I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it
I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it
You like my hair? Gee, thanks, just bought it
I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it
7 rings, Arianne Grande
Sorry to rain on the magical parade1, but if the so-called psychedelic renaissance is anything to go by, the esoteric revival will be like the 70s, only with more self-loathing. If you thought there’s no way the culture could get more narcissistic, I’ve got news for you, babe. When you’ve got an expanded view of the Self, the sky’s the limit.
Have you ever noticed how you’re never the narcissist? A search for “narcissist book” on amazon.co.uk yields the following results:2
Surrounded by Narcissists: Or, How to Stop Other People’s Egos Ruining Your Life
It’s Not You: How to Identify and Heal from NARCISSISTIC People
The Highly Sensitive Person’s Guide to Dealing with Toxic People: How to Reclaim your Power from Narcissists and Other Manipulators
Narcissists Exposed: 75 Things Narcissists Don’t Want You to Know
The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free
Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself
Think about the people in your life. If you look closely, you’ll notice how many of them are narcissists or fascists3 or both.
Except you, of course.4
You are not like the others. You may be lost, but at least you know that you are lost. You know that there’s more to life than this: slaving away for the Man, placated with artisanal bread and digital circuses. Don’t you deserve to be ring leader for once? Aren't you tired of being a loser?5 Sick of being a victim?
But don’t we need, like, moral values or something?6 What about the other victims? Who’ll take care of them?
The fairies?
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
“This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”7
Si Dieu n'existait pas, we’d have to invent Her.
Notwithstanding John Pistelli’s rather self-serving endorsement of MAMA.
I omitted How to Stop Being A Narcissist: Real and Proven Strategies to Change Narcissistic / Manipulative Behaviour and Stop Sabotaging Your Relationships since it didn’t support my thesis, which I admit was rather manipulative of me. But the titles I did note down are all real, I swear.
Speaking of fascists, Dr. Pistelli had me ROFLing with his response to the denunciations by a former member of the allegedly fascist HEC (the Hegelian E-girl Council, if you’ve been living under a fascist rock or something):
The irony of that—to prevent fascism, culture must not be democratized!—reminds me of Sontag’s line from “Fascinating Fascism”:
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established.
The same essay is partly responsible, along with the Continental theory Sontag was reading (Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, etc.), for those overly broad “cultural” definitions of fascism used by intellectuals to denounce too much of what human beings want—not war or genocide or dictatorship but beauty and pleasure and connection—as fascist:
National Socialism—or, more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal, and one that is also persistent today, under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders).
Since Sontag (almost called her “SS”) only contrasts fascism with communism, and since she would shortly be calling communism “fascism with a human face,” I’ve seen leftists accuse this very essay of glamorizing fascism and therefore of being fascist itself. This same strange “everything is fascist except anti-fascism, which is also fascist” dynamic seems to be at work in the Hegelian egirl situation. I notice that one the egirls (anna kw) is quoting Simone Weil and seems to be headed for Christianity. But then it was Sontag who taught American intellectuals to quote Simone Weil in the first place—as a challenge, possibly fascist, to our bourgeois civilization, also fascist.
The sad truth is that you probably are not a narcissist. You are probably drawn to narcissists because they have what you lack: the cardinal virtues of Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent.
Sam Kriss argues convincingly that Nietzsche (like all philosophers, really) is for losers:
Nietzsche might have been weak, but he refused the comforts of resentment. His entire philosophy is a image of what it would look like to really live without those comforts. Instead of festering, everything bursts outwards. Passion, violence, the terrible freedom of the man-shaped wolf. The pleasures of power as an antidote to the much more potent and seductive pleasures of suffering. It’s hyperbolic; of course it’s hyperbolic: he needs something furious enough to burn through the accumulated layers of resentment that have formed around your skin. Everything I love about Nietzsche is part of this project. The ontology of becoming: what would it look like to have a metaphysics that’s completely untouched by resentment? It would look like a world that’s constantly being cast behind itself. The perspectivism: how do you build a non-resentful epistemology? By making it impossible to cling to the tawdry compensations of truth. But the really ugly and monstrous parts of his thought—slavery, murder, wars of mass extermination breaking out across the entire world—they’re part of it too. They might have been a metaphor, but he really did believe in them. Too much of any remedy becomes a poison.
Freya India preaches what I have been trying for months to say in my own non-committal way. Although I understand it is my leftist duty to go ewww, why do you have to get all fascist about it? She’s written for Quillette, you know! and remind you that actually, the problem is capitalism.
Although I would hardly accuse Marija Gimbutas of “intellectual rigour”.