Category: argument

Feudalism of the Soul

You will never escape yourself.

I could write a long story about my unavailable father, how he did about three things with me as a kid and those only after knock-down drag-out fights with my mother, how he complained to her constantly about his own comforts and inconveniences while she was in hospice, and after her horrible lingering cancer death, how shameful he became, indulging in emotional abusiveness to a degree far beyond the excuse of grieving. Much of it was directed at me. And I suspect he hasn’t stopped being an asshole; though, we haven’t spoken in years. He found his true calling late in life.

My father, in short, was an emotionally stunted, highly manipulative, self-obsessed, cruel, dishonorable man, who liked to pretend otherwise—sometimes to himself, but always to non-family. He liked to lie. Still, I knew him and I’ve been on guard for most of my adult life because of it. I didn’t want to become like him. I worried that, because he was my father, I was somehow destined to devolve into an approximation of him in an Appointment in Samarra sense—that no matter how hard I ran in the other direction, I was just running headlong towards some kind of genetic destiny.

Like he said to me once about not wanting to be Catholic: I said, “I have a list of problems with Catholicism and, honestly, I don’t consider myself a Catholic at all. I’m not one.” He laughed at me and said, “You got baptized and were raised Catholic. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll always be a Catholic.” That made me angry. But that’s all he wanted.

He made a big noise about being Catholic my whole childhood. And then, when it suited him, he gleefully helped an unimpressive, desperate woman at the back end of unkind middle age into a state of abject adultery, which I believe is a grave, mortal sin according to the church. But whatever. It’s just one example of many. He didn’t actually take Catholicism seriously all those years. Acting righteous and upright just fit his brand.

But this isn’t really about my father. It’s about the myth that we become our parents, usually in the most disagreeable ways. There’s supposed to be a moment of clarity, perhaps sometime in our late 30s, where we pause and declare, horrified, that I’ve become my mother! Cute, but no, you haven’t unless you made a conscious effort to make her same bad choices. Even then, you wouldn’t really be her in any meaningful way. You will never escape yourself.

Certainly, character is influenced by upbringing. But such influence can only be one developmental consideration among many. You are you. Celebrate that. You are an individual, and neither facile social constructivism nor the ancient mythology of blood can take your individuality away. Those are nice ideas to play with. Maybe they make good stories or seeds of stories. But you are not without unique agency. When you look in the mirror, one person looks back, not your ancestors, not your parents, not your extended family. Just you. And you are more than the sum of those parts. Of course, that perspective implies a certain degree of responsibility on your part.

People love to flirt with powerlessness. It’s freeing to feel like you can’t make a mistake (because you can’t make a real decision when everything about you is already fixed). You’re a known quantity. You’re traveling on rails. So relax. You don’t have to change. Growth is a myth. Ethics? Don’t make me laugh. Self-initiation into a better way of life? Don’t kid yourself. Just make the same lousy choices you’ve always made because that’s what your parents and maybe grandparents did. It’s fate, baby!

One day, all this will be yours.

This train of thought gets applied to the good things, too. But it’s just as ill-conceived. Maybe grandma was a saint (unlikely, but let’s say). How’s that working out for you today? If you consider yourself something of a genetic reincarnation of her, you might feel very superior to your fellow dirt ape. But if you still happen to be standing in front of the mirror, you may want to ask your reflection what happened. Isn’t grandma a direct ancestor in your bloodline? Between us, your halo’s missing and your pumpkin bread leaves something to be desired.

Was Uncle Bob a pedophile? Are you having tendencies? No? Did Aunt Phoebe run a dance company for the blind for 30 years all by herself? Nice! Then why is it that you can barely hold down a crummy office job and you’re afraid of your manager? Aunt Phoebe and 100 blind soldiers of the Nutcracker shake their heads at you from ballerina Valhalla.

These old myths seem like rationalizations for economic injustices at best, for path dependencies in coercive cultures, for systemic brutality, for the angst of staying where you are, staying who you are, maintaining the microcosmic and macrocismic status quo, and never risking change.

If things “run in the blood,” what use are you if you discover your ancestors were awful? You’re good as a slave, maybe. You’re good as a consumer, as an addict, as a drinker and a fiend. Just like dad.

Feudalism, for all its romance, is actually fucking brutal—on the mind, on the self-conception, as well as on the body, on generation after generation. And in many ways, feudalism is alive and well today in the myths of the old world that we’ve unthinkingly inherited.

Assistant chief Starlink engineer when ordered to fall on his sword.

In the 1980s, we learned about the zaibatsu system, which seemed a whole lot more Tokugawa than Datsun. In the 1990s, we had the rise of multinational tech conglomerates, which we don’t have to say much about along these lines, since they’re now up in our orifices 24/7.

