All my life, all I’ve wanted is to struggle. To forge the glory of heroics. Sure, I stuck up for the bullied. Got in tussles on behalf of the harassed. It’s heroic stuff. But the white savior deal only satisfies so much. Everyone knows you can just take your ball and go home — when you’re the white savior. Too easy. I wanted my own Goliath. By age 10 I was furrowing my upper-middle class brow in hard-day’s-squint, pretending I’d “really lived”. By 19 I chose — EXPLICITLY CHOSE — to become a heroin addict. I spent all of my money to bask in the glory of poverty. Yet these were not enough. I wanted the grand crucible of becoming, that apogee of Heroics — extant, true oppression of my intrinsic being — to overcome.
I can assert that I have, at some point in my too-charmed life, wished I were queerer, blacker (yes, I mean black at all), more genuinely connected to some oppression, the rebellion of my individualism more certified, my differentiation more consequential, more extant, more essential.
It just wasn’t all that easy for a privileged white man to find a personal oppressor. Until Woke.
Yes, Woke. The recent champion of issues I have fundamentally supported — #MeToo, #BLM, #TransLivesMatter. But this is probably the only chance I’ll get to have an oppressor in my lifetime that I didn’t have to finagle myself. I may have to take it. I may have to get cancelled.
I’m not talking about getting Harvey Weinstein cancelled. I’m not talking about sociopathic and illegal acts of indecency. I’m not even talking about Jeffrey Toobin acts of indecency. I’m more talking Brett Weinstein cancelled. I’m really not even talking about “acts”, per se. I’m talking about…talking. Like…casually mentioning that “liberals” are verging on fascism (nothing sends us lefties into more of a fascistic frenzy). Not crime-crimes. Thought crimes.
I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I shouldn’t be telling you what an awful, awful, awfully wonderful plague cancel culture is …for intellectuals! How romanticized the spectre of cancellation has become for us. I shouldn’t be outing such furtive fun. Well, not fun, exactly. It’s not fun to be doxxed, fired, dragged thru the proverbial mud (emphasis on proverbial). No. It promises something far more rewarding than fun: Immortality.
I’’ll explain.
SHORTCUTS TO THE IMMORTAL
Per multiple Norse myths, if a Viking was dying of natural causes he would cut himself on his deathbed to fool Hel, the goddess of death, into thinking he had died in battle instead. No death-by-battle, no Valhalla, no immortality.
The Norse kept it Marvel. The Greeks got more granular. Homer rightly ties the hero’s immortality to fame:
Per the Odyssey (xxiv 93–94):
But when he (Achilles) died, the songs did not leave him,
but the Heliconian Maidens (Muses) stood by his funeral pyre and his funeral mound,
and they poured forth a thrênos (song) that is very renowned.
And so the gods decided
to hand over the worthy man, dead as he was, to the songs of the goddesses.
Here Achilles’ reward of posthumous immortality is mediated through song. Not just any song — a song “that is very renowned”. A famous song. If the muses stop singing his songs, his immortality evaporates. No fame, no name. Not just dead, dead dead. For the Greeks (the word “hero” is theirs, after all), the reward for death on the battlefield was immortality — an immortality entirely mediated by fame.
In today’s wholly mediated world, the medium is the battlefield.
Today’s hero doesn’t need Grecian muses to commit their heroics to “song”. Today’s heroes battle within the medium. Glory is measured not by bodies slain, but by attention captured. The sword-cum-selfie stick wags in the heat of the attentional war. Twitter, TV, Tik Tok, Facebook, You Tube, Clubhouse…Substack? These mediums — these attentional battlefields — confer a purpose that salivates the lips of any poor ego thirsty for immunity from its own oblivion.
Trump vs AOC. Weinstein vs Bragg. Eminem vs Snoop. Me vs Traffic.
Ready…
Record…
FIGHT!
GLADIATORS OF ANXI{ETY
Sun Tzu:
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.
