House of Eratosthenes

Once upon a time, I was single and unattached. Aw, quit laughin’. Anyway, back in my younger years I had made a mistake of thinking I could become appealing to women if I worked harder at becoming appealing to most women. It’s a common mistake among young adult men. My other mistake was to define what most women wanted, according to what I had heard most women say they wanted. Young men tend to think young women see things & go through life the way young men do, which isn’t even close to being correct…

To my credit, I outgrew this after I had heard one particular phrase a bit too often: “Confident but not cocky.” This sounds like two things that are different, with a meaningful difference that will emerge and self-clarify if only you study it hard enough. But why do you need to study it? Logically, if both aspects of this desire are of paramount importance, it should similarly be of paramount importance to define the dividing line between confident & cocky and spend a few words explaining what this is. Nobody ever did, so I gradually came to the realization these were dumb, fickle women who were being asked their opinions…and throwing out incomprehensible, self-contradictory gibberish.

They were expressing a craving for exactly the same thing for which they were simultaneously expressing a revulsion. There was, and is, no dividing line. They wanted a man who knew what he wanted in any given situation…until such time as this quality might become inconvenient…and then they wanted this very quality to be deactivated, instantly, on command, like flicking a switch. These dumb women didn’t want a living, thinking mate, they wanted a stuffed animal.

In the years that came afterward, I discovered this was a very common problem. Dim women, thinking they were emotionally available for emotional involvement with a man on equal footing, but who really wanted a stuffed animal. The rest of us, much of the time, are like this too. We go through the motions of wanting to interact with each other, of wanting certain things out of life. But we don’t really want these things. Until we’re missing them, and then we want them again.

2. Waffling

Waffling is, of course, the opposite of decisiveness, and we all know we hate waffling. Everybody loathes the boss or the politician who puts up a good show of having made some decision, when all he did was wet his finger and stick it up in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing. We all detest that guy. We say, “just do what you think is right, even if I disagree with it; I’ll at least respect you for it.”

And then we got George W. Bush as our President. He did a lot of things a lot of people thought were wrong, but at least he got their respect for doing what he thought was right. Right? Heheheh. No, not even. If he stayed in office twenty more years, he would have been less popular each year than he had been the year before.

See, we get exactly what we asked for, and once we get it we’re unhappy with it.

3. Individual recognition

The other morning I woke up to the brain-cell-killing morning news channel talking about a couple of high school soccer players who would be hosting…something. It became very clear that the girls were celebrities, and a lot of people within & outside of the student body found it personally satisfying that these two individuals received an unnatural magnitude of attention, over and over again. In fact, this particular news story was paying attention to them for no reason other than the fact that the story was about them getting attention somewhere.

I went to high school myself, awhile back, and I remember how this works. In my day it was male football players. All the cool kids would learn to rattle off their full names, Christian-then-surname, as if it was all one single syllable. Which meant everybody else ran around working those names into conversation as well. If so-and-so busted his ankle skiing, it would make it into the school newspaper. There was one time I tried to get interested in the whole thing, maybe go to a Friday night football game just to see what the fuss was all about. It didn’t work because those people were not my friends, and furthermore, I just didn’t care. I tried this only once.

Many years into adulthood I realized: There is a reason kids have a craving for celebrity worship: They toil away in an environment of enforced sameness. The grown-ups do too…but, to make the economy go, we need to give the grown-ups some latitude to earn special privileges which we then say are, by their very existence, evil. But we do not need to permit our children this latitude.

So when you’re in school, you’re in the land of “if I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand,” and, “because of the poor behavior of one person, we are all going to have to do without.” Everyone is on an unnaturally smooth, unnaturally polished, unnaturally even playing field. A playing field where no grass can grow — a dead thing. More like a stainless steel plate, upon which a ball bearing will not roll.

People get tired of it. They want someone elevated to a pedestal, so they can live vicariously through that person. And so X becomes worthy of special attention…and then X is recognized again…and again and again and again. But only X, because there is effort involved in learning about a new celebrity, so it tends to remain the same person or persons across a great expanse of time. For someone who is not X to achieve a minute in the limelight, remains resolutely unthinkable.

4. Masculinity

I mentioned the dumb girls who say they want a guy “confident, but not cocky” when what they really mean is they want male confidence they can turn on and off like a light switch. Somewhere I have a post with embedded video — I’m way too lazy to go searching for it — of a protester being shown his way out of a college bookstore by campus police. The protester is the one shooting the video, and he’s an absolute douche bag, playing out his Mahatma-Ghandi-civil-disobedience thing, but very badly. He keeps calling for some kind of sit-down to talk out the differences, over and over again…doing all of the talking…but sounding exasperatingly wimpy. Blah blah blah blah blah…and he’s got this nasal resonance thing going on that makes you just want to punch him.

His co-hort is taking a different route, spoiling for a fight the whole time, and one quickly estimates that his mouth is writing checks his body can’t cash. The interesting thing is these two people are hanging out together: Alan Alda and Mike Tyson.