Those were the easy feudalisms. But there’s a deeper, more spiritual vassalage at work: call it feudalism of the soul. And it says the liege lord is there by virtue of divine right. You are here by the providence of that same organizing principle. And if your life is nasty, brutish, and short, well, it’s just who you are.

But it really isn’t. You still get to choose.

Rhetorical Edgelordism and the Summary Dismissal

[Edgelord:] Even from its earliest uses, the word carries the connotation of eye-rolling skepticism.  The edge in edgelord comes from expressions like cutting edge or the idea of being edgy, applying a sense of boldness or unconventionality to such behavior; the lord half elevates such a person ironically with the rank of a deity or member of British nobility, with echoes of Voldemort, Sauron, and other dark-spirited, villainous characters who hold that title. — “Doing the Work of the Edgelord,” Merriam-Webster.com

Lately, on political news blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, we’ve been seeing a lot of summary dismissals of arguments, particularly those which are racially or pandemically charged.  This might suggest people are more stressed out than ever.  One rarely sees argumentative moves like this when times are calm, even in the divisive cesspools of social media and in the freewheeling comments areas still permitted by news sites. 

Only when people begin to crack under sweeping emotional strain do they start to become rhetorically evasive and nihilistic.  They want to appear as though they’re open to reasoned discussion and debate, but really they want to close down the conversation and talk about their cats.  In a sense, I don’t blame them.  We’re in a very emotionally difficult moment right now.  And no one wants to admit to having an exploding head.  

We might classify this particular evasion as a form of “rhetorical edgelordism”—an attempt to disingenuously self-protect by dismissing an argument while also trying to seem like the smartest, most incisive person in the room. 

If someone says, “It could be A or it could be B,” the edgelord adds, “No, A and B are a false choice because C,” which invalidates them, ostensibly ending the discussion.  Usually the person bringing C is upset with having to choose between A or B and wishes to redefine the choice as (A vs B) vs C—where C is much less controversial, threatening, or applicable.

C is usually something exotic. In order to function as a blanket dismissal, C can’t use the ideas from A or B (because then it falls into the scope of original discussion).  It has to be from a distant discipline or sphere, so far outside the purview of A or B that the core argument gets derailed. 

Here’s an example: “COVID-19 originated in fruit bats” (A) vs. “It was bio-evolved in a Chinese lab” (B). Then (C) pops up: “Actually, statistics have shown social attitudes to pandemics track according to political party affiliation, if you want to talk relevance when it comes to the virus.”  Ironically, C itself is immensely and obviously irrelevant to what’s being talked about.  But unless it is instantly ignored by everyone, it’s work is done.

People who see this move might point out the scope creep.  But by then the thrust of the original discussion has already fractured.  In our example, we’re now talking about at least 3 issues: (1) the bat theory vs the lab theory, (2) the new political party theory, and (3) whether the new political party theory matters or is an irrelevant digression.  Now it’s much easier for the edgelord to divert the argument, self-soothe, and still pose as the edgy freethinker not caught up in the preoccupations of A vs B conformist thinking.  At this point, we’re about three or four rhetorical steps away from looking at a jpg of his cat, Waffles.

In healthy discussions (with psychologically healthy people), this is sometimes called “reframing the issue,” and it’s a perfectly legitimate way of clarifying a subject under consideration—when it focuses on getting at a deeper point significant to A and B.  In the example, this might be something like, “The issue of whether the virus originated in fruit bats or in a lab actually raises the deeper question of whether determining the origin will matter to developing a vaccine.”  Here, the reframe is aiming at a link between both A and B and trying to enhance and clarify the discussion by pointing that link out.  The test is relevance: A and B are both compelling because they are interested in how we know and therefore can control the global outbreak.  But when reframing is done as a way to distract and dismiss by bringing in an extraneous consideration, there are usually disingenuous motives at work.

People who didn’t live through the online evolution of bulletin boards, newsgroups, and discussion forums (all of which disappeared eventually into the reeking maw of social media), might not recognize this tactic as a largely online way of posturing and pseudo-arguing.  Like most rhetorical strategies born in the disinhibited, critical-thinking-starved world of the internet, it’s largely an empty, counterproductive tactic, an emotional time and energy sink best avoided.

Still, during a lockdown, when we’re spending more of our lives online as opposed to in person, pointing these things out might be worthwhile.  They’re no longer the sole province of trolls, basement dwellers, loudmouths, and fakes.  As we move toward the 2021 US Presidential election, social tensions flare, and the virus dances in the streets, stress levels are likely to soar.  And, in cases where public discourse is critical, we might even see close friends and family posing as the edgelord in the room while surreptitiously looking for the exit.