#neoliberal narcissism

[nando161mando]

I joined a bunch of landlord groups to subtly manipulate them into being better people.

[transmutationisms]

Would you be willing to talk a little more on what you mean about us society not really being an individualistic one, rather a massified one? I guess I interpreted that as being a comment on how people flippantly refer to a society such as the us as being individualistic but I guess greater scrutiny breaks that down when you realise the amount of struggle that comes from not meeting the status quo ideal (and being deemed useful), and that really the power of being an 'individual' is given only to a select few. But I find this interesting because a lot of my leftie friends (and I have also been guilty of this and not previously realised) will definitely be like oh the UK is a super individualistic society when we're maybe really trying to make a point about something else ... Anyway, am I barking up the right tree at all and do you have any wider thoughts on the difference between those two ideas (often conflated) you'd be happy to share? Is the idea of the individual still helpful in terms of understanding the mythos of the US and also the UK in using it as a powerful idea larping at meritocracy at least in contrast to actual senses of community...

oh this is just something that irritates me in a lot of left and left-adjacent discourse—the slippage from a correct observation that capitalism denies us a lot of social support and connection, to the unfounded and frankly reactionary assertion that it in some way values or respects individuality or individuals' autonomy. i think this plagues a lot of discussions of 'egotism' & so forth. in truth i don't think we're facing some kind of epidemic of self-centredness or 'narcissism' (lmao) or whatever—i think , again, it's an economic context that is structured around the construct of the individual, and that's alienating and harmful. but at the same time—and particularly since the increasing use of population management, social statistics, state medical authority &c from the 18th century onward—we are also in an economic context that treats the population as a mass to be controlled and surveilled (hence 'massifying'—sorry to borrow an ugly term from an ugly foucault translation) & it's unhelpful to characterise this as any kind of genuine attention to individuality or the autonomous ego. it is certainly true that esp neoliberal discourse relies on the invocation of the self-sufficient individual (talking esp here about the post reaganite/thatcherite US/UK) but it's overly credulous to extrapolate from this that like, austerity politics actually has any interest in protecting individual rights, desires, &c. actually the entire 'individual rights' paradigm is kind of irksome imo because it presents the 'right' as something calcified and possessed by the individual rather than a social relation arising from a social context—but even leaving this aside for a second, like, it is just not viable to argue that the US or UK (to take the obvious examples again) genuinely are protecting or valuing individuals in any way lmao. like, what part of cutting benefits, extending work hours, breaking labour power, &c does that? ultimately i don't usually find "individualism" a particularly helpful schema for political / economic analysis. i think it's often a confusion of a few different things: a purely rhetorical analysis of reactionary liberal claims; a response to alienation that should be analysed as materially grounded; an openly reactionary response to a perceived loss of power for social institutions like the church or the family, &c.

[avoidantrecovery]

Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han

“Today we talk about positive power, neoliberalism, narcissism as a reaction to modern life, how technology makes isolation easier, and some tactics to find peace in the digital panopticon.”

[haggishlyhagging]

The history of drawing on feminist language and theory to sell products has been driven by the idea that female consumers are empowered by their personal consumer choices—indeed, that choice, rather than being a means to an end, is the end itself. The idea that it matters less what you choose than that you have the right to choose is the crux of "choice feminism," whose rise coincided with the rapid, near-overwhelming expansion of consumer choice that began in the 1980s. Consumption, always associated with status, became elevated as a measure of liberation and swelled with the self-obsession of the privileged but insecure. Tom Wolfe identified this dynamic in his coinage of the term "Me Decade," and later satirized it in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Historian Christopher Lasch, author of the 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, laid the enshrinement of a cycle of consumption and neediness at the doorstep of the advertising and marketing industries, but also excoriated left-wing movements, feminism included, as enablers. (The temperamentally antifeminist Lasch would later target burgeoning marketplace feminism in his posthumously published collection Women and the Common Life, writing that "the feminist movement, far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own.")

The feminist cultural historian and media critic Susan J. Douglas has noted, for instance, that the success of advertising to women in the 1980s hinged on its effective pairing of status and power with liberation. As neoliberal, greed-is-good, if-I-have-an-umbrella-it-must-not-be-raining rhetoric became the common tongue of the overclass, luxury beauty products, designer labels, and exercise regimens (Buns of Steel, anyone?) became liberatory achievements, rather than mere consumer goods. "For women in the age of Reagan," wrote Douglas, "elitism and narcissism merged in a perfect appeal to forget the political already, and get back to the personal, which you might be able to do something about.” The representations of choice in a time of tacit postfeminism translated neatly into what could be called "empowertising"—an advertising tactic of lightly invoking feminism in acts of exclusively independent consuming.

