The exploration of the no-ego ego trip and its relevance to contemporary culture a few weeks back has implications that reach far. The discussion that followed, lively as it was, barely scratched the surface of the subject. This week, before we return to the Situationist movement that set this sequence of posts in motion, we’re going to go a little deeper. In the process, I hope to cast some light on one of the most pressing questions of our time: why can’t the left meme?
Those of my readers who don’t follow internet culture may be wondering what on earth that question even means. Even those who cut their teeth on lolcats and got the joke when I named a band in one of my novels “Smudge and the Memelords” may welcome a review of the history. The word “meme” is older than the internet. It first appeared in biologist Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a term for ideas that replicate themselves through the collective conversation of a time the way genes replicate themselves in a population of living things.
In 1993, when the internet still consisted largely of message boards, author Mike Godwin applied Dawkins’ logic to online phenomena and created the concept of the internet meme. (This is the same person, by the way, who coined Godwin’s Law, the rule that sooner or later every internet debate will drag in references to Adolf Hitler.) The term was still used for a wide range of internet phenomena in those freewheeling days. Then came 4chan.
4chan was one of the earliest of a whole archipelago of imageboards—internet sites set up for the anonymous posting of images and freewheeling discussion. It’s responsible for a lot. I’ve written elsewhere about the improbable impact 4chan’s /pol/ (that is, Politically Incorrect) forum ended up having on the 2016 election. Just over a decade before Kek the Frog God had his astonishing second coming, however, a twist of internet fashion got 4chan habitués posting silly pictures of cats every Saturday (“Caturday”). Adding text to the images was the obvious next step. Put the text in the popular Impact font, add the garbled grammar and spelling for which the internet was already famous, and—ahem—pretty soon somebody wanted a cheeseburger.
This kind of meme, a single image with text, is technically known as an image macro. It remains the standard form for internet memes, though short computer-generated videos and a few other formats have risen up to challenge the marching legions of image macros these days. Image macros, though, turned out to be extraordinarily well suited to politics. The hard limits imposed by the form—a single image, a handful of words, and a fraction of a second to catch the eyes of jaded internet users as they scroll on past—forced meme artists to cut through the masses of verbal fog that blur most political discussion, so they could make their points with all the subtlety of a cold wet towel across the face. At a time when the things most people wanted to discuss in the political sphere were the things no mainstream politician or corporate media outlet was willing to mention, messages amplified via image macros had extraordinary force.
There’s nothing inherently partisan about image macros, or any other form of internet meme popular these days. In theory, it should be possible to create smart, witty, memorable memes promoting any imaginable political agenda. In practice, however, the conservative populism that found its totem in Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of wickedly funny memes while most other political factions were left in the dust. The Democratic mainstream in particular has found it all but impossible to come up with memes that appeal to anybody but its own true believers. That was what generated the question with which we began: why can’t the left meme?
That’s an oversimplification, of course. First of all, it’s not just the left that can’t meme. The country club Republicans who dominated the GOP before the rise of Trump were, if anything, even worse at meming than their Democratic rivals. There were plenty of reasons why such old-line Republicans as Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney were brushed aside so easily by the Trump juggernaut, but a torrent of raucous memes that helped turn voters against them certainly contributed something to it. Nor are these the only conservatives who can’t meme; if anything, libertarians are even worse at it. (Admittedly these days most American libertarians are either potheads or corporate shills, and neither a brain full of business-school platitudes or a bloodstream full of THC is an asset to a meme artist.)
Second, it’s not entirely true that the left can’t meme. There have been some genuinely crisp and funny political memes out of the left; it’s just that there have been so few of them, compared to the competition from the populists. Leftists like to insist that there are lots of good leftist memes, which just aren’t getting the distribution they deserve, but this begs the question. Memes aren’t distributed by any central authority; they spread, or fail to spread, because hundreds of millions of individual social media users glance at them, and either laugh and forward them to their friends, or roll their eyes and scroll on by. Populist conservative memes get the first reaction much more often than memes from any of the leftward factions.
I suppose it could be argued by the left that this shows that the vast majority of people on the internet are goose-stepping fascists aligned with the populist right. That’s not what other measures such as voting behavior show, however. Thus it’s hard to escape the supposition that the difference really is in the quality of the memes—that the populist right really does make better memes than their rivals. The question that follows, then, is why this should be.
What makes this point especially fascinating is that the weight of the humor used to be on the other side. I’m old enough to remember when it was the left that had a virtual monopoly on raucous humor and the right that was stuck in a grim and humorless rut. In those days TV comedy shows such as the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In mocked the Republican Party into incoherent fury, while attempts by conservatives to respond in kind routinely set new lows in sheer lameness.
