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I Wonder What He Thinks of Me?
Everybody needs an identity. Something we can identify with, and be comfortable with. In small towns, it’s often what town you live in, which family you belong to, which church you attend, what sport you play, what you do for a living, or things like that. If you were to hang around the local Walmart or something, a lot of people would look the same to you – they dress similarly, and they don’t seem to feel the need to intentionally separate themselves from others with the way they dress or something. Perhaps because they’re sufficiently comfortable with who they are that they make little effort to change it or hide it from others.
My daughter is a scholarship athlete at Georgetown, so I’m going to DC a lot to watch her play these days. I thought it would be fun, to see the complex mix of cultures and backgrounds that make up the diverse population of such a cosmopolitan city. And in a way, it is interesting, but not the way I expected. You’ve got the rich white men in Priuses, and the rich white men on bicycles wearing silly outfits (Spandex should be illegal for anyone over 25 years old), and the rich white gay men wearing rainbow patches on their backpacks, and the rich white men driving Bentleys, and the rich white men wearing old brown T-shirts and worn-out cargo shorts, and the rich white men with laptop backpacks and electric scooters, and the rich white men with beards and flannel shirts, and the rich white men wearing Hawaiian shirts and pork pie hats, and so on and so forth. The vast majority of these people would look incredibly out of place in nearly any small town in America.
You might think that such a lily-white, insanely wealthy place like Georgetown was disturbed by their lack of diversity, so they tried to invent their own, as best they could. Safe diversity. Without any, you know, actual diversity. But I don’t think that’s it. I think that many Americans have been taught to be ashamed of their true identity. Ashamed of their skin color, their beliefs, and their country. Leftists work hard at accomplishing this. They suffer from it themselves (Barack Obama, Prince Harry, and my liberal nephew all called their grandmothers racist), but they also work at ensuring that everyone suffers from it as well. So in Georgetown, Brett is not a wealthy lobbyist from a suburb of Boston – no, he’s a socially conscious Prius driver who drinks organic coffee. He likes himself better that way…
Those of us sufficiently comfortable with who we are may find such silliness to be, well, silly. I mean, c’mon Brett – if you don’t like being a lobbyist, why don’t you go do something else? You could drop the charade. Geez – this is silly.
But firstly, there’s nothing silly about self-hate. That’s an awful place to be.
And we should also remember that those who are capable of hating themselves are also capable of hating others. It comes naturally to them, as a matter of fact. Once you hate yourself, hating others is easy.
The right focuses on what we have in common as Americans. The left focuses on that which divides us.
The unity which can be gained from what we have in common serves to make America stronger and more stable.
The hatred which results from that which divides us serves to weaken American and strengthen the left. Which is the whole point. And now, the left not only tries to divide various groups from one another, they encourage self-hate in just about everybody. If you were trying to create chaos and violence in society, this is what you would do.
Teaching people to hate themselves and hide their true identity is a terrible idea. It’s not good for anybody. Well, nobody except leftists who want power, and need social chaos and violence to get it.
Plus, if the only identity considered to be virtuous is the identity of a far-leftist, then you can get people to abandon their own hated identity for one that is more socially acceptable. If all you have to do is wear a Che T-shirt and drive a Prius to go from a hated white person to a loved leftist, why would you not do that? Harmless enough, right?
Well, maybe, except that the self-hate needed to abandon one’s identity will tend to make some of these converts hate everyone else with the passion of the newly converted. Such people can be dangerous. It doesn’t take many of them to create chaos and violence.
The people in Georgetown seem harmless enough. The men often start their sentences with ‘So…’ and end their sentences with a non-threatening upward lilt. And I’m sure they mean well. At least, they go to a lot of effort to publicly signal that they mean well.
But as I was watching people walk by in Georgetown, I was a little creeped out. I wanted to grab some random guy as ask him “You manage a $250 million hedge fund. You’re from Greenwich, Connecticut, and now you live in a $5 million townhouse in Georgetown. Why are you dressed like a beach bum? Ditch the Prius. Buy some new flip-flops, for Pete’s sake. What are you trying to prove? Who are you trying to impress? Who are you trying to be?”
I’m not sure who exactly he’s trying to be, and he’s probably not sure, either. But it’s certainly not him.
And if he doesn’t like who he is, I wonder what he thinks of me?
