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Notes -
Collectivization of Suffering
Disclaimer: This might be better for the Fun Thread, as there's no deep point here, just an observation.
I've become aware of a vibe among my circle of professional peers: collectivization of suffering.
Look, for example, at this comment to an article about decreasing worker productivity on hackernews, a news aggregator site that's popular among techies, especially US ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468735
When did it become popular to upload your emotions to a shared cloud? How does that even work? Like, when I eat a donut or stub my toe, does the collective feel a pang of pleasure or pain? This commenter and others in that thread bring up war, the pandemic, social upheavals, etc. It's like they're trying to say that these things affect them deeply... despite 99.99% of them being completely uninvolved. It sounds... preposterous: that most likely a tech worker that's most likely situated in the US of A is somehow suffering as much as a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas or a woman protester in Iran.
This reminds me of a great collectivist, Hegel, who picked up Rousseau's idea of the national spirit, and molded it around the idea of the state. People who declaim being part of a great collectivized suffering sound to me like folks that are yearning to become ants in a great colony, extensions of a single organism, like what fingers are to a person.
I worry that people like this are ripe for exploitation. They just need an ideology to forge them into something violent--the poster writes as much: "I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval".
Look at this Politico piece about the rift in the Democratic Party between the young(ish) people pushing for the left agenda:
And of course it makes him sound insufferable, pompous, and up his own backside (the piece does some lovely stiletto in the back moments like this throughout).
These people do have privilege, which they have learned is bad. They are uneasily aware that they are The Enemy, as all their political thinking has informed them they must be, but they personally don't feel like The Enemy - they're not racist or sexist or transphobic! But they have both a privileged position, according to the Oppression Totem Pole, and they can't do anything about it - activism is all very well, but they're not in a position to make the decisions that lead to real change, because they don't have political or financial clout.
But what they can do, in order to relieve this sense of pressure about being part of the problem but not part of the solution, is to participate in it. They are suffering too! They are thinking about poverty and injustice and feeling bad! They share all this to reassure each other, and be reassured, that they are in fact not the bad guys, they're one of the good ones.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
For many, I suspect there's also an element of selling out.
Nerd culture, especially the US flavor, has a strong countercultural streak to it. By talking about these topics, signaling support, and wearing a hoodie, it's probably possible to mask (from yourself) the fact that you're making a boatload of money, writing design documents, and talking about KPIs, quarterly goals, and securing wins.
That doesn't quite work... Counter cultural nerds were among the first victims of privilege-checkers. Even now, if a nerd even so much as mumbles "I didn't like that recent MegaCorp adaptation of Nerd Franchise" they get smeared as everything from Nazi to transphobe.
What if these nerds are not the Eric S. Raymond/Richard Stallman type, the initial bazaar dwellers, but the new crop of folks that entered the culture post-DomCom crash? The pragmatic ones who love the counter cultural aesthetic but just want a safe, cool job?
They can stop calling themselves nerds, and get off my lawn!
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It is our fate to live in an age where this is how journalists write, if you give them half a chance.
Harlequin5942 said, taking a puff from his 1962 Cuban cigar.
How the fuck did thinkers and writers this awful wind up the professional caste of writers?
Reminds me of the popes who owned brothels... institutions actively selecting for the worst possible candidate.
I hope some crazed video essayist literally devours him... not figuratively. Literally. Let one instant in his life be poetic
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Oh, they all write like that since the New Journalism, because it's human interest donchaknow, it makes it bright and newsy and relatable and gives people a hook to emotionally attach to the story.
Ordinarily this annoys me, because I want "just the facts, ma'am" and I don't care if blonde 42 year old Doris was sipping her morning coffee as she looked out her kitchen window and saw the car crash, I want to know "there was a car crash? where?"
But in this case it doesn't matter, since it's not reporting as such, it's a colour piece about a bunch of insufferable youngish leftyish Democrats chewing one another's faces off over who gets to steer the party, vaguely realising that if they want to win seats they need to have policies that appeal to normal people, and tripping over themselves not to use the word "populist" since they have succeeded in making that a dirty word, but also realising that damn it, they need to be populist.
So the pretentious twats in both camps being described as sipping their cocktails as they have their 'happy hour' parties and watch and rewatch videos of old election debates are perfectly suited for this style. In this case, I do want to know if they look like 'inflated eight year olds' (oooh, that one was sharp) and what kind of nonsense they indulge in, thinking this makes them cool and mysterious when it just makes them look like prats to the adults in the room.