That began to slip in the 1970s with the rise of certain currents in second wave feminism. It’s not accidental that the words “That’s not funny,” spoken in a censorious tone and accompanied by an angry glare, were the punch line of a thousand jokes about feminists back in the day. Year by year, the same attitude spread through the left. I remember rather clearly when I first encountered the term “microaggression” among social justice activists. It was applied very broadly on the extreme left, as a label for anything that falls short of the abject cringing obedience that activists expect from the rest of us for their ever-increasing list of demands. Humor, however, is almost always a microaggression—a point that has much to reveal.
At this point it may be helpful to talk about humor itself—its nature, and the reason why it’s always so threatening to some people. The Hungarian-American philosopher Arthur Koestler proposed in his book The Act of Creation that the heart of humor is the collision between incompatible worlds. Puns are the simplest example: you encounter a word that seems to be meant in one sense, and all of a sudden you realize that it’s meant in another sense, and the sudden shock of the collision makes you laugh. Take the first dad joke that comes to mind—say, “I want to be cremated, because it’s my last shot at a smoking hot body.” There’s the set of meanings we usually associate with the concept of cremation, and the set that we usually associate with the phrase “smoking hot body.” Those matrices, to use Koestler’s term for these patterns of meaning, have nothing connecting them—until all of a sudden they do.
To this process of collision between unrelated matrices of meanings, Koestler gave a useful term: bisociation. He saw it not only as the source of humor but as the core of all human creativity. The creative mind takes two or more unrelated matrices and brings them into relationship through an act of bisociation, so each one casts unexpected light on the other. When Isaac Newton realized that the same forces that govern the arc of a tossed stone keep the Moon falling forever around the earth, that was an act of bisociation; when Jane Austen realized that fiction didn’t have to be a vehicle for wish-fulfillment fantasies and could be used instead to explore the dramas of ordinary human experience—the discovery that created the modern novel—that was another. Look into every other significant creative act and you’ll find bisociation at its heart.
Bisociation is risky stuff, though. It’s especially risky when people have strong emotional reasons to want to keep certain matrices of meanings and ideas as far as possible from each other—and that, in turn, lands us in the territory we explored together three weeks ago in the first of these interludes, as we pondered the mysteries of the no-ego ego trip.
The ego, as I noted in that post, is the self’s self-representation. It is how we perceive ourselves, who and what we think we are. That representation can be more or less accurate. It can never be completely accurate, any more than any other representation can, but it can be close enough that the differences don’t threaten our sense of identity. The more inaccurate it is, the wider the gap between who we are and who we think we are, the more threatening the gap is felt to be, and the more energy has to go into defending the false representation against the ongoing assaults of reality. Thus we can arrange egos along a spectrum of greater and lesser accuracy, which can also be labeled “resilient” and “brittle” respectively.
The problem of the brittle ego deserves more attention than it usually gets these days. The more inaccurate somebody’s self-assessment is, the less they can tolerate anything that challenges the lie. That usually expresses itself as anger, for an interesting reason. Anger is a secondary emotion—that is, it’s how we react when we feel a primary emotion that’s too difficult or intense from us, and cover it over with some other emotion that’s less painful to feel. The primary emotions under anger are usually some combination of shame, grief, and fear.
People with brittle egos generally have no shortage of these: shame that they can’t live up to their own self-image, grief over the pain their brittle ego has caused themselves and others, and above all fear that their self-deception will collapse around them and leave the lie exposed once and for all. Those are powerful emotions, difficult to bear, and anger is a convenient way of hiding from them. When you see people reacting with weirdly disproportionate rage, therefore, it’s worth considering the possibility that brittle egos are involved. Any time you see a whole society reacting that way, it’s even more likely that glaringly false self-representations and the inevitable brittle egos have become pandemic in that society.
The obvious next question is why so many egos these days should be so remarkably brittle. That’s not a difficult question to answer, either. Back in the middle years of the 20th century, psychologists noticed that inadequate self-esteem was a source of many emotional difficulties. That was a valid insight, but their proposed cure for the problem turned out to be worse than the disease. They argued that the way to prevent children from having inadequate self-esteem was to shield them from the risk of failure, lower standards so that nobody could fall short of them, and bombard children with a constant stream of oleaginous flattery meant to tell them how precious, wonderful, talented, brilliant, and special every one of them was.
The problem with this is that such treatment doesn’t actually yield self-esteem. Genuine self-esteem is earned by confronting challenges, achieving goals, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the self; that word “esteem” comes from the same root as “estimate,” after all. There are quite a few terms for the state of mind you reliably generate by making sure that somebody can’t fail and gets flattered all the time, but I prefer an old-fashioned word: vanity.