It’s pretty obvious what is going on. Just as, when you form a social protocol that one person cannot be any more important than any other, people start to crave that very thing, the same holds true for masculinity. When it’s All Ghandi All The Time, people crave brashness, pugnaciousness, arrogant-bastard-ness. They want to see it and they want to become it. Boys who show too much of it at the wrong time and get in trouble with the law, disproportionately come from single-parent households and they live out their lives with a day-to-day deficiency in masculine role models. Protester #1 was avoiding masculinity because he’d been taught it’s a bad thing, and Protester #2 was compensating for something. No, not for that — for hanging around Protester #1.

5. Opportunities to become obscenely wealthy

Of all the leftist politicians and political figures out there who complain “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” have you ever stopped to notice how many of them are breathtakingly wealthy?

That goes for the people on the left who have no prayer of ever getting that far, as well. Once you eliminate any possibility whatsoever of getting out of the vicious paycheck cycle, and life has nothing more to offer that’s more lavish than next year’s vacation and that’s only if everything goes right, life becomes dull. People tend to underestimate how dull it can get, or to even notice there’s something missing when they can no longer strive for anything, reach for anything.

They start to crave the opportunity to acquire something out of the ordinary. They become easy marks for slick salesmen who sell houses, cars, timeshares that the prospect cannot realistically afford. They start to fall for the “you’ve arrived” method of salesmanship. This is very much like shopping for groceries without a list when you’re starving. But, imagine what would happen if you went shopping while you were starving but did not consciously realize you were starving. That’s where these poor wretches are. They’ve gotten rid of the opportunity to do something material and special, and they want it back again. They end up with a primal impulse, a sense of something missing, that is much keener and more urgent than it naturally should be.

6. Social unrest

How many times have we heard about CALWWNTY, “We’ve Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet”? How many times do we fail to ask the tough but obvious question: “Wait a minute, if we’ve come along way, and several decades ago we were getting told we came along way, we’ve been coming a long way every single year since then, would you care to explain why we’re not there yet?”

There’s a simple reason why these things drag on through the generations and nobody ever gets “there yet.” They become addicted to the conflict. They form their personalities, their identities, around this perceived truth that one segment of society is keeping another segment down.

And so you often see people lapsing back into it. How else do you explain the fact that America, a country with a black guy as President, needs affirmative action? The people who continue to complain about this, they become living solutions in search of problems. It’s very sad. These are entire lives wasted on a big nothing, by choice.

The dog chasing the car, may be as confused as all get-out, but he at least stops running when the car stops. The racial huckster in search of social-justice or social-equilibrium, is more confused than the dog. He never stops.

7. Aristocracy, titles, castes, inequality of privilege

Why do we have “ObamaCare waivers”? Seriously, why.

I’ll tell you why. We do not elect wonderful people full of charisma and charm to make us all the same. We elect them to tell us who all must be the same as who else, and who is allowed to be different.

Listen to these politicians give their speeches sometime. Just pick some speeches at random. They identify these problems with “some” people unable to acquire access to health care services…it’s always some people underprivileged. We need to make a new world in which everybody has whatever-it-is. It’s not good enough if the service is easy for some to acquire and possible for others to acquire. We need enforced same-ness.

But if you listen to the speech a little while longer, it becomes quickly apparent that these politicians would not be able to handle a new social order that works this way, in which everybody can do everything with equal ease. The minute they identify a problem, they have identified someone responsible for creating it and keeping it around, making the problem bigger. In other words, villains.

This is different from high school student bodies singling out individuals from among them to worship as celebrities. That has to do with manufacturing an identity. This has to do with stratification, building classes as opposed to building individuals. Also, it has to do with real power. Those soccer players mentioned earlier, their classmates want them to get attention, but there’s no special need for them to make real, powerful, influential decisions. We want people we know, to achieve fame; we want people we don’t know, to achieve power. We want strangers who are nearly guaranteed to remain lifetime strangers, to make the big decisions that impact us personally. And, deep down, we want them to make secret deals with each other they would not make with us.

And we want those super-people to have super-powers of some kind, to be able to do things any ol’ schmuck would not be able to do.

Like everything else on this list, the minute we get rid of it, it seems there are many among us who want it back again. And, among the people who want it back again, very many of them took point on the project to dispose of it in the first place.

brutal.
- seattle | 02/05/2011 @ 12:23
Of all the leftist politicians and political figures out there who complain “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” have you ever stopped to notice how many of them are breathtakingly wealthy?

That was my favorite part of campaign 2004 by far. Living as I did in a college town, I was surrounded by people who thought it was exceedingly clever to sport “Billionaires for Bush” bumper stickers. It gave me great joy to point out that their putative candidate, one John F. Kerry, actually was a billionaire…. and that he in fact married into it, European royalty-style.

Good times. That’s why I’ve always maintained that cognitive dissonance is a myth. If it were real, there would be no liberals, as their heads would’ve exploded long since.
- Severian | 02/05/2011 @ 16:18
Morgan, in #4, you are referring to the NYU student protest thing they had in the cafeteria or some such place. I remember that pompous gasbag going “we need to democratically discuss consensus to decide blah blah blah.” A truly emasculated… man? Can we call him a man?
- KG | 02/05/2011 @ 16:54

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