So if I am going to jump into this fight…just how dangerous is cancel culture? Because I want to be prepared. Hit the mental gym. Prep my youtube missives.
- It’s non-lethal and it generally focuses itself on the affluent. This makes it basically 100% survivable. (So far, so good.)
- It’s an implementation of weaponized status anxiety — aka ostracism. (That’s called high school — I can handle this.)
- The existence of the internet makes cancel culture an exponentially more mobbish strain of ostracism than anything before it.
Fair enough. A little history on Ostracism.
The word “Ostracism” comes from Ostraka — the beady-eyed, seed-shaped pottery shards Ancient Greek citizens used to cast their votes with — to ostracize individuals from Greek life. How many votes did they require to ostracize a single person? 6000 votes. Six thousand. Compare that to today’s arbiter of cancellation, Twitter — that’s 6000 retweets. Ancient virality. AnteTwitter.
Oh — and if you were ostracized in Ancient Greece and you returned — you were put to death. That feels relevant.
Meanwhile, England was banishing so many people that by the 19th century it managed to create a whole country of banished people. That country is called Australia.
And to where are today’s victims of cancel culture banished? Not to a literal burning stake. Not to an inhospitable outback. Certainly not to Mars (that’s for the elites). No. To Clubhouse. To YouTube. To Substack. To the fucking Thunderdome. To become heroes of the attentional war.
That’s it. I think I want in.
LAME CORE
A joke.
Me: How many intellectual dissidents does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
You: …..?
Me: What, you don’t know?
…Last night, within one of the attentional battlefields of heroics (Clubhouse, the audio-only social radio app), I stumbled directly into a virtual room entitled How To Destroy The Media. How rebellious! By the time I entered, an erstwhile New-York-Times-sucks fest had turned into three calls to action:
- Celebrate the “cancelled” person as a hero to shift the narrative.
- Establish “cancelled funds” for cancelled talent to give the designation economic advantage.
- Fund “un-cancellable” social media platforms.
Giddily, the moderator (also a fellow Substacker, tho one I’ve never read), told all 400+ listeners “Just so you know, if you’re in this room, you’re pre-cancelled! Hahaha! Get ready. Friday, your boss will call you in to fire you for subversion…”
Everyone on the virtual stage un-muted and giddily laughed along. Like teenagers who just planned their first hedonistic fuck-you-dad weekend, they were part of something rebellious now. They all felt a rush of… what’s that word…Cool. You could practically hear them all rushing to their closets to grab their “Che” shirts. (Che was a techno libertarian, right?)
Lame becomes cool. I’m not just talking about the return of mom jeans or Oakleys. I mean anything lame becomes fertile grounds.
Even racism (yes, racism is an emergent property of economic predation, but that does not negate it).
Take this excerpt from Neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer (which, of course, advertises itself as “The Most Censored Publication in History”) just after the Charlottesville riots:
“To those of you in Charlottesville, go out and enjoy yourselves.
If you’re at a bar in a group, random girls will want to have sex with you. Because you’re the bad boys. The ultimate enemy of the state. Every girl on the planet wants your dick now.”
Small Dick Energy. But a small-dick bit true.
Look, if you don’t understand that the confederate “rebel” flag is “cool” to white supremacists precisely because the rest of the country hates it — then you need to put down the NPR for a second and smell the moonshine. Humans look for belonging. When you combine belonging with struggle, a higher order of belonging emerges:
The struggle cluster.
STRUGGLE CLUSTERS
My mom recently showed me the first story I had written as a kid. I was maybe 6 years old. In greedy number 2 pencil it began:
Once there was a boy who had a crew. He also knew kung-fu.
Not only did I always want struggle — I wanted a crew (and apparently to know kung-fu). Little did I know then the depth of the relationship between struggle and crews — or that identifying a shared external threat so readily facilitates belonging.