Vain people don’t have self-esteem: that is, they don’t estimate themselves accurately and recognize their real capacities to rise to challenges, reach their goals, and make change happen in the world. What they have is a severe case of brittle ego. Vain people believe that they are more intelligent, attractive, talented, etc. than they actually are, and have to defend that inaccurate self-assessment against the constant onslaught of reality. That’s why vain people get angry so easily and so often, and why their anger is so often so extreme. They’re not just angry at this or that perceived slight—they’re constantly seething with anger at the entire cosmos because it’s quietly telling them, over and over again, “No, you’re not as wonderful as you want to believe.”
Vain people have another mark that distinguishes them: their capacity for humor is very limited. Some vain people can become very skilled at the sort of waspish, witty putdowns that target the weak spots of their rivals, but there’s always something mean and petty about their wit, and it never earns a belly laugh. Genuine humor always eludes them. Down through the history of humor, from the days of court jesters all the way to the present, comes a simple but ironclad rule: you can never really make fun of anyone else until and unless you can make fun of yourself. This, in turn, vain people can’t do.
Yet there’s one demographic that’s been at least partly sheltered from the noxious effects of the contemporary cult of self-esteem, for a richly ironic reason. Young white men growing up in today’s America get fed the same monotonous diet of flattery as their peers, but they’re also told even more relentlessly that they’re privileged—that is to say, Bad People. Since they’re assigned the status of Bad People, in turn, they’re just as constantly told that their place is to shut up, go sit meekly in the back of society’s bus, and respond to the slaps and kicks dealt out to them by thanking their abusers for helping them to become better allies.
Brutal as all this is, it has had one interesting consequence: it seems to have provided an effective antidote to the cult of self-esteem. Those young white men who don’t crumple under the pressure (as many do, of course; check out the suicide rate among young white men sometime) quite often end up with resilient egos. The proof of this is the simple fact that they can handle mockery, and in fact dish it out to themselves and one another with verve.
The best places to take this in are populist-right forums of the sort where Pepe the Frog is a frequent apparition. You’ll see young white men laughingly calling themselves and one another “faggot” and “retard”—try, just try, to imagine participants in a far-left forum calling themselves and each other “bigot” and “Nazi” in the same merry tone. They love to mock their own autistic tendencies—and it’s an interesting commentary on our times that autistic people are by and large not merely accepted but celebrated by the supposedly intolerant right, while the supposedly tolerant left is redlined as hostile territory by so many of us on the spectrum.
Thus it’s not accidental that this is the same demographic that drove the emergence of memes as a political force in their own right. The 2016 US presidential campaign—the First Meme War, to give it the name many of its veterans used—was fought, like all political campaigns, on the battlegrounds of the collective imagination. That was where torrents of dank memes cracked the aura of inevitability that Hillary Clinton’s propagandists tried to build around her, and turned the absurd idea of a Donald Trump presidency into an option that just enough Americans chose to embrace. Among those who kept the meme cannons roaring during that conflict, in turn, the demographic we’re discussing was massively overrepresented.
What’s more, these same self-proclaimed faggots and retards make fun of the very political leaders they support. They laughed themselves into hiccups a little while back when leftward periodicals posted baffled articles about the explosion of memes doing weird things to J.D. Vance’s face. Did it mean that the right was turning against Vance? Of course it meant nothing of the kind. It was the kind of mocking welcome you can expect when you join a community of young men with resilient egos. Vance passed the test with flying colors, not only laughing at the memes but posting a Halloween picture of himself dressed as one of them. His chances of being swept into the presidency in 2028 by a tsunami of dank memes have gone up accordingly.
The broader political implications of all this are not small, for vanity is a fatal liability in at least three ways. First, vain people consistently overestimate their own abilities, and so take on challenges that are beyond their capacity. Second, in order to sustain their overinflated self-images, vain people just as consistently underestimate the abilities of their rivals, and so get blindsided by preventable defeats. In The Art of War, Sun Tsu noted that a leader who knows his own strength and knows the strength of his enemies will win a hundred victories in a hundred battles. Since vain people cannot attain either of these two essential modes of knowledge, their success rate is rather noticeably lower.
Yet the third liability of the vain is even more dangerous to them: vanity makes you easy to manipulate. Flatter the vain, and they’ll follow you as though you had a rope tied to their septum piercings; mock them, and the blind rage that pops up on cue makes them even easier to herd in whatever direction you want. This isn’t simply a theoretical concern. Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has been backing the Democrats into one losing position after another: all he has to do is favor something and his opponents oppose it. As long as he chooses things that are generally favored by the voters, as he’s done so far, the Democrats’ historically low polling numbers will stay low.
