doubt or criticism. Naturally you are critical of those who oppose the rules, or don’t conform. The world is a simple place for you and all that’s required is to stay in line.
Higher, but not too much, is the Dunning-Krueger exemplar. Here you are a functional adult with a surface-level familiarity with the issues and debates of today. You have a deep grasp of some field (cosmetology, or air conditioner repair) and the idea that a person could spend a few days idly watching YouTube videos and gain a workable grasp of your field would be patently ridiculous. You’ve watched some videos online about virology and economics and you have very strong opinions in these areas. You’re pretty sure the professionals have it wrong. You understand the concept of expertise in general but you haven’t realized that fields of science and of technocratic social management are twenty times more voluminous and intricate than the fields of expertise you’re acquainted with. You wrongly think that these areas of study are simple enough (or that you’re brilliant enough) to have meaningful ideas to contribute based on a cursory dabbling.
Above that there’s a more aware level, where you grasp some of the challenges of our civilization and the flaws of our institutions. Here you can even be ideological, in certain directions. You now have options other than the preset expectations and incentives of society and you might even have a fairly deep understanding of certain social dynamics. However, you have accepted your ideology or worldview (whatever it is) totally and without criticism. You’re very naive and you’ve largely escaped contact with the brutality and suffering which afflicts the world. You recoil from violence (in any circumstances) and see everything in simplistic terms. Many well-educated young women seem to fall into this category (a lot of teachers in my experience, for some reason). This is also the level of the cult member. Many such people begin as brilliant and astute members of society but that kind of awareness entails psychological difficulty and anxiety (responsibility is a burden… even epistemological responsibility) so they trade their critical thinking skills for a comfortable reliance upon an outside source of authority and focus all of their credulity and adoration upon that person and idea. They subconsciously decide to drop a level of perception, or several. In return for ignorance and the tendency to be exploited, they receive the bliss and safety of the insulated and the dependent. People on this level are gentle and non-threatening pawns for whichever set of principles or whichever personality is directing their awareness.
Above that is the level of the ideologue: you have seen struggle and you understand it. You are intelligent (and usually educated) and you have an active and critical mind but you’ve switched it off (again, subconsciously) when it veers too close to dangerous subjects. This is the level of most college professors and journalists. They have been exposed to many different ideas but they move in circles where there are very well-defined incentives and certain ideas are simply not permitted without the risk of some real harm to status and reputation (or finances, or professional success, etc). They understand the history of racism but they will not discuss or even allow themselves to think about the level of racism in our society today or how it might be measured or described. “There is a high level of damaging modern American racism” their brain (guided by their social milieu) tells them, and they will not interrogate this idea. Confirmation bias cements the idea firmly in place. This isn’t a conclusion-it’s an axiom, a starting assumption which is more deeply rooted than most learned ideas or personal conclusions.
In our society, there are an increasing number of such axioms for these people to hold and not question (involving gender dysphoria and global warming and economic policy and the social landscape of America and history and immigration, etc.). These axioms make their worldviews rigid, but also riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Suppressing and addressing these folds and gaps requires a great deal of psychological energy and also creates negative emotions of anger and anxiety, which are then projected into their enemies. Liberals in the US today have significantly worse mental health than conservatives or moderates and are significantly less tolerant (in attitude) toward conservatives than conservatives are towards them. This is a major reason why.
There is a subset of the ideological level (described in the preceding paragraph): the privileged radical, or the comfortable cynic. These people are ideologically committed and have also made subconscious commitments to avoid examining certain ideas and biases. In a betrayal of its proper role the educational system has actually fostered in them this kind of internal self-censorship by stigmatizing and misrepresenting certain ideas and associating them with outcast notions, like white supremacy. These people are not deeply ideologically committed though. They haven’t been indoctrinated long enough or they’re too lazy or too dysfunctional or too complacent or too greedy to really get invested in a movement, even an empty and entirely online one like ‘Social Justice’. Instead, they see the world and their ideas as a series of negative formulations, and not just negative but superlatively negative. Ideas are often a kind of accessory to be displayed for them, rather than guidelines for human behavior. These people are perfectly acceptable for the Critical Theorists, for although they are not change agents themselves (they’re too passive and ineffectual to be agents of anything other than their own acquisition of sustenance and pleasure and attention) they are deeply critical of the status quo and they will not lift a finger to help it. They are pawns which have removed themselves from the chess board.
There is a ‘privileged radical/comfortable cynic’ position on almost every major historical idea or contemporary trend and debate in our society. It is usually derived from Critical Theorist precepts and is a simplistic and self-righteous little sibling to the Critical Theory stance which its closest to.
They can be identified with two basic characteristics: (1) they’re deeply, even absolutely, critical of some aspect of the status quo or the ‘haves’ as they see them. (2) They completely ignore any implications for the thinker’s own role or agency or lifestyle. It’s a strange combination: total and scathing judgement and support for radical change, along with a personal obsessions with comfort and a complete unwillingness to act or sacrifice.