Take the infamous 1994 billboards for Wonderbra that featured model Eva Herzigova looking down in delight at her suddenly pneumatic breasts swelling out of a scalloped black bra, alongside the words "Hello Boys." The Wonderbra had been sold in the UK since the mid-1960s, but sales rocketed up thanks to the billboards. The ads worked so well in part because they were tongue-in-check (others in the series read "Look me in the eyes and tell me you love me" and "... Or are you just happy to see me?"), but also because they assumed a level of what feminist theorist Angela McRobbie calls "feminism taken into account"—a belief that the movement's success has rendered it irrelevant as something to be considered in shaping culture. You can almost hear the rationale proffered in the Wonderbra billboard concept review: "This would seem sexist if we didn't know better, but we do know better, and because women know we know better, this is, in fact, empowering." If Herzigova, Kate Moss, and the millions of other women who sent Wonderbras flying out of department stores were making the choice to wear this underpinning, and they’re exhibiting sexual agency in doing so, such logic went, what's more feminist than that?

There are no concrete numbers on how many consumers indulged that postmodern reading of the ads, but based on Herzigova's own reflections twenty years later, probably not a ton. Recalling the billboards (which, in 2011, were voted the most iconic ever by Britain's Outdoor Media Centre), she initially told the UK's Mail Online, "My Wonderbra campaign empowered women.... It didn't degrade them like some said." But in the same article, Herzigova complained that when she tried to shift from modeling to acting, Hollywood executives wanted to check out her underthings first: "I met people who said, Yes, we can talk about the movie over dinner. I was, like, What dinner? I can just read the script here." The fact that the supposedly empowering ad did nothing to chip away at the routine sexualization of women—that it might have further galvanized it, even—didn't seem to register.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once

[grandhotelabyss]

If the 70s are back, does that vindicate the red scare girls in their promotion of lasch?

The Lauren Duca trajectory described in the Compact article pretty clearly demonstrates the early Red Scare thesis that leftist radicalism was neoliberal narcissism in disguise. Though, confession, I've never actually read The Culture of Narcissism, just The New Radicalism in America and The Revolt of the Elites among Lasch's books, both of which were more capital-P political than psychological in nature. I wonder how the girls' current trajectory refracts this question. Anna's advocacy of open, grandiose narcissism is perhaps not what the self-styled Jeffersonian populist Lasch had in mind, though I find it personally sympathetic.

[ask-a-radfem]

So what do radfems believe that's different?? What makes them different from intersectional feminists, specifically? Because all I can see is that you seem to really, really hate men (just check radblr tag to see what I mean), but when I say that I'm told I don't understand radical feminism but never get it explained to me. Am I just meeting shitty radfems?

On the distortion of "intersectional feminism" into something neoliberal that really has nothing to do with what Crenshaw meant when she came up with the term intersectionality (there's more under my intersectionality tag):

On hating men:

for a "what do radfems even believe then? like, what is it?" check out my first post. Also look at Bindel's book Feminism for Women, which is a book aimed at young women. Order it at your library!

[thenewobjective]

Zoë Mc Pherson ~ Upside Down

The beats seldom stop on Zoë Mc Pherson‘s latest record, and the energy never flags.  And yet the artist has more on their mind than dancing; Mc Pherson also calls out stark indictments of the “neoliberal war machine” and the culture of narcissism.  On the cover, the artist stands resolute and upright, continuing to favor green, offering a natural visual counterpart to the horizontal Pitch…

[negativity-spiral]

At work once again, almost done this night. Just a few more hours. And then I’ll go home.

So many changes as of late. So much death. One of the residents I help take care of in the house. She had a stroke on my shift and she died a week later.

Not that I blame myself. Well. Maybe a little. I blame myself for not recognizing the signs of stroke, although I wasn’t told what the signs of stroke are. And likely even if I was I wouldn’t have been able to understand that’s what was happening with her condition. Apparently neither could my supervisor or her boss who were both helping the shift before. Deflecting. It comes back around to the role I played in the death in my own family. An incidental one. An accidental one. But still a role. Had I not made a plan to see my parents on that day they came over, maybe dad would have been around to stop it happening. But alas. Blaming myself for something so indirect and outside even the periphery of my ability to influence it truly is a useless endeavor.

I’ve come to hate this world. Not all of it. Not in a misanthropic sense. Just. The way all people in my country have been programmed. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about actual politics in places other than the states. Political theory from actual sources. I’ve learned that, over time, most people have had the very notion of the words they need to use to accurately describe the problems with the current government have been systematically disempowered so as to be useless, thereby making them obsolete terminology. I hate this. I hate this neoliberal capitalistic ideal of self sufficiency, self responsibility, and borderline idolized narcissism. The fact is, the reason this world is so hateable, so reprehensible, is not and has never been simply “something deep down in human nature that’s inherent and ever present”. No. Rich men. Authorities. They made all of this happen through decades of careful work. It wasn’t even that hard to do, just a few tricks of human psychology, an encouragement of anti-intellectualism, a lack of moral fiber, and a lack of integrity. That’s all it took. That, and years of waiting for the pushes in the direction of aggression and stupidity to take effect. Soon every element of our lives and ourselves will be within full control of governing bodies. Hell it might as well already be at that point. Things are not going well for the world at large. People are not doing well.