All this has a personal dimension as well as a political one, and many of my readers who grew up being fed the toxic diet of fake self-esteem our culture inflicts on its young will have had to contend with its downsides in their own lives. Yet the thing that interests me most just now is how the cult of vanity I’ve anatomized here intersects with the perspectives I’ve drawn from the Situationists, that obscure movement whose ideas I’ve explored in recent posts. We’ll circle back to that discussion in another two weeks.
*****
In other news, I’m delighted to announce that a new book of mine is available for preorder. I think most of my readers know that W.B. Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, was also up to his eyeballs in occultism. His occult writings, however, lie scattered through the volumes of his collected work and haven’t previously been brought together in a form convenient for occultists to use.
So, of course, I had to fix that. 😉 The result is The Magical Writings of W.B. Yeats, an anthology that contains his most important occult writings, including the original (and long unavailable) 1925 edition of A Vision, his major work on occult philosophy. It will be out next May, but is available now for preorder, and readers of mine get a 20% discount with the code YEATS20. You can preorder your copy here in the US and here elsewhere.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 10/20). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Patrick’s mother Christine‘s vital energy be strengthened so she can continue healing at home without need for more surgical operations.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Marko have the awareness and strength to constructively deal with the situation.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; may he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, Someone recently gave me Phil Knights book ” Shoe Dog” , and I read it cover to cover on a dark rainy day last week. Now, I am no Nike fan boy as, I don’t think making shoes with slave wages in third world countries and tricking Americans of low self esteem in to wearing them with celebrity endorsements is a noble thing.
But what struck me about the book was the collection of men Phil assembled around him starting in the middle 1960’s. They were self depreciating in the absurd and mocked and taunted each other in a way that has not been possible in the workplace for 30 years now. They called each other “buttface” and went on ” buttface retreats”. They even ruthlessly mocked and played tricks on Nike’s number 2 guy, Bob Woodall, who was a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.
I would guess this bunch would have been good at memeing if it was around then.
What they have is a severe case of brittle ego. Vain people believe that they are more intelligent, attractive, talented, etc. than they actually are, and have to defend that inaccurate self-assessment against the constant onslaught of reality. That’s why vain people get angry so easily and so often, and why their anger is so often so extreme. They’re not just angry at this or that perceived slight—they’re constantly seething with anger at the entire cosmos because it’s quietly telling them, over and over again, “No, you’re not as wonderful as you want to believe.”
Hey, stop talking about me in my early twenties, or else I’m going to get very, very angry! 😉
One reason I would submit for why Democrats can’t meme is because of the ego-discrepancy between what they think they are and what they actually are. They want to think they are the party of “the people” and the downtrodden, yet what they increasingly are as time goes on is the party of the blue-state big-city Professional Managerial Class and their administrative class hangers-on. Not only will they not be able to properly meme in this condition, they will not be able to handle having this pointed out to them!
The Smothers Brothers. My Heroes. I haven’t thought about them in decades.
Mad Magazine (does it still exist?) Pogo. We have lost so much.
But I will be good and not mention Adolf Hitler. Not one word of Adolf Hitler will pass my lips.
My keyboard on the other hand………
oleaginous flattery – Love it. Sounds gelatinous. So is humor, could you say, a gauge of how rooted and balanced someone is? It’s not received enough attention, and yet Ousepensky mentions it, and Henri Bergson has an essay (which I ain’t read) on it as well. Your theorem, btw, explains to me why comedy is a dead art form in America. The right is allowed to use it, and the Left forgot or lost the capability, although they still make the movies, have the shows, etc. I noticed it in spades after 9-11, or thereabouts.
Some of what is deemed funny or not in either side of this debate seems to be based on in-jokes. If you weren’t hanging around the chans, some of that stuff might not be funny. If you didn’t hang out on the chans, likely it is because some of that stuff was downright offensive to a person. Likewise, if you weren’t hanging around some of the places where leftists congregate the things they think are funny, and their own in jokes go flying over the head of others. They are laughed at, but not in the way they think they should be laughed at.
I have noticed a lot of autists that I know don’t get the more subtle side of my verbal humor. It goes over them completely in many cases. I work with several, and am friends with several more, so that is just on the basis of those interactions. That said, it seems that there are plenty of autists on the left as well, and they seem to be the kind who are also trans. I am not the only one who notices a venn diagram with the autism spectrum and people with gender dysphoria. I am probably on the spectrum too, but my attention doesn’t last long enough for me to give much attention to the idea. Maybe that’s a deficit on my part.
