Our Insecure Cultural Warriors
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blockspot.com
Culture War 2.0 is as inescapable as it is
obnoxious. Its loudest proponents, the Social
Justice Warriors, live off a drama that they create,
playing enlightened victim-activists fighting
micro-struggles against micro-aggressions in areas
most people have never even thought about.
The issues are ideological, but they're mainstreamed
by focusing on personal narratives. The
victim-activists are usually millennials from
wealthy families with useless degrees. It's a story
as old as radicalism, but in the dawn of the 21st
century, it's activism and culture war being
replayed as farce.
Culture War 2.0 politicizes narcissism and
insecurity. It obsessively masticates culture the
way that its political predecessors destroyed
people. Its target audience lives and thinks in
terms of premium cable shows. They are to it what
novels were to its 19th century counterparts.
Even its ideology is more grievance than theory. It
only cares about theory to the extent of parsing the
Victim Value Index and determining who has more or
less privilege, who ought to feel more guilty and
who ought to feel more victimized. This is ideology
as soap opera. Politics as a means of deciding who
gets to play what emotional role in a societal
drama.
Its political expressions exist in the space of the
personal narrative. In this tawdry post-Orwellian
future everyone will get their essay of victimhood
on Medium or ThoughtCatalog read for 15 minutes.
Their drama will, very temporarily, be a trending
topic. For a generation of overindulged children,
broadcasting their petty pains is the closest thing
their lives have to love and meaning.
1984's world was obsessively serious. Our 2015
social tyranny is absurdly trivial. It's a world
whose leaders is always looking for goofy photo ops
while he violates the last remaining shreds of the
law. Every crime is buried under a thousand
shrieking viral headlines that alternate between
fake empowerment and fake outrage.
We don't have an adult totalitarian state, because
we no longer have adults. Instead we have Lord of
the Flies and Mean Girls. Overgrown children advance
a totalitarian state out of spite and envy. Identity
politics is everything because tribalism is more
innate to children than it is to adults. Enemies
have to be punished for emotional validation.
Freedoms have to be eliminated out of insecurity.
The politicization of insecurity lets everyone be a
victim. Anyone can turn their feelings of shame or
ostracism into political awareness. Feelings not
only displace reason, they warp ideology around
themselves, so that ideology becomes a means of
emotional venting. Activism becomes catharsis.
Hating others becomes therapy. No one is cured, but
making things better was never the point.
Our emotionally unstable activist elites veer from
narcissism to insecurity. Their politics are
manic-depressive efforts at managing their emotions
by controlling others. They retreat to political
safe spaces, gnaw at each other and then emerge
forth to demand that the world be made safe for
their feelings.
The left always gets what it wants and is never
happy. The purpose of its idiot activism isn't
progress, but drama. Each achievement leaves behind
a sense of emptiness. It isn't about rights, it's
about conflict. It's not about giving to someone.
It's about taking from someone else.
Without the conflict and its accompanying
self-dramatization, there is only the emptiness.
The social justice warrior seeks to escape
insecurity by dramatizing its own victimhood all the
way over into narcissism. But such dramas need
participants. Politics is its means of manufacturing
that drama by finding antagonists. Without
antagonists, there is no drama. Without drama, there
is no sense of importance and the activists loses
what it hoped to gain, a sense of self.
Our emotionally insecure culture warriors other
themselves and then assemble an identity that makes
them the victim of some larger primal force, racism,
the patriarchy and privilege, when really they are
Rachel Dolezals, unstable types who manufacture
their victimhood out of a paranoid dislike of
people.
Paranoia is the political currency of the
emotionally unstable culture warrior who is always
certain that someone is looking at them the wrong
way, threatening them on social media or committing
some other microaggression against them.
There are people who can't hear a "good morning"
without seeing a conspiracy against them. In normal
life, they're diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics.
In political activism, they're just sensitive to
microaggressions.
The left has always valued oversensitivity because
neurotics are easy to convince of their own
victimhood. And career victims naturally dehumanize
those they consider to be their oppressors. As
neurosis has become culture, the only way to escape
accusations of privilege is to find your own
victimhood. And there's nothing like being forced to
develop insecurities to make you insecure.
Culture War 2.0 is culturally crazy. Its personal
dysfunction so entangled with politics that there is
no way to tell where one begins and the other ends.
It politicizes insecurity and narcissism for
campaigns that are indistinguishable from trolling.
It reduces every issue to personal unhappiness and
demands the abolition of traditional freedoms and
rights as the answer to that unhappiness.
Its demands are unanswerable because they are
personal. There is no solution to them except
sanity. And in a cultural conflict where insanity is
an asset, sanity is no answer. It's an accusation.
The truly paranoid see the world as hostile and are
driven to destroy it. Their crusade to find
happiness by making everyone else miserable can only
success halfway. They can never be happy, but they
can always make others miserable.