I’m not sure how many young people in America this now describes but it’s a LOT. On my darker days I begin to think it might even be most.
Here are some examples of PR/CC archetypes, with a bit of detail for realism. Once you begin looking for them online you will see them EVERYWHERE:
The privileged and well-educated undergraduate who believes in a radical leveling of America’s institutions in order to facilitate racial justice (or something) and who also lied on their application and exaggerated their life’s struggles in order to be accepted to their alma mater. They are committed to a complete redistribution of privilege in theory while fighting to keep and gain as much privilege for themselves as possible. They’ll often have and exhibit these wildly discordant attitudes/tendencies for their entire lives.
The young person on social media who believes that capitalism is the root of the world’s ills. She is a dedicated socialist, in theory. she also shops a lot, works in a retail job, has ambitions of acceptance into an expensive private college and is writing these ideas on a platform, using a device, created by the most ruthless and dynamic capitalist forces in history. Every author she’s ever read wrote partly in order to make money and every musical artist she enjoys and every celebrity she follows (even the publicy socialist ones) are sophisticated products of a hypertrophied consumer capitalism. Obviously she could live on a commune as an adult, but even less extreme than that she could donate her surplus wealth to the poorer members of society and forego an empty office job in favor of honest, productive manual labor.. farm work perhaps. She doesn’t want to do that, though, because she much prefers the comfortable air conditioning and urban home afforded by capitalism and she really likes buying things, even silly or random things. Nevertheless, she is a strong advocate of socialist revolution.
The wealthy young professional who believes and tells others that the Earth is experiencing a climate crisis, and that there are far too many people on it. He is engaged to a beautiful young woman who wants children (as does he) once she’s scaled the heights of professional advancement. He lives in a beautiful, climate controlled home in Southern California which accounts the energy requirements equivalent to about 60 average residential units in Malawi, each year. His job takes him to the East coast and back about twice a month, so each typical month of his flying equals more than an entire year of driving for the average American automobile. He buys the best food and clothing and accessories he can afford and these account for emissions and climatological impacts which are equivalent to dozens of normal Indian citizens each year. His three children (when they are born and grow) will absorb his casual environmental radicalism and their environmental footprints will end up similar to his over their lifetimes. This family of 5 will cause more environmental impact than 300 typical Moroccans, which is more than 1,900 typical Afghans. This man and his family also supports a radical paring of the Earth’s population and a ‘net zero’ CO2 policy and often argues for these things at parties and online.
The young American mother who is deeply concerned with racial justice. She truly believes that she lives in a country saturated with white supremacy, a kind of 21st century apartheid state where the segregation and impoverishment of its black citizens (which is the result of systemic intent, or at least profound negligence). Even her young son’s school maintains this in several communiques sent to the parents each year. The school, incidentally, is Brentwood, an uber-exclusive and very expensive private K-12 institution in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The school has several retired police officers to provide constant daily security and she lives in a very wealthy gated community. Her child’s school and his academic prospects occupy a great deal of her money and her emotional energy. She would never send her child to a LASD public school. Her entire life is lived in a bubble of extreme socioeconomic privilege and the safety or her person and her property is maintained by expensive and efficient combinations of LAPD and armed private security. She also firmly believes that the modern trends of economically and racially segregated schools and neighborhoods are wrong and should be addressed and she supported the ‘defund the police’ grassroots movement in 2020.
The young feminist interior designer who is militant about the wage gap and the lack of young women in STEM fields. She believes that the US is a patriarchy, with aspects of rape culture, and considers the fact that their is a relative paucity of female engineers and mathematicians a clear indictment of society. She wants the immediate institution of quotas to force companies to develop and hire the many women and girls that she imagines are out their being harrassed or overlooked by a male-centered society. She has many female friends and three close ones. They virtually all believe this, to some extent, and they publicly advocate for the hiring of more female engineers and coders. None of them has any interest in these things. They all chose humanities or art/design-related fields in college. Bridge construction and computer languages and the operational logic of engines are subjects in which they have zero interest. They don’t really understand how these subject could interest anyone. They also believe that America’s deep-seated sexism is limiting its relative share of female mathematicians and engineers.
The PR/CC is passionate about issues but their memetic rot begins on a deeper of belief. Please keep in mind that they learned all of these ideas from educators and cultural critics: these are not independent formulations or based upon any personal observation or analysis. They are intensely suspicious of capitalism or meritocratic education or family roles, even though they have used and enjoyed the benefits of these social structures for their entire lives. Worst of all (to me): they condemn America and consider American history to be a shocking litany of horror, rather than what it-a flawed but well-constituted national story of a diverse and changing people which has consistently moved toward enlightened political practice while creating more wealth and freedom and culture than any other human society in history, by far.
Please don’t be that person.