I do think the lack of humor in the workplace these days is a direct result of the brittle nature people have in general. It comes from the top down PMC’s… who certainly don’t have humor.
While Vance may be able to meme, Trump’s ego, though not easily bruised, does seem to be brittle in the way he demands attention at all times. Maybe he has a deficit of attention too. Trump also seems to have gotten puffed up quite a bit from his new thought techniques. His own self-esteem issues come to the fore anytime someone is critical or what have you. His scathing attacks on his opponents are the kind you expect from a bully who has to put others down so they can feel good. That’s one way of viewing it anyway.
You have said in the past, that you don’t care for the kind of humor that pokes fun at other people. A fair number of memes do seem to fall into this category. So what has changed there, for you, if anything?
One of the critical areas of true self esteem building has been removed from the life of the young at just the age it is needed. In my town when you reached forth grade you were allowed to go in to the fields and pick crops. For us it was berries, starting with strawberries and ending with boysenberries.
There was no self delusion in this activity. You got for the amount you picked and not amount of puffery, flattery or silver stars would change this. If you got faster and faster as the season went on your paycheck would show it. I think this came at a critical age for the building of good self esteem.
Only a few years later ( in the early 1980’s) child labor was outlawed and this critical activity disappeared for the young. Replaced by camps, and activities that handed out gold stars and made sure everyone was valued. We can see the result today.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Clay, interesting. Yeah, that sounds like typical young male humor from the days before brittle egos.
Mister N, there’s that, certainly! Pretending to be brave heroes defending Middle-earth from the hordes of Sauron when you’re actually just defending your own class privilege by shilling for one of two competing factions of insanely corrupt billionaire kleptocrats will put some brittleness into even the most robust ego.
Annette2, funny. My late wife was a huge Pogo fan, btw — the only person I’ve ever met who knew, and used, Beauregard’s full name. She and I used to address each other now and then using the names that P.T. Bridgeport used for Bun Rab: Caldwilder, Thimscrabble, etc.
Celadon, there are funny people who aren’t very well balanced, but I’ve yet to meet a brittle, unfunny person who didn’t have serious problems.
Cato, that’s valid. As I mentioned in an earlier post in the Situationist sequence, the left has bought into the Marxist notion of collective morality, and so those transpeople who happen to be autistic get a free pass for their verbal gaucheries, since they belong to a category that’s assigned the role of Good People and therefore can do no wrong. It’s those of us who don’t have that advantage that tend to avoid the left, because we’re not good at tracking the endlessly changing rules about what terms you’re supposed to use, etc. As for my own tastes, I can recognize that something’s wickedly funny and effective without finding it personally enjoyable. Much of memetic humor falls into that category for me — though there’s also a good deal of it that embraces a self-deprecating absurdity I find very entertaining.
Clay, that’s an excellent point.
@6 P-Funk
I am an autist, and I don’t easily process verbal humor but can understand written (i.e. Internet) humor. I don’t think many autists can devote much brainpower to social interaction, so we’re taxed by just having a conversation. I can get around that to an extent by internalizing some scripts through repetition until they become automatic, but those scripts are too rigid for subtler humor. (And sometimes I do get jokes but find them lame.)
As for JMG apparently appreciating comedy, I think he doesn’t find it funny for the most part but understands that others do.
Re: Trans autists
Right-wingers claim that the trans/nonbinary movement targets vulnerable autistics by love-bombing them into an “inclusive” community. It seems plausible to me but I’m not in a position to support or attack that narrative with ancedotal experience.
For those who are willing to sit through one of the cringiest videos they have ever seen, here’s a “chef’s kiss” example of what passes for the left being unable to meme effectively. That the tune chosen was from the anthem of the East German’s ruling communist party (“The Party Is Always Right”) is just cringe-icing on the cringe-cake. Holy lack of self-awareness, Batman!
JMG:
Vain people have another mark that distinguishes them: their capacity for humor is very limited. Some vain people can become very skilled at the sort of waspish, witty putdowns that target the weak spots of their rivals, but there’s always something mean and petty about their wit, and it never earns a belly laugh. Genuine humor always eludes them. Down through the history of humor, from the days of court jesters all the way to the present, comes a simple but ironclad rule: you can never really make fun of anyone else until and unless you can make fun of yourself. This, in turn, vain people can’t do.
ME: I have to remember that as people go through either Trump Derangement Syndrome or Zohan Mamdani Derangement Syndrome (MDS). You do have to have a sense of human to laugh at yourself. What I find in either case TDS or MDS, everyone is very petty, very serious, and very sure that we are all going to DDDIIIIIIEEEEEEE!