I mean, a guy who can say with a straight face that "hungry kids are counting on us" should be mocked soundly, roundly and often by having someone write in excruciating detail what his sad little drinking group are like as they fool themselves that they matter, they're relevant, hey AOC swung by one of our dos a couple years back!
The photos, oh my God the photos. They look exactly as you imagine they'd look.
Imagine being a Democratic party operative who has worked in politics for donkey's years, and this twenty year old infant strolls in wearing a black T-shirt and saying nothing because he wants to look cool. Do you, grown-up politics person, think "Wow I should let myself be said and led by this wunderkind" or do you go "Holy crap, is this what the party has come to? Okay, we'll let the nerds do the number-crunching in the back while we do the real work of the campaign"?
Imagine being so clueless you take the advice of people around you to wear black and say nothing, you'll be cool and mysterious, you'll have that rock-star vibe (meanwhile, to anyone over the age of thirty, it's abundantly clear you only started shaving two years ago).
The black t-shirt, eh whatever, but you've got to admit that "say nothing" is powerfully good advice in context. "Mouth shut, ears open" is something every novice usually doesn't hear enough.
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Good points. Perhaps by accident, it's useful information in this article, rather than just a thin sickly familiar in the form of Hunter S. Thompson.
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I couldn't tell if this article was supposed to be a hit piece, and if so which side it was trying to hit.
For once, I enjoyed a Politico piece, because it's pretty clear the writer was fed-up with both sets of pretentious wannabes. The writer is "David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications."
So he's older than this bunch of 20-30 year olds, I think maybe in his mid-forties, and he's probably been around long enough to no longer be impressed by this kind of guff.
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If everybody was hooked up with Neuralink and forced to literally feel the collective suffering of humanity, it would result in people with chronic pain all getting murdered (as painlessly as possible.)
Or as we call it in the dystopian future, banned for spamming.
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This is interesting because it seems to turn the notion of the disenfranchised and down and out being most tempted by a potentially dangerous nationalist spirit on its head. Nay, it's employed professionals? In this case in tech.
It's just a bunch of pretty well off people trying to signal that they're not in league with the "evil" well off people.
As I mentioned before, these are my coworkers. Yet, if I were to believe many of them literally, they're simple, humble, working-class folk who are just as fed up with "the system" as the everyman. Thus, they're part of the collective suffering, because unlike the evil well off people, they're not doing cocaine off of sex workers' genitals on a yacht, and so it's only natural that once the promised revolution comes, they will be part of the proletariat, helping overthrow the bourgeoisie.
Eh, snide remarks aside, I'm astonished by the jaw-dropping power of the meme that Marx and Engels gave birth to. It's amazing how it splices itself into feelings of compassion and goodwill and proceeds to corrupt the victim.
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I think these people truly are suffering but do not have the vocabulary or introspection to determine the cause. My relative would have you believe that every bad emotion they felt from 2016 to 2021 was caused by Donald Trump, and since 2022 the cause is Vladimir Putin. Most of his complaining is about these two. But I know him and I know that he’s actually upset about aging, a feeling of lack of control, and a decayed sense of community. These external events become symbols of internal disruptions.
Perhaps this is asking too much, everyone being Internet strangers and all, but how do you spend time with your relative? Do you approach them with compassion? With persuasion? Or do you just accept them as they are, right now, in their bad moment?
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But they could be feeling bad because of Trump/Putin! If you think about something you've decided is bad and should make you feel bad constantly, you're gonna feel bad! Even subconsciously, you'll start depressing yourself or teaching yourself to obsess over the "bad" thing until you've turned your own psyche away from your immediate experiences and towards this external thing (or, worse, your internal interpretation of the external thing, which you've already taught to catastrophize).
Is there a name for this?
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I think the "suffering as much as" is an exageration, and one the comment you quote doesn't say, but I don't think it's odd that people suffer, to some extent, when they hear about others suffering.
Speaking for myself, hearing about the suffering of others can definitely have an impact on my mood. I can get outraged when hearing about injustices that don't effect me personally. I could feel sad when hearing that something bad has happened to someone else even if I don't know them personally. Contemplating all the suffering and injustice happening the world over and the remote possibility of alleviating it can be a profoundly depressing and draining experience. This is exacerbated by the fact that I'm plugged into an information ecosystem that will surface these kinds of facts to me the world over.
To the extent other minds are like mine I find the comment you link relatable.
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