Postscript:
Ok, before you all start, yes, there are significant weaknesses to the way I’m trying to illustrate my point. Those who admire centralized power structures, and are willing to give up something of themselves to be part of something bigger than them, tend to be drawn to cities, and to leftism. And a bunch of bored wealthy white people playing dress-up for one another is not necessarily proof of some underlying conspiracy. And yes, I’ve long struggled with leftism’s odd combination of arrogance and self-loathing, which is not necessarily demonstrated by a rich white lady in a multi-million dollar condo wearing a floppy bohemian hippie dress and turquoise jewelry which appears to have been designed by preschoolers.
But still.
I do think that leftists understand that one way to get everyone to identify as a leftist, is to make their own real identity to be loathsome and embarrassing. And I maintain that encouraging self-hatred is vicious and dangerous. And I think that people who have been trained to hate themselves are more likely to hate others. And before you know it, we move from a united society to a tribal one. And tribal societies are inherently unstable.
Which is ok with leftists, as long as leftists are in power. Despite how things look, I really don’t think that leftists are really trying to burn down American society. I just think they’re using techniques to gain power that lead to social instability, and if American society burns down in the process, leftists don’t care. They’re trying to save the world, here. Omelets and broken eggs and all that.
So maybe I’m making too much of a rich white guy in cargo shorts. I probably should redo this essay, and try a different approach. But I’m too lazy. Perhaps I should have followed the advice of Lawst, and thought about what I was typing before I typed it.
Nahhhh…
But I think my basic point is still valid. Despite my difficulties in illustrating it.
Encouraging self-hatred leads to hatred of others, which creates social instability. So when I see a bunch of people pretending to be something other than what they are, it gives me the creeps.
What do you think?
Published in General
What makes you think they feel better about themselves for doing that. I’d think it would make them feel unclean and would lead to social pathologies.
My family; referring to us all as “a buncha stubborn squareheads.”
You know Prince Harry? Cool. But he’s not representative. He’s a former prince who got caught in an international intrigue and has gotten neurotic, even if he has got a hot, compliant wife.
And white college students, I can sort of see your point. However I think of them as going through their deferred teenage rebellion, and disparaging their heritage is just a phase; and their heritage just supplies a convenient object for their disapproval, but is not heart-felt. Then again, they might be really really sick, too. Does anyone really hate their parents and their ethnicity because of social pressure? Maybe so.
Is that disparaging, though, or just a fact?
For every proposed family activity (picnics and the like): 20% are fer it, 20% agin it, and 60% are laughing at 40%.
I would guess it’s quite common. Not so much social pressure to hate, but social pressure to be cool, which parents and the most-represented European ethnicities definitely are not.
But then isn’t that just shallow posturing? Like what they call virtue signaling?
“Virtue signaling” is the new “campus life.”
No reason it can’t be both.
I do. I went to Denison University. Rich kid school. I spent 4 years with Prince Harry.
But people do things like this to feel good about themselves, not to feel bad about themselves. And that’s really it.
You dare to speak the truth about my family?!
Wow. Cool. You know the archetypal heritage hater. But seriously, I don’t believe that they really mean it. Except for a few, like Harry. And he’s got fairly good reasons, being born into the — what do they call it? — the firm.
Absolutely. Liberals! Why do you think they are tearing down these statues?
Edit: I guess you just don’t know them personally. I went to college in NYC no less and they are all over the student body and the departments. They have now expanded from the colleges to general society itself. I still keep in touch and yes they despise western culture and they are full of themselves.
Anybody read the book Oikophobia? People can be insanely irrational towards a whole host of things. Why not an irrational hatred of one’s own heritage.
40% of the population with the same disease?
Sounds about right. TDS was another disease that was widespread, though I don’t know that it reached 40%
Perhaps so.
I
havehad mixed feelings about Trump. But look at how norma it was to go completely insane over some stupid tweets while his policies created prosperity, peace and safe-guarded classically liberal values.Yes. The thing is, TDS isn’t a real disease; it’s a symptom of a disease perhaps, and perhaps 40% (conservatively) of Americans are Bat-scat crazy, but they’re being told what to be afraid of, and as soon as they’re told not to be afraid of one thing and to be afraid of something else, they’ll change virtually over night (give it a month or two).