For me, the hyperfocus is hilarious since it means they are so vain as to think that it is all about them and their pet problems. I had to have my family turn off Steve Bannon who has a severe case of MDS. He is hilarious with those who have TDS, but not when his ox is being gored. Of course, you have to be vain to be Steve Bannon.
I also heard that sarcasm is the protest of weak people.
As for me, I do such silly things, that I am used to people laughing at me. Sort of like Opus the Penguin of Bloom County.
Quote JMG:
“It remains the standard form for internet memes, though short computer-generated videos and a few other formats have risen up to challenge […]”
Fair enough, but sometimes you just wanna autistgasm for four minutes straight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mLzFeqWePo
The one at 1:01 minutes gets me every time. Even better than the one where he is riding the velociraptor at the end… 😉
Hello JMG and commentariat:
I’ve started to read your current online essay with less illusion than your essays about Situationism. However, when you’ve remembered Arthur Koestler ideas I’ve gotten very happy: Koestler is one of my favourite writers and thinkers. Well, he had his dark side like everybody, but I think like you he’s been unfairly forgotten today.
About leftists who can’t meme, I read some days ago a book by a spanish essayist (whose name is Juan Soto Ivars), who explains this lack of humor with a core idea: woke and feminist left hasn’t any humor sense because they have no irony. They’re literalist, like every fundamentalism in History and nowadays. They interpret reality in a only boring form. I think in his book (roughly translated from Spanish as “Battle of Letters”), he grasps a part of woke leftism groupal mind, but his analysis isn’t as complete as you’ve written today in your blog.
Bisociation sounds eerily similar to the Ternary. Maybe that’s why enlightened folk like to laugh a lot.
I never thought of the people who ran around wearing Handmaid costumes were vain. Now that you point it out, I guess they were. Why else would you run around wearing silly clothes and keep a perfectly straight face, proclaiming the patriarchy is out to get us all?
@JMG
About cultivating resilient egos, there’s one way that is pretty common in India – corporal punishment. Of course, the “don’t ever hit a child, speak to him/her” trend has begun here too, but it’s still way more marginal than in the West. I’m 29, and I can confidently say that most people in my generation were beaten by their parents quite liberally as children – for example, I remember being beaten with the rolling-pin, cricket stump and belt in my childhood, and this was quite common, though not an everyday thing, of course. The “spare the rod, spoil the child” attitude that has taken hold in the West (I’m not sure if it holds true for the Asian Tigers though) has likely played a part in this scenario, IMO, and I do genuinely think that a very large number of these people with brittle egos and an overinflated sense of self-entitlement could have been prevented from landing up in this problematic territory, had they been dealt with strictly by their parents, using corporal punishment at times. I know correlation does not automatically imply causation, but when I look around me and see the people who have such problematic attitudes, it strikes me that the vast majority of them have been treated like royalty by their parents, and have never even been slapped in their lives, much less being whacked by a cricket stump or something.
Today, as an adult, I don’t feel any anger or pain or bitterness towards my parents for doing so; in fact, I am grateful to them, as the alternative would have been far worse. While I personally do not intend to have any children, I am fully supportive of the idea that there should be a modicum of a sense of discipline in everyone’s life, and that cultivating such discipline in childhood is greatly facilitated by some stern behaviour on part of the child’s parents, from time to time.
This does not mean, however, that beating children cannot be taken too far – there are very many sad cases where children are brutally thrashed in childhood by their parents beyond any reasonable extent, and many of these children deal with the accumulated trauma by becoming criminals, among other possible scenarios. However, these are statistical outliers, and they do not invalidate the general idea per se – unfortunately, modern culture tends to swing towards extremes even when there’s no need to, and thus you get the “my son is a little prince and he must get whatever he wants” on the one hand, and the “you dropped the glass of water, now just wait and watch, I’ll whack you with my belt till your body aches all over from the beatings”, on the other.
“ First, vain people consistently overestimate their own abilities, and so take on challenges that are beyond their capacity.”
I have been learning about the truth of this statement and the dire consequences of acting out of vanity when engaged in high risk activities from a certain YouTube channel called PilotDebrief, of which this link is a sample:
https://youtu.be/kIA1rcdhDLA?si=5fEp0unpDTHvTezW
It’s compulsive viewing.
Interesting insights on humor. I recall a comedian saying humor had to include truth and pain. I’ve felt this was one reason leftist memes so often fall flat with middle or lower class people. The leftists who are also members or aspirants of the managerial class live in a different reality. So their view of truth is obviously untrue to the populists. Your fragility theory similarly restricts them to meme material guaranteed to be quickly ignored by many people since it just doesn’t fit the populist experience.
