B. Willem Holtrop
Everyone’s got the ick.
What Christopher Lasch wrote about in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) has continued to worsen us into a pointedly neurotic, self-serving society, one that is increasingly incapable of love, community, or collaboration. One that seems convinced that pathological narcissism is self-protection, indicative of choice and freedom.
A quintessential Capitalist American delusion, the worst raison d’être.
It’s not that the ick hasn’t always been around or that it’s not real; it’s that now the ick, no matter what it is, is a deal breaker. It would appear that the idea of meeting in the middle is so inconceivable to us in this late-stage hell. We are incapable of compromise; we stay stuck in loops of deep neuroticism; we see red flags everywhere; we’re allergic to everything.
Similarly to what I wrote about in #12 (my cultural BPD theory), we are armed and ready to shut anyone down; everyone else is the problem. We log on to perform our disgust for others, as though this signals some sort of refinement or discernment, when in fact, all it does is serve as an example of how far we’ve taken our collective paranoia.
Our inflated sense of self has come to absorb the most delusional belief: that we deserve exactly what we want, that such a thing exists, and that we can order people up like a fucking Uber Eats and get a refund for the smallest mistakes.
I’ve written a lot on the dangers of our increasingly anti-social behaviors and how we de-fang ourselves politically and socially each time we retreat into our new autistic instincts. Even worse is how we take pride in those instincts: adults acting like children, recoiling from each other for the most ridiculous reasons imaginable, refusing logic, pointing and laughing, and staying in one place, like toddlers stuck in the No phase.
The ick will always be real; it’s how much importance we give it and our ability to move on from it that requires crucial adjustment. We let it become a wall; we let ourselves become impossible; we let love die.
Our minds are phobic and overwrought; we move further and further away from knowing what we want and closer to what we don’t, and our pickiness becomes precise. We end up telling ourselves we’re better off alone, traumatized by the idea of “settling” — a true Capitalist nightmare. A heart overwhelmed by choice, a head too sick to hear it.
Maybe all I’m suggesting here is that we not be so cavalier with our icks, that we sit with them and examine them instead of taking them as hard proof or deadly diagnosis.
Or, you know, we can all keep strangling ourselves with our impossible standards, waiting for sex robots, dying alone with perfect taste.
Yeah, that will show them.
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Thank you. This really needs to be required reading.