liminalOyster » Tue Jan 24, 2017 8:11 am wrote:I have to admit I find it exceedingly challenging to believe Spencer (or Gavin Mcinnes) is not simply doing an Andy Kaufman bit. I know this is wrong but, in addition to the real fear and concern it inspires, it's also just so incredibly fucking ridiculous.
So is Trump. Arguably so was Hitler: a performance piece by a frustrated artist. So are a lot of people outside politics of this kind. What's the difference? They are narcissists, as it's called. They serve their egos and imagos by adopting a character and staging a show to attract an audience. They are wounded in some way that life wounds, and they want to make up for it. They very closely attend to their followers, establishing a feedback-reinforcement loop. It's always about their struggle. They work the stupid, consciously or not, and adapt accordingly. There are the actual stupid, about 30% of any random population, and then, sometimes (but not always) more insidiously, there is the stupid in every audience, every person. (Which is why you can also get echo chambers of Davos Men.) The results often look like parody to the critical observer. They even learn from parody. Parody explores new forms for them to pursue. It does not matter, not immediately, because all that matters is that it works in the now, that it gives pleasure in the present, that there is power in its enactment. If the practitioner did not already believe the bullshit, they have to come to believe it and embody it fully because that
works better. There's so much competition! It is a form of lifetime method acting for bad actors (in both senses). It's part of what I keep calling kayfabe, although that's unfair to the wrestlers. We're also in the neo-kayfabe era, when everyone knows on some level it's kayfabe and studies how to do it, can use more than a century of scientific manuals on its practice in every one of a thousand forms. Self-improvement, how to sell, social psychology, propaganda, population management, etc. Manifold! The morphological similarity of the Alt-Right practice to PUA practice probably explains more of the affinity of MRA to Alt-Right than does shared ideology or world-view. You are free, because you write yourself. It's about enacting the power circuit. Play your role. One wins more by becoming one's character. All you have to surrender is a prior self that you did not design. There is no necessary bottom to how much like a drag act it's going to look, how hypocritical or theatrical or parodical or ridiculous to the ones who aren't playing in the piece. A bottom only reveals itself when it reaches its limits. By then there is no stopping the performance. It's why they still play their characters in those few cases when the history turns a certain way and they end up as defendants in capital criminal trials.
Spencer's been pretty open about pursuing an exterminationist program. He has written that "we" should be having a discussion about how to eliminate the black race. Having read some of that rhetoric and seen that video, I still would not have punched him, because I don't punch, but would have felt a strong urge to do so, sure, because I do feel that urge in many cases, like almost anyone else. And I understand those who are celebrating the punching. Obviously he's infinitely worse than the puncher (knowing nothing else about the puncher than that he punched him). There is no common scale here. Then again, maybe the puncher will turn out to have been a confederate. Post-reality, false-flag, stage everything, right? That, by the way, is the story that the Alt-Right would have been reflexively spreading immediately, if a leftist or a "cuck" had been punched (or shot in Seattle) by someone in a mask: that the perp was really a confederate or someone from the same camp.
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