“They want to think they are the party of “the people” and the downtrodden, yet what they increasingly are as time goes on is the party of the blue-state big-city Professional Managerial Class and their administrative class hangers-on. Not only will they not be able to properly meme in this condition, they will not be able to handle having this pointed out to them!”
Yep, you can blame Third Way Clinton and New Labour Blair for that, who decided to abandon the working class for the managers and the bureaucrats. And now you see the Teamsters support Trump, and Nigel Farage praising trade unionist Arthur Scargill who lead the miners against Thatcher.
One of the huge problems with todays corporate and public sector bureaucracy is that it in both cases ( public sector is worse) they are filled with these brittle vain personalities, usually women. So that when some else pokes fun at them, often men, they file HR complaints.
Well meaning employee laws preventing sexual harassment and hardcore mental abuse have evolved to provide those of low self esteem a set of weapons to use against their enemies. The smallest remark, humorous comment or god forbid some type of workplace meme can lead to overblown HR investigations. This has stifled the effectiveness of most of these public and private bureaucracies. That is one of the reasons we can’t build new bridges, fight urban fires, or send a man back to the moon.
JMG thanks for your reply.
If “sarcasm is the protest of weak people” as Neptunesdolphin suggests… there is a reason. Gen X is perhaps the most sarcastic and Gen X got screwed, in a lot of ways, by the Boomers. That has put some of us in a “weak” position. As such biting sarcasm and irony were the only way some of us have lived through it.
…funny about the MDS… it is as if two mirrors are aimed at eachother.
Very interesting observations!
One thought I had– in addition to the cult of self-esteem, people in my generation (I’m 42) were treated to an endless harangue about how it was our personal job to save the world.
It wasn’t put that way, of course. Instead, we were, as children, regularly told that the world was in deep trouble, that it needed to be saved, and that it would be up to our generation (as a collective) to save it. I remember being forced, at age 10, to sing a song about this for the school chorus. It went on in several verses in dismal tones about the whales and the rainforest, and then shifted into an upbeat chorus about how “We are the ones who will build the world that can be! We are the hope, we are the ones!”
We were also regularly told that, throughout our lives, we would be told that one person cannot make a difference, one person cannot change the world, and so on, but that under no circumstances were we to believe this. “Never believe that one person cannot change the world– one person can change the world! That’s the only way it’s ever been done!” And of course, we were treated to a litany of One Persons who had changed the world, starting inevitably with Martin Luther King, and with no mention made of the fact that the One Persons in question were simply the public faces of large, organized and well-funded movements. Meanwhile, at no time in my 42 years on this planet has anyone ever told me that “One person can’t make a difference” or any other variation on the subject. Indeed, the only time I’ve heard anything remotely like that said in seriousness in a nonfiction context was when I listened to Michael Levin’s recent speech at the meeting of the Jewish Republican Coalition a few days ago. So no one (except Michael Levin) actually says things like this.
And so we were told that the world needed to be saved, that one person could save it, and, By God, you know who’s one person? I’m one person!
No mention, of course, was made of changing ourselves first, or of developing character through the cultivation of virtuous habits which might then influence others around us. Indeed, you’re the first writer I ever encountered who insisted the importance of changing one’s own lifestyle. No– we were apparently meant to simply badger other people into reforming all of society.
I’m not sure how long this sort of messaging went on, and readers younger than I am can tell me if it lasted beyond the 1990s. But I’m convinced that this accounts for at least some of the neuroticism seen among people my age, and may account for some of the odd behavior of people on the Left in particular.
You can be strict to your children without corporal punishment. Identify what your child is attached to the most and take that away from them as punishment. Make them do more chores. Et cetera. They’ll quickly learn not to do the wrong things. But too many people today don’t even do the mere basics and spoil their children.
Mr. Greer, how delicious this post! I gave a hearty chuckle as the heading materialized on my screen.
Now, after reading through it, I began to peruse some other sites .. one of which is ‘The Quartering’.. whereby, shortly after the requisite lead intro, a short meme video commenced of which I found quite funny. Twas no doubt A.I. altered, but hit the humor spot just fine: it even has a bit of classical piano, and the player is exquisito! Now, I know you don’t generally watch such media, but after reading the above, I have to say that it hit like a rubber arrow piercing straight through a Pythonian Knight’s helm! The short meme vid starts at about the 1:34 mark, just after the rather stupid WallMart one .. which ain’t no meme that I can cypher. Bon appetit, if you dare.
