The Generalized Other
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly Every Friday @ 6:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
The Philosopher Queens w/ Rachel Haywire and Raven Connolly. August 28th, 2020. 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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August 27, 2020
Jeremy Johnson returned to The Stoa earlier in the week and provided a good faith critique of the Cancel God piece I created that got released last month on HighExistence and Rebel Wisdom. It was a treat to invite Jeremy back to The Stoa, as he is consistently coherent and treats his interlocutors with respect. I was happy to learn from him.
It seems that his event brought new attention to the Cancel God, and this comedian tweeted it out, which had a bunch of comments. To use my quick culture war pattern matching, I’d place him in the Democratic socialist and Chapo Trap House memetic tribal constellation, or what is known as the dirtbag left.
These types like to dunk hard on Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette types, who they see as oversensitive to wokeism, and their style of humour is what I’d call hyper snark. I found one of the comments replies funny, most lame, and others really nasty, e.g. “That guy definitely raped some passed out girl in college. 100%.”
Oh man. This was probably my first taste of culture war noise coming my way since putting myself on the internet (which was around September 2018). Reading those comments stung at first, especially in the hyper snark style they were delivered in, which conveys something like: this is so self-evidentially bad and barely worth our time to comment but we’ll squeeze out some mockery anyways.
It has the feel of the cool kids in highschool making fun of you. I get that this style is in-group signalling for this tribe though, and after the initial sting it was a good opportunity to practice my Stoicism, and build-up some “internet skin” to these sorts of things.
It is also good to find the signal in noise, and I would say when I initially did the voice-over for the animation and filming for Rebel Wisdom, I felt like I was presenting the idea with way too much seriousness, which I see can appear cringe to some. It appears cringe to me at times. It is always good to be humbled when you take yourself too seriously, and those who have the proclivity to engage in hyper snark are good at spotting people who take themselves too seriously.
I did premeditations to prepare myself for getting caught up in culture war noise, and one thing I really do not want to get caught up in is getting triggered, and hit back out of ego. Instead, I want to use these moments to strengthen my sovereignty, and build my inner citadel, and respond, if I need to respond, in a kind way that encourages future dialogue.
The Cancel God piece is really an art piece that serves as a culture war Rorschach test. How you respond to it teases out your political views. For example, Mike Cernovich retweeted the piece a few weeks ago and a bunch of MAGA types, most who seemed like bots to me, started to tweet it out in support of their narrative. And few people, like Maria Clara Parente, who is more “my people,” will see past the culture war noise and run with the piece in intellectually rich directions.
There is this term I like from George Herbert Mead called the generalized other. This “other” is what society expects of us, it is the social rules we need to follow. I like this concept because I do think we carry around this anthropomorphized version of these rules, which is deeply internalized. This helps make the rules feel more real.
We automatically outsource our “choice-making” to this generalized other, and each memetic tribe in the culture war has its own. If you're firmly tribalized in a memeplex, you are strongly tethered to one generalized other. If you are a meta weirdo like me, who is someone that is “up for grabs” philosophically and politically, you can sense into many generalized others trying to influence you.
I do not think it is a wise move to fight against them, or submit to them wholly, but to become friends with them, so you can learn what you can from them, even if what you learn is a simple lesson like not presenting yourself so seriously.
I sense the more you “dialogue” with these generalized others, the unconscious bits of your own generalized other becomes more clear. How many social rules and expectations are you living by that are not only doing you a disservice, but doing the world a disservice by you following them?
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