Of course, most oppressions are extant, vile, too-real things. Hells that swarm the newly born. Enslavement, plagues, famine. Nothing anyone would hope for themselves. Humanity has had no choice but to struggle against such things — and glorification of the struggles against them does little to lessen the generational damage they cause.
Still, the most reliable way to form a lasting “cluster” of people has been to identify a common external oppression — whether severe or perceived. Struggle clusters that have endured severe oppressions exemplify the most bonded groupings. Post-Holocaust Jews. Black Americans. Of course, none of us would wish enslavement or decimation upon ourselves. But we might wish softer, more convenient struggles, to belong us more meaningfully to a cluster than we otherwise might.
Take patriotic nations. When a patriotic nation exhausts its supply of more severe oppressors, spontaneous “boogeymen” are enlisted to take their place. This keeps a nation fervently clustered beneath the rhetoric of freedom. The United States is a master of enlisting such boogeyman when severe oppressors are running thin: Iran’s Mossadegh, Guatemala’s Arbenz, Ho Chi Minh, Hugo Chavez. “WMD’s”. None posed any threat. One didn’t even exist.
Take the prophets of Cool. “Teenagers”. The term didn’t even exist until 1944, when “adolescents” finally began rebelling against sexually and socially repressive norms. It wasn’t slavery or Hitler, but it would do the trick anyhow. Suddenly, they were their own struggle cluster. They were teenagers. Teenagers — and their interminable plight against authority — exemplify the ideal David-Goliath relationship — one that never exhausts itself of non-lethal oppressions to choose from.
Perhaps no film more earnestly summarizes this thirst for an oppressor than 1953’s The Wild Ones. Marlon Brando plays “Johnny”, the leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, interloping in some ghosted Americana. He’s surly, nasty rude. Leather-daddy outfit and all. Small-town Mildred asks:
“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
“Whadda you got?” Johnny replies, dead eyed.
As Brando delivers this line it becomes understood that anything — anything — will do.
CONVENIENT HAUNTOLOGY
It is perhaps the greatest testament to our progress against the more brutal oppressors that the privileged now have the luxury to embrace (and even seek out) less brutal ones.
Of course, admitting as much would diminish the heroics involved. So, we have a nifty way to make sure we never have to: If our oppressor seems less overt, we may simply assert that the majority of its horrors have become covert. Systems haunted by the ghosts of oppressions past. You may not see my oppression — but its there.
This is the big complaint of the Anti-Woke intellectual: The covert (systemic) oppressions Woke is concerned with are not falsifiable. In other words, just because I can’t disprove that “pink dragons exist somewhere in the universe” it doesn’t mean that they do exist.
Similarly, the Anti-Woke intellectual views “institutional bias” as a pink dragon: A bunch of admittedly racist videos favored by algorithms of rage are hijacking our limbic systems and turning us Woke without the lucidity of data. And so the Anti-Woke intellectual asks: how do you know something like systemic racism even exists!?*
(*Actually its pretty easy to prove systemic racism exists: redlining and comparative conviction rates do the trick. But I’m still considering being heroically Anti-Woke here — so forget I said anything!)
Thus the “woke mob”, who, for instance, tend to think binary pronouns are a covert conspiracy by patriarchy, are deemed patently irrational peddlers of phantasms. We intellectuals, on the other hand, are the rational ones, you see.
…Until, that is, we want a covert oppressor for our own heroics. Then, suddenly, the sky’s the limit.
Jordan Hall’s popular “The Blue Church” essay, for instance, handily illustrates how social media has made it difficult for the corporate state to control the popular narrative, but then, in story-book whimsy, gives the corporate state a lifetime designation of “Blue” (progressive). This not only forfeits a proper analysis of the corporate state by negating its agnostic culture-war opportunism, but perpetuates the very culture-war mythos that provides cover for its more fundamentally oppressive actions to begin with — namely economic and environmental predation. (Which is precisely why its “color” oscillates, Blue to Red, The New Deal to McCarthyism, etc.).
