Do we dare allow reason to trump anger?

Ben Shapiro writes at National Review,

We must stop allowing anger to be its own justification.
We’re living in the era of “authenticity.”

Once upon a time, human beings strove not to be authentic — at least not in public. Self-control was predicated on the idea that our most authentic selves had to be overcome by reason and civility. Sure, you hated Bob from accounting — but you were a better person because you never said so, and you treated Bob decently whenever you saw him. The book of Proverbs suggested, “Fools give vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end.” Ecclesiastes recommended, “Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools.” And Aristotle suggested that anger, while useful, should only be channeled in service of reason.

Thanks to the ubiquity of social media, however, those who withhold their true emotions are now seen as inauthentic. Reason must never trump anger — allowing reason to trump anger is a sign of insincerity.

The same holds true of new Democratic stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who has been hailed as the avatar of the new Leftism, or Bernie Sanders, who channeled the supposed rage of the youth, or Donald Trump, the man who captured the anger of conservatives. Overt displays of fury act as predicates to trust: We know we can trust people who can’t control themselves, or who won’t control themselves. They’re not lying to us.

...Our addiction to anger must stop. Anger may be authentic, but there’s no reason to trust angry people to wield power responsibly.

Read more here.

Are you authentically living who you really are?

Atomic Betty writes,

...I wanted to write that book so badly. It was about the freedom we enjoy in this country about our right to pursue happiness. It was mostly a political book. The problem aside from being a big success phony, I realized pretty much all of politics was made up of phonies. Holy God, politics is like the mother ship of phonies. I learned 99.9% of all politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about your happiness. Then the lines became very blurred on who the good guys were. And I abandoned my book. (But there was this great chapter about the Foo Fighters I really wish you could have read. It was a thing of beauty.)

I started several other books since then. I didn’t finish any of them. It never felt “right”. But I’ve come to realize that writing isn’t always about when you feel like it. After reading Stephen King’s book On Writing, I felt my ass had sufficiently been kicked by the almighty, admittedly creepy, astonishingly talented, King of the modern publishing world. He wrote, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” As a matter of fact, reading about his journey, especially his struggle, was like a light shining through a cathedral’s stained glass window that before I had only stared at in the dark. Finally, I got it. It was crystal clear and it was beautiful.

...I just realized today, however, this is the book I was meant to write.

It’s about how real happiness in life is found when we are authentically living who we truly are. Much of our lives are concerned with putting on airs. We have to become someone specific at our jobs. We try to be someone else with our children. We struggle to be who we truly are in our relationships. All because we want that love, acceptance, and maybe a raise.

Read more here.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

"No virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness"

David Ernst, writing at The Federalist, reminds us of a speech Donald Trump gave at the Al Smith dinner just days before the election.

And a special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true. The politicians. They’ve had me to their homes. They’ve introduced me to their children. I’ve become their best friends in many instances. They’ve asked for my endorsement and they’ve always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then suddenly, decided when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.

Ernst's analysis:

In other words: even if I have been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel, what does that make you? At least I don’t pretend to be decent; you people, on the other hand, have the gall to pretend that you’re any better than I am. Let’s dispense with the fiction that you would have treated me with any less contempt if I had bothered to live up to any of your standards of decency in the first place, and acknowledge that they have nothing to do with decency per se, and everything to do with power. Your presumption of any moral superiority is a willful, bald-faced lie, and I’m going to keep calling you on that crap until it puts me in the White House.

...In contrast to the many religions, systems of moral thought, and other ancient traditions that have distinguished every effort to better the human condition, postmodernism presumes that all of these endeavors are the cause of human failure. It therefore, operates according to just one moral imperative: discredit anything that other people presume to stand for goodness, because the belief that anything is superior to anything else inevitably results in prejudice, interpersonal strife, and inequality.

Thus, the Venus de Milo has no more aesthetic value than a crucifix in a jar full of urine; Beethoven’s symphonies are no more profound than the latest round of top 40 hits; all religions are fundamentally the same, and their “moderate” postmodern adherents are all comfortably represented on the “Coexist” bumper sticker. In a sense, it isn’t culture at all, but rather an anti-culture that measures success insofar as it deconstructs anything that other people value.

Provided that the postmodern man believes in nothing and values nothing, one wouldn’t be unreasonable in concluding that he cares about nothing. But anyone who knows postmodern man also knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, the “cult of non-discrimination” is filled with bright-eyed idealism about making the world a better place, and in the cases where it challenges baseless prejudice, it does make the world a better place. Like other utopian visions that seek to remake human beings into something alien to their nature, however, it is incapable of compromise, and thus lends itself to hypocrisy and fanaticism.

PC’s fakeness is only outdone by its fanaticism, which has grown with considerable intensity in recent years. Everything from Brendan Eich’s firing from Mozilla for donating to Proposition 8 in California, to the eruption of protests on college campuses over the offensiveness of Halloween costumes, to the controversy over state laws that restrict bathroom usage according to biology rather than gender identity, suggest that the postmodern “cult of nondiscrimination” only grows more desperate the more it succeeds. What gives?