Patrick “Right-wingers claim that the trans/nonbinary movement targets vulnerable autistics by love-bombing them into an “inclusive” community. It seems plausible to me but I’m not in a position to support or attack that narrative with ancedotal experience.”
Another angle to view it from is that autists with gender dysphoria are excluded from right wing autistic social groups because of the kind of very male humor employed. Since many are non-binary this would be a turn off. At the same time the religious arm of the right wing doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of the way some actually feel about their bodies. These trans autists would then get included in the left wing side of things where they are loved bombed by people who have their own hang ups, but whose hang ups dont include as much what people do with their genitals when in private.
Patrick, I’ve heard the same thing, but I have no idea if it’s true or not.
Mister N, at least it’s truth in advertising!
Neptunesdolphins, it’s an interesting case study in competing projections. Too bad Jung isn’t around to write a mordant commentary on both.
Sven, nah, you wanna do that. 😉 I’ll pass on the video, thanks.
Chuaquin, that’s a good point. I may need to make time for a discussion of political, religious, and cultural fundamentalism, and not just because we’ve got so many people in that trap just now. From a neo-Situationist analysis, fundamentalism is the insistence that there can be no difference between Spectacle and reality, and that cannot coexist with irony.
Jon, interesting. I’ll be meditating on that.
Neptunesdolphins, oh, it’s more complex than that. Remember that in current left culture, you can only be a Good Person if you’re oppressed. Thus you get plenty of privileged upper middle class white women who spend their time LARPing as oppressed people, so they can convince themselves they’re Good People.
Viduraawakened, to my mind that’s definitely one of those situations where the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea. My father was beaten brutally and repeatedly by his father, and had the emotional scars from that experience for the rest of his life. (Admittedly it also gave him one of the very few good memories from his teen years — the day when he was fourteen, when his father beat him bloody as usual, and he waited until it was all over and said, in a bleak bored voice, “Are you done yet?” That was the last time his father beat him. He was nearly seventy when he first told me that story, and he had tears in his eyes.)
I was spanked as a child, but only with an open hand, and only when I’d really gone out of my way to deserve it and every other disciplinary measure had failed. I think that’s a reasonable middle ground. But a rolling pin, a cricket stump, a belt? Call it a cultural difference, but from my perspective, that’s child abuse.
CC, I’ll pass on the videos — I’m not a visual media fan — but yeah, high risk activities plus vanity quite often equals at least one corpse.
Clay, yeah, there’s that, definitely.
Daniel, that’s valid — humor has to include at least a sidelong truth. The dad joke I cited gets its edge because we’ve all seen people do the most idiotic things to get “a smoking hot body,” so the idea of getting cremated for that purpose resonates with the absurdities we’ve witnessed. Equally, the comedian’s right that there has to be pain — I might add that this can be rooted in shame, grief, or fear. It might be interesting sometime to analyze some really bad memes from both sides to see whether they lack truth, pain, or both.
Cato, that makes a lot of sense. You won’t find me saying anything to defend my g-g-g-generation, given the way that it’s still clinging to wealth and power at the expense of the generations that follow it.
Steve, good gods. I’m old enough to have escaped this. What a horribly toxic double-bind — not to mention a vicious example of political Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy! You can be sure that the people who told you all this weren’t actually trying to be that one person, after all…
Anonymous, exactly. There’s a world of positive possibilities midway between child abuse and spoiling your kids.
Polecat, I’ll pass on the video, but I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Another challenge to the matter is that to give kids the chance to acquire real self-esteem, you kind of have to… stop all those maladaptive efforts, and you have to do so in the face of parents who grew up Special, so of course their kids are Special, and How Dare You Fail My Kid? It’s difficult to run a campaign with the goal, basically, of “stop protecting kids,” and in certain parts of the country it’s difficult to even parent that way; some busybody will call CPS for “neglect.”
This could be a cyclical thing. Fourth Turning theory would suggest that parenting is peaking towards its most smothering right now – most noteworthy in the ways several state or national governments are trying to pass laws age-gating social media.. (Yes, there are theories that this is a ruse to ultimately tie real identities to pseudonymous accounts, and maybe there’s some truth to that, but realistically, if the government wanted the information, they always were able to get it.)
I feel, though, that resolving this at this point would either require a major shift in how society as a whole approaches child-raising, or would require us to progress(!) far enough into the Long Descent that school as we know it is compelled by circumstances to transform or disappear.
Astrophane (offlist), please save off topic questions for the open post on the 4th Wednesday of each month, or (if it’s an occult question like this one) post it next Monday when I do my regular Magic Monday open post on my Dreamwidth journal:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/
Thank you!