Such suspensions of reason abound. Anti-Woke intellectuals think Covid masks are part of a deep state plot. Jordan Peterson thinks non-binary pronouns are a totalitarian conspiracy to emasculate the species — conducted by postmodernism itself! (How’s that for a pink dragon!) Indeed, the measured intellectual falls rather easily for the immeasurable convenience of covert oppressions — when it serves us to.
But nowhere is covert oppression more alleged than by we progressives. We “progressives”, who have tasked ourselves with making progress against oppressions, are curiously loathe to admit we have ever progressed at all! Yes, for to admit we have progressed makes us…less…progressive! And so we deny progress itself — in order to progress more ardently.
We want the odds to at least seem interminably, woefully, awfully stacked against us. You don’t have to admit it. I’m admitting it for us.
THE WORSE THE BRAVER
The worse the odds, the more fame, the better. Kicking off this tradition some time around 1000 CE for the English was the epic poem of Beowulf.
Each of us must accept the end of life here in this world — so we must work while we can to earn fame before death.
Beowulf — much like American children, — prioritizes fame above all else. But while Achilles went off to fight a winnable war, Beowulf marches into utterly certain death against a dragon. He slays it — but not before he is mortally wounded.
Extra hero points.
Bravery has since come to be predicated entirely on bad odds. So much so that heroics are permanenced into the quilt of Chronos especially in failure. The more certain the death one enters, the more “impossible” the “mission”, the greater the hero. Yes, heroes who die to win the battle. But even more, heroes who die and lose the battle.
How many Texans have proudly cried out “Remember The Alamo!” How many Mexicans have thought to themselves “Um…si, yo recuerdo lo”…? Every last Texan soldier was killed there. How does it reason to proudly remind the world of your most morbidly epic defeat?
Because the more insurmountable the oppressor, the bigger the hero. The Battle of Thermopylae. The Battle of Gaixia. This all might be history we’d forget — but for our mediums of fame. Fireside stories. Written words. Songs. Film:
Braveheart. Rambo (all of them). Lawrence of Arabia. Glory. Lord of The Rings. Star Wars. Avengers (all of them). Mission Impossible. 300. Die Hard (all of them) Saving Private Ryan. The Wild Bunch. V For Vendetta. The Matrix. Every cowboy movie ever. Rocky. It. Never. Ends. We are fucking obsessed with such asymmetrical efforts. The greater the asymmetry, the more immortalized the flesh.
And so, in all our mundanity, whatever we find unpleasant we call “the worst”. We elevate “traffic” to “the worst”, so that we can “battle” it. Of course, we never can totally beat traffic — which is part of what makes “battling traffic” so great. Extra-heroism.
LOOSE REFRIGERATORS
At this point I’v probably blown it. I’ve revealed too much. Besides, too many are already Anti-Woke already. Every “cool” intellectual has some edgy quip about it. In a couple of months it will have lost its cache. I was too late. Anyhow.
You know what’s been missing from this piece? Some earnest naivety wrapped in entropic metaphor. Let’s finish this.
In 1957, Leon Festinger identified our displeasure at holding two contradicting thoughts in our minds at once. This phenomenon is known as cognitive dissonance. As a result, we tend to avoid contradictory thoughts in order to homogenize our identities at the expense of being more completely informed. We don’t like confusion.
Our current capacity for cognitive harmonics (a practice I’m developing to improve toleration of cognitive dissonance) is, for now, laughable. We need to improve on that. For instance:
Anti-Woke is fighting for freedom of expression. Woke is fighting for social justice.
Is it me or do both sound good? Could Woke and Anti-Woke arrange to get along — as contradictions? Why not. Contradictions, after all, are precisely how homeostasis is achieved and life on earth is maintained.
