Can't fight this feeling

I woke up in a rotten mood today. I so often happen to find myself like this that it should be old hat, but I would be omitting the truth if I were to say that it is not trying, to carry this metastasizing lump of boiling resentment around and around and around and around. It was once again a twitter post that pushed me into indulging another blog post, but it was a tiktok bite that sent me down the road to Damascus. Inundation in the dark arts of digital magic leads one to familiar but unwelcome shores.

Perhaps that is why I find myself with such sympathy for the post-liberal turn that certain intellectual circles in the United States and Europe have begun to take. It is our erstwhile, ambitious and vigorous senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, who after all has brought conservative attention to the myriad ills, economic and social alike, that ubiquitous access to digital technology has wrought. Beyond compulsions like the campus conservative reverence for "free speech", I mean.

Something is rotten in the hearts of the youth across the developed west. Suicide rates have skyrocketed, depression diagnoses have followed them on that crystal voyage heaven-bound. The masses cry loneliness. But why should they, if the social ill is a shared one? The solution to this particular problem is located in the word "social" itself. There is certainly no acute shortage crying wolf in the vast chambers of slow-scrolling social media feeds. "Mental health" is the new byword, shared by any and all. It's a deity with a devoted cultic following, eagerly plastering its signs on campus walls and office spaces. Illness is romantic, because Difference is God and Sameness is apostasy. I don't think I need to tell you what happens when everyone is Different.

I am certainly not the first one to burrow beneath the slogans of our therapeutic culture, which begs the question as to why those far more learned than myself, who so ravenously point to its internal contradictions, would also partake in its vernacular and rituals. If I had to wager a bet, I would stake it on the simple observation that it is too tempting a morsel not to bite at least once, twice, thrice...

But why, you ask, go after such low-hanging fruit? It is easy to sit on the sidelines and take a kick at the man passing by in the street. Perhaps it is because I am so eager to see a solution to the problem as it stands, or rather, to dissolve it. People are still dying after all. Yet the cause and demographics of death seem to be different depending on where you are. In the new citadels, in our metropoles, children (literally and figuratively) hang themselves at a tweet. Concerned parents shove them into the willing grasp of an armada of professional degree-wielders to little avail. In the heartland, where job security and stable family formation were once the rule, all is liquid. Fentanyl, alcohol, suicide, poverty, and despair are the new masters. As others have noted, what were once inner-city pathologies afflicting the black underclass have transplanted themselves to inner-America, inner-Britain, inner-France, and so on. Life expectancy in the United States dipped into the red in 2016 and 2017 and remained stagnant the following two years.

Even as our meritocratic class gentrifies and insulates itself from the rural hordes it so despises, its members find they cannot escape falling victim to their own cruel inventions. It is a delicious irony to see the weapons they pioneered fall so precipitously out of control and better yet to find them used, abused and mishandled by their erstwhile opponents. It has its own logic now. Those on the coasts, in the cities, in their private chats, image boards, and feeds crying depression, loneliness and angst may truly "believe" what they feel, but we ought to know better than that.

Can I deny that there are those who live inside the shining hill-cities and want out? No, because I am one of them. But I would recommend a crash-course in a certain kind of austerity (or should I say quietism?) if they hope to tunnel out of the hole their masters have dug for them. Most are indulgent grafters, the few that can be saved have no "clout". What is to be done?

A true war on loneliness would fight hypocrisy with hypocrisy. Those vulnerable to this critique, myself included, must wake up and identify the root causes of this mass piece of performance art. Pseudo-loneliness is an in-group technique; what was once spontaneous gleichschaltung has become something closer to conscious conspiracy. We air our feelings to attract attention, to gather disciples, to pad our egos when we suffer slight alteration in the passions. We benefit from the structures we attack, but this benefit is part of a devil's bargain, a bounded choice to which we have implicitly capitulated. What's beyond door number one? A bevy of followers just waiting to catch us when we choose to proclaim a fall and reassurance that we are indeed "not like the rest". And door number two? Consignment to the dustbin of history. You would do better to take a photo with Stalin.

To save or to destroy? That is the question. Those who have been kicked through door number two might find some common-cause with those who have made door number one work for them. After all, there are many twos who might like to be ones and some of the ones might sincerely believe that they aren't what they are. This would be a mistake. Any such alliance would be asymmetrical and amount not to common cause but to co-optation, and we know all about that, don't we? The twos would do better to bring the whole rotten structure crashing down. True loneliness created false loneliness to sustain itself. Two contradictions feed each other. The "torment" of personal relations is symbiotic. Eliminate the illusions and emotion will once again run free, true, sincere, creative, uncontrollable, unstoppable. Insincerity is the cudgel of atomization. It wins by offering those morsels to its ostensible foes. You can speak, but you can't act. And why not? You win by pretending to lose. There is nothing so attractive as that.