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A brief epilogue to my previous post about the cabal of Former Theatre Kids who appear to be running every significant Western government and international organization:
On Thursday, the official NATO Twitter account posted a thread in support of the Ukrainians which included this jaw-dropping statement:
The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.
Besides being yet another Theatre Kid shande far di goyim (Rod Dreher had us dead to rights with that line) in an era that has been full of them, I think this is a data point in favor of a pet theory I’ve had about progressives/post-Marxist culturists/“the woke” for a while.
When I see some fat black woman or horse-faced lesbian activist rail against how society “reifies hegemonic standards of beauty and body shape which disparately marginalize the bodies of subaltern identities” or whatever, I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)
If we’re getting deep into psychoanalysis, it seems at least plausible that for a certain personality type - highly neurotic (and thus liable to experience negative emotions acutely, leading to traumatic imprinting on experiences that non-neurotic people are likely to move on from with no issues), extremely creative and imaginative, great at constructing arguments and manipulating symbols - combined with some social/physical handicap which places them at the bottom of a local social/sexual status hierarchy, you get a perfect storm that leads to becoming trapped in a sort of arrested development - results in a failure to mature emotionally past that formative period, and a predisposition to escapism translating into political utopianism.
Now, presumably this is where someone like @FCfromSSC would jump in and dismiss my attempt to draw a clean through-line between psychology and ideology. Agency is key, and equipped with the right religious and cultural guidance, anyone with these baseline psychological traits and formative experiences can transcend them, becoming a normal and functioning member of society with a healthy worldview. In this telling, in pre-Enlightenment societies, either 1. this personality type basically didn’t exist at all, or 2. those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.
I am genuinely unsure whether or not I accept this telling! To hear psychology researcher Ed Dutton tell it, these “proto-woke” people or “spiteful mutants” were precisely the type of people primarily targeted by medieval witch hunts. I tend to intuitively favor the explanation that these people have always been a sliver of humanity; maybe that’s because it gives me psychological comfort to imagine that even in pre-literate warrior nomad societies, there were scrawny little guys like me, preoccupied all day long with stories of the gods and ancestral heroes while they were supposed to be sharpening their spears and hauling bags of cured meats. If it is true that the Enlightenment unleashed the full latent power of this sliver of the population, propelling us first to great heights but then succumbing to the poison pill at the heart of the project, then perhaps this offers a roadmap to reintegrating the “spiteful mutants” back into the fabric of healthy society by showing them both the benefits of giving them a day and the grave dangers of letting them monopolize power. Certainly at the very least they shouldn’t be running NATO’s Twitter account.
Have you heard of the Amish concept of Rumspringa? It's a traditional period when Amish youth "hop around" getting into a little bit of trouble, ordinary rules are suspended all together or only lightly enforced, after which the young Amish can choose to be baptized into the community as adults, when rules will be enforced.
That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.
In college if you're a bright kid, you can spend all night discussing philosophy or history with other bright kids, if you're the brightest you can hold a little court at the Algonquin in your dorm room; if you're a bright guy in your 30s, unless you're bright enough to have a substack no one cares except the other dorks on your message board. In college all I needed for a girl to think I was a romantic was a DVD of Midnight in Paris and a bottle of cheap wine; in my 30s well, I'm married anyway, but if I wanted to impress women it would take time, effort, money. And worst of all, if I wanted any of those things now, I would have to go find actual people. And finding actual people after college is harder for most people: as the quote ran around Twitter "Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours." When you're in college single women your age are everywhere, other pseudo intellectuals are everywhere, your friends are a short walk away.
You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented. There's room to be above average and feel extraordinary, do extraordinary things. In adult life, for most people, those opportunities are lacking.
In his excellent, and now both old and prescient, Coming Apart Murray argues that Upper and Lower class white Americans are becoming more and more stratified, with upper class Americans being more likely to preach left-wing tolerance while practicing traditional middle class morality; while lower class Americans are more likely to believe in solid family values while practicing dissolute and self-destructive lifestyles. His core thesis isn't as interesting to this argument as his theory that Upper Class/Blue Tribe/PMC Americans basically fail to practice what they preach: marriage is more common among white upper class college educated Blue Tribers than it is among working class white people, yet college is synonymous with hook-up culture and dissolution.
I propose that we can think of high school and college as a kind of Rumspringa in Blue Tribe culture, a period in which ordinary rules are suspended. You can't do the things you do in high school and college after you graduate, when you have to be a good and respectable member of the community. So of course the jealousies of high school and college run deep, run forever, scabs that keep getting torn off again and again. Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.
Correct me if I've got your wrong, but the compulsive rule followers are the people who want to overthrow society in this thesis?
I'm a little confused by what you're saying. Who wants to overthrow society and in what ways? What would overthrowing society constitute? I'm really just talking about why so many modern mass-psychoses seem to be rooted in school-age grudges.
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