Sunday, 8 September 2019
‘They’re All Idiots’: Amid Brexit Chaos, Britons Lose Faith in Politicians
Of course they do. The media have been telling us not to trust politicians for decades.
We finally believed them. It's nice to have the world defined: us good, them bad.
Inside
the mind of an internet extremist. (By David Brooks)
I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am one of
those fanatics on the alt-right and the alt-left, the ones who make online
forums so vicious, the ones who cancel and call out, the minority of online
posters who fill the air with hate. I’m one of those radicals whose rage
is intertwined with psychological fragility, whose anger at real
wrongs is corrupted by my existential panic about myself.
To know
anything about me you have to understand the chaos at the core of my innermost
being. I was raised without coherent moral frameworks. I was raised amid social
fragmentation and division, the permanent flux of liquid modernity. Adults in my
life have not been trustworthy. Friends have not been trustworthy. Women reject
me. I passed through school unseen. You have no idea how ill equipped I am to
deal with my pain. I was raised in that coddling way that protects you from
every risk except real life. When I was younger my eyes pleaded: Tell me
what adulthood and manhood are supposed to look like! All you said was, “You
can be anything you want to be!” How does that help?
You told
me I was special, but the world goes on as if I don’t exist.
I yearn
for order. Blunt simplicities. Politics provides the Manichaean binaries I
can’t find anywhere else, and so I make everything political. Own the libs!
Smash the racist right! A war of pure good and pure evil. I crave the single
narrative that will make everything clear: Everything is race. Everything is
class. Everything is moral rot caused by godlessness. They say that
fundamentalism is rigid and authoritarian. I say to them: Yes! I want
fundamentalism. Please wrap me in that rigidity. Otherwise, I have no coherent
self.
Catastrophizing
is my mind-set. Catastrophizing is pure: Society is totally corrupt. The
“system” is totally rotten. I am terrified by ambiguity and ambivalence, the
idea that the glass might be only half full. I seize on the extreme
example of anything and take it to be the typical case. In this way I
create my truth. An immigrant committed murders, so
immigrants are murderers. People are not defined by individual traits but
by group ones. Individual persons are too complicated, but groups are abstract
and easy to stereotype. Every human being gets reduced to some category,
preferably the cunning ones I despise: the libs, white males.
I need leaders and spokesmen who will never show
uncertainty. I want leaders who tell simple blame stories. It’s the bankers!
It’s the immigrants! I want intellectual put-down artists who will crush the
other side and let me vicariously enjoy their triumphs on YouTube again and
again. My moral system is simple, too. Up is evil and down is good. People above
me on the status hierarchy are venal, while those of us in my group are victims
of their corruption. The existence of any hierarchy itself is prima facie proof
of injustice.
From the abstract vantage point of my computer screen, I
see a world in which my opponents are elite oppressors and my kind are
oppressed. They have their exclusive cliques and I am disdained. And here we
get to the ultimate injustice: Why are they recognized while I
am not? This is the molten core from which my indignation
flows. The status quo does not respect me, and therefore I despise it.
So
my politics is not really about issues, it’s epic wars for recognition. I seize upon the
minor missteps made by my opponents in order to discredit their kind. You
stumbled? I delight in crushing you! Owning the libs or the alt-right spares me
the terrifying ambiguity of actually getting to know one.
I’ve lost
faith in reason. Communication is for condemnation and arousal. Forgiveness has
become foreign to me. Sometimes you have to be vicious for justice. If I
afflict the comfortable I have served justice. I don’t have to worry about
comforting the afflicted. If I attack faraway wrongdoers I don’t have to worry
about tutoring a child nearby.
Online
war is a force that gives life meaning. Hatred gives me that delicious
simulacrum of power. Did you really think you could raise me on gourmet coffee
and yoga pants and I wouldn’t find a way to rebel against your relativism and
materialism? Didn’t you observe the eternal pattern — that if you try to
flatten a man to the bourgeois he will rebel by becoming a fanatic?
And yet …
somehow it’s not working. Somehow politics doesn’t fill my soul, bring me peace
or end my existential anxiety. I have helped create a harsh world in which
vulnerability is impossible and without vulnerability there can be no
relationship. Relationship is the thing that I long for the most and that I most make impossible. I have cut myself off from the only thing that can save me.
I am
indignant. I am superior. I read Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground.” I
am alone. (Except, of course, for friends who think exactly as I do.)
# posted by Had It in Holland Park @ 01:39 
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