In general, though, homeostasis is a rather fascist program. Take our bodies. Our ideal temperature is set to about 98 degrees. The moment our bodies rise over 99 degrees, we begin to produce sweat to cool back down. That’s not a lot of room to get weird within. In the context of culture, we want to build in some tolerance. Enough disturbances of the equilibrium that we are vitally alive, but not so many disturbances that we are constantly dead. Something that isn’t utopian (no tolerance), but isn’t dystopian (infinite tolerance). We might call the tolerant ideal protopian. A realist’s paradise. And so, towards a protopia, I propose a new homeostatic model:
The loose refrigerator. (Or is “casual fridge” better?)
Imagine a refrigerator full of ideas that wish to be preserved on an inhospitable alien planet called Twitter. The planet Twitter experiences wild temperature swings caused by “tweet storms”. Some storms last just a few minutes, but if the storm sticks around for longer, it generally means the storm will hang around for a few months. Such fluctuations would strain any homeostatic system. But this is no ordinary refrigerator — it was designed especially for life on Twitter.
Instead of having its sensor (thermometer) only set to a specific number (tight relationship), this fridge has its ideal homeostatic temperature set to a range of numbers evenly distributed around its ideal number. Storms on Twitter would have to be severe or last for a while for the refrigerator to spend energy on corrections. This ensures energy is not wasted on unnecessarily, averting overcorrection.
In systems where high dynamism and plurality (variation) are intrinsic — systems like planet Twitter’s atmosphere (or systems like multicultural life) — tolerance is required. Not simply required to maintain the dynamism, but required to survive it.
So, instead of constantly reacting to every modulation of weather, ruining the ideas it contains, frosting and heating, throwing them from anemia to bloat and back again, the loose refrigerator factors for tolerance as a means to efficiency.
And what is efficiency a means to?
More energy.
More energy to be even BIGGER HEROES against even bigger, more fundamental Goliaths.
After all, Cultural wars distract us from the larger, fundamental wars. The more we satisfy our desire to be cool heroes within the cultural layer of reality, the more bad actors function with impunity at the fundamental level: economic predation and environmental extraction.
Take Coca Cola. No company is more applauded for being a beacon of Woke principles. So Woke, their diversity training included a Robin DiAngelo video on “how to be less white”. That’s at the cultural layer. Yet no company operates less ethically at the fundamental level. Funding bunk research to shift blame in what can only be called an epidemic of diabetes. Killing union organizers in Columbia. Creating drought and pollution in India:
“Drinking Coke is like drinking farmer’s blood in India,” said protest organizer Nandlal Master.
“But they have interracial couples in their commercials!” Yes. It’s called wokewashing. And while promoting inclusivity is vitally important, it should not satisfy our desire for heroics.
It’s just that we only have so much heroic energy to spend. And that’s why we need to be more like loose refrigerators.
The loose fridge increases tolerance of both Woke and Anti-Woke not to become a lousy fridge — one that allows tyrannical forces to run rampant and spoil us into bystanders — but as a means of increasing its own energy supply precisely to slay the bigger dragons.
Given that humanity is rapidly approaching genuine existential peril on multiple fronts, it would be inordinately more efficient and braver to re-prioritize our dragons according to their ability to damage us — and to shepherd our energies accordingly.
Fossil fuel emissions, nuclear arms, toxic oceans, unbound income inequality, deforestation, justice system reform, international “third world” usury, two-party systems, militarized policing, indigenous predation, Citizens United, corporate tax loopholes, speculative real estate, Monsanto, corporate personhood, CocaCola, deep fakes, child trafficking, data-sharing, Facebook, Google, CIA interventions in democratically elected countries, etc..
Sure, if you’re a privileged thing considering your heroic options, these dragons may not make you feel edgy or cool or sexy to slay. They might not make you feel like you belong to a crew. They may not even oppress you.
…But then again, maybe it is time to settle for just being a “savior”, after all.
THE END
