It’s not vice-signaling because that’s only a tactic, same with ragebait. Nihilism is too broad and contradicts with the bible-thumpers that also engage in this. It’s like what Sartre describes in the “anti-Semites” excerpt. I really think there is a coherent phenomenon that encapsulates this. I think the best way I can describe it personally is ‘bloodsport politics’ but words are kinda failing me here. I might already know it even and could just be having a brain blip
“the state cannot improve your life, but if you vote for us we’ll punish the people you despise!”
Grievance politics. It’s like the flip side of libs who get off on poor people in red states getting poorer because they didn’t
blue hard enough.yeah i had a hunch it was ressentiment-adjacent, but I feel like there’s just a je ne sais quoi being dropped here. i think it is literally the Sartre quote that I can’t fit in there because it feels like a fundamental piece of what I’m grasping that my brain can’t entirely link to ressentiment
Yeah, it’s a subset of grievance/resentment politics that’s devoid of any real agency. Gaining anything for your group is irrelevant, it’s just how hard you can “own” another group you think has slighted you.
Downward-projecting hierarchical cruelty + “you’re not gunna’ fool me” smugness psychic compensation, maybe.
I think a lot of people take the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” thing too far and don’t understand that a lot of chuds don’t actually care about being at the top because they defer to authority all the time (and is like the defining feature of their world view), it’s way more important that they have people below them to look down on rather than being on the top, necessarily, especially the more pessimistic lower-class types. Same thing with non-white racists who don’t care about being top-race, but more so align around hating blacks/Africans globally.
So a lot of the talk of harming themselves doesn’t matter because they don’t have any sort of objective worldview, only relative so as long as they’re above others they can at least be satisfied in some way.
There is something about it that is like a new formation of online socialization in a similar structure to hazing/initiation for hierarchical organizations. It is a very performative mode that shows fealty towards sadistic power for the sake of proving the existence of that power. It’s a super position of “got mine, fuck you” and “one day I’ll be wearing this boot”. So you end up with something like “fuck you, the boot has got mine” cheering on the sadism as vicarious redemption.
“Gen X”.
It’s like, self-destructive posturing or something
You’re right, this is hard.
The thing is that it feels so consistent and coherent as a social phenomenon that I’m surprised that I’m not equipped to describe it with a specific turn of phrase. It might be because it’s something that really only manifests properly with the depersonalization and disassociation that the internet affords so it might be more of a burgeoning analysis?
Yeah it’s like some sort of venomous denial. There’s an aspect of self-hate and almost suicidal selfishness that is hard to describe.
How about making one up like chuddy?
I imagine Foucault has a word for this. The phenomenon you’re describing feels very much like an observation of l’ordre du discours. I think it’s hard to think of one word because (at least with a discursive lens) there are multiple external and internal disciplinary mechanisms at play.
It is a projection in the mathematical sense, a mapping from the large amorphous discourse of The Now to a well-behaved model discourse that has necessarily been divorced from power relations. Thus neutered, these deg-nerate (again, in the math sense, word filter) fictive discourses encyst the ego; each is a single-feature “reality” of rot, never fully “false” nor ever encompassing something “true”. The intellectual currents that spring from these cysts are not coherent programs with canonical texts but a mass of individualized projections intersecting, enclosing, and refocusing. This is the core of the Sartre quote, as well. The ludic detachment from sincerity reinforces itself as the ultimate defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance; what might rightly be a center of discomfort becomes a place of power.
This is alien to you because your politics is built on sincerity, while theirs cannot admit it without the protective cop-out of “cringe”.