The answer is that the postmodern man ultimately finds satisfaction in the only thing that is left for him: power. Moral superiority is an undeniable source of power over other people, and postmodernism’s moral imperative offers it cheaply to anyone who accepts its premises. The power to shut others up by merely insinuating that they are a bigot is subtle, but its potency is difficult to overstate.

...As they run out of traditions, institutions, and customs to deconstruct, however, the more diluted the power rooted in their outrage becomes. Hence the growth in moral hysteria over ever smaller and more trivial things.

...As soon as the PC outrage machine decides something is wrong with whatever you think, then it has no interest in your thoughts or reasoning: you must submit or remain silent.

All this raises an uncomfortable question for people who have no use for PC’s agenda, and who value the freedom to think for themselves. How do you respond to someone who is determined to smear you for your alleged bigotry regardless of what you think and why? How do you win an argument against someone who willfully changes the meaning of words, maintains that the truth is completely relative, and feels perfectly justified in accusing virtually anyone of the gravest moral failure?

...Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.

If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable.

Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a buffoon and scorn for being the next Hitler. Better yet, they figured that his astounding rise confirmed everything they had long assumed about half the country and were now free to say out loud: they are indeed a basket of irredeemable racist, sexist, homophobic deplorables. Mainstream Republicans would surely hop on board the progressive train rather than be associated with these creeps.

So I’m a scoundrel because I don’t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I’m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p—y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I’m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You’re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.

Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I’m authentic, at least I’m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.

So say goodnight to the bad guy! Because this bad guy is now our president.

Read more here.

Can we know truth?

Jeff Costello is consumed with living in truth.

Yes, it is true that in all societies, throughout all time, most have been fundamentally unconcerned with truth, and content to parrot the lies that guarantee social acceptance and advancement.

Read much more here.

The GOP over-promised and under-delivered; so did the Democrats!

Ed Morrisey writes at Fiscal Times,

Forget experience, policies, and ideology in the 2016 presidential primary fights, in both parties. Voters have less concern over those traditional priorities for candidates in exchange for another quality altogether – authenticity. While pundits bemoan the rise of political novices and demagogues who have enough of that currency to prosper, that shift comes from a rational reaction to American politics over the last generation, and both Democrats and Republicans alike share the blame for the shift.

In 2010 and again in 2014, Republicans won back control of Capitol Hill by promising not just to stop Barack Obama’s agenda but reversing it, even though simple majority control in Congress isn’t sufficient to do so while Obama remains president. The GOP overpromised and under delivered--a classic set-up for discouragement and backlash.

Democrats have not performed much better with their own base. Obama and the party’s leadership have sounded the usual progressive-populist alarms about Wall Street and supersized banks and corporations, but have done nothing to address those issues. The Obama administration has never prosecuted any corporate leaders over the financial collapse that led to the Great Recession, a point made by Ben Bernanke this past week, despite their fanning of Occupy Wall Street’s rhetorical flames.

...Now with the e-mail scandal moving into a full-scale FBI probe, Clinton’s authenticity crisis has reached its nadir. Only a third of voters in three key swing states (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania) believe Hillary to be honest and trustworthy, while two-thirds put their trust in Joe Biden. This may seem ironic, given that Biden’s first presidential bid collapsed due to his plagiarism, but it points to the weakness of Clinton’s position.

...Authenticity means more than just a personal connection – it means delivering on those promises, a lesson both parties are learning the hard way in 2015.

Read more here.

Wound dwellers

Leslie Jamison wonders if pain is the "unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness." But why dwell in one's wounds?

Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color. And yet—​beyond and beneath their fruits—​they still hurt. The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it. It’s perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is wound appeal, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it promises what it rarely gives. My friend Harriet put it like this: “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

A Google search for the phrase “I hate cutters”yields thousands of results, most of them from informal chat boards. There’s even a Facebook group called “I hate cutters”: This is for people who hate those emo kids who show off there cuts and thinks it is fun to cut them selves [sic]. Hating cutters crystallizes a broader disdain for pain that is understood as performed rather than legitimately felt.It’s usually cutters who are hated (wound-​dwellers!), rather than simply the act of cutting itself. It’s the actual people who get dismissed, not just the verbs of what they’ve done. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but what’s that “just” about? A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—​and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It’s not just that women are prone to hurting—​a pain that never goes away—​but also that they’re prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men … [their] pain reports are taken less seriously.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’ ”

The general outline goes something like this: girl gets her period; girl gets scared; girl gets mocked. Girl’s mother never told her she was going to bleed. Girl gets elected prom queen and gets a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her head just when things start looking up. Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don’t—​until she starts doing unto others as they have done—​hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.

Then, there is the post-wounded woman:

These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-​wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-​wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: These women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-​wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-​wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don’t cry too loud; don’t play victim. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt. Post-​wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it; they refuse to hurt about it or to admit they hurt about it—​or else they are endlessly self-​aware about it, if they do allow themselves this hurting.

Read much more here.