norswap

As seen in one of Scott's linkdumps. I thought it was interesting enough to deserve discussion here. Scott's comment: > Hotel Concierge, everyone’s favorite Tumblr cultural commentator who is definitely not secretly The Last Psychiatrist, has another magnum opus out – Shame And Society. My favorite excerpt: “Make no mistake, the performative sadness is not consequent to the pursuit of hedonism; it is a justification.” Deserves a lot closer reading and more discussion than I probably have the time and energy to give it. The thing is long, and at times intricate. It meanders a lot and you're left wondering what point is being made and how it relates to the bigger picture. Yet it made all kinds of light bulbs go firework in my head, and if only on the strength of the connections that are being made between disparate culture-war memes, I would recommend this piece. It's almost impossible to summarize, but I'll give it the old college try, focusing on the big picture and the parts that had an impact on me. It's probably partly wrong. Broadly, the piece is about the fetishization of surface behaviors, and how society (in a broad sense — Moloch) encourages this. We require signalling (checkboxing), and we're on a path where these requests become more and more intricate and demanding. As a result, we spend most of our time performing. The concierge ascribes this to a transition from metis (“hard to express,” “local,” “accumulated, experiential knowledge”) to episteme (“top-down,” “abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge”). The global culture swallows the local cultures. " Checkboxes become more granular and the list of permissible narratives shrinks. Everyone sends the same signals so the signals lose meaning." Shame is a force to coerce you into the checkboxes, the real heroes are those that require the least amount of coercive shame. You can avoid shame by performing guilt. But perversely, the causality reverses: guilt sanction cruelty rather than absolving it.