It seems less worth it to try to make the world better. To improve things. We could be living in a utopia if we allocated resources properly, but even the IDEA of utopia has been stripped of all positive associations because “humans are inherently greedy”. Or so say the capitalists, who want you to believe that for all the beauty, generosity, love, kindness, and community out there are all lies perpetuated by idiots who want to manipulate you. Like hitting the nose of a dog to get it pointed in a different direction.

And so we work. And we work. And we work. We live each day waiting for a single emergency to put us under. I am $500 away from being homeless on a given paycheck. If my car gets fucked I have to just suck it up and walk to work or hope people in my community will be able to get me a ride. Because the fact is, I can’t NOT go to work. I’ll die. You’ll die. But no. It’s the other poor people, it’s the other sufferers, it’s the other that are alike to me, it’s they who must surely be the problem. The reason.

Scapegoating is the only effective tactic left for a decent portion of the masses. Flattening. Denuancing. All things simplified. Nothing whole.

Sincerity seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now is only irony and post irony, layers of detachment from any sense of endearing whole joy. The act of wholeheartedly, un-critically enjoying something with no caveats. I wish I didn’t morph myself into shapes I was never meant to fit over my whole life.

I was on hormones for almost a year. It was nice in some ways, the emotional progress was nice. The tits are fun and I enjoyed seeing the progress. The thing that made me stop though, was realizing that if I didn’t I would hit a point of no return. A point where, if I’m not sure that this is what I want, it would be too late to just go back. I would need to either fully embrace this and go whole hog, or get off of it and see how I felt. Still in the “seeing how I feel” stage right now. But more and more I’m coming to understand that the reason I’m afraid of hitting that point of no return was and is completely external. It’s mostly my father. He programmed fear into me in ways I could not begin to describe accurately. His attachment to masculinity and alpha male talking points, his unwillingness to expand his knowledge, his unwillingness to view femininity as something that is a part of every person, that being feminine is just as good as being masculine. All of these things, things which do not matter to me, clearly influence every single element of his life. Sure, he could get over the whole “bisexual polyamorous with 3 partners” thing. But I really truly believe he would be too upset to continue even associating with me. And therein is the problem.

Even though I don’t live with him, and haven’t for almost 6 years, I need him to support me financially. I am fiscally tied to him and mom’s ability to help me. Because I’m absolutely fucked without them. And therein is the conundrum. I know I would survive, I’d make it work. But for how long? And should something go wrong, where do I go? I suppose my other partners’ parents is an option but that’s mooching and they likely won’t be able to give me anything anyway.

I’m going to discuss this soon enough with them. Hopefully. That’s the goal anyway. Because I have to come to some determination about this soon. My paralyzing fear of confrontation has held me back for too long in too many ways. I need to push past it. Move forward. Keep living. Keep loving. Build community, build foundational tools of assistance that all people’s could pull from. But it’s so hard. And I’m so tired. And I just want to rest.

I suppose I should get back to work, much as I loathe every waking second I waste here.

Build community. Focus on others over yourself sometimes. Give a few dollars or a snack to the homeless beggar when you can. Love.

[jerfusipse]

30 de agosto de 2022

"[...] I am not sure that calling narcissism a private religion in a derogatory manner does much to help us understand the issue. It seems to confuse the topic in the same way that claiming capitalism is a religion does. It seems to me that it's the lack of meaningful rituals and communal spaces and traditions that is driving the rise in narcissistic practices and worldviews -- that 'God is dead.'

[...]

Collective narcissism is an attempt to preserve spiritual meaning within a nihilistic, neoliberal society that values efficiency and production at the expense of meaningful, communal traditions and rituals. Traditions we once held as intrinsically meaningful have been turned into little more than self-congratulatory and hedonistic events.

Collective narcissism is not an outcome of delusion and reality-impairment. It is an outcome of the reality which we live in. It is only reality-impairment insofar as it accurately reflects the impairment of society. It is a delusion insofar as it reflects the ways in which western society has deluded itself into believing productivity, efficiency, and empty social statuses are of the greatest value and importance. Collective narcissism is destructive and self-defeating, because there is a collective dissatisfaction with society that is not being addressed. When we feel powerless to change pernicious order, it is only natural that we will covertly attempt to destroy this order through pernicious compliance. It is a type of rebellion and resistance as much as it is a type of submission and participation."

--u/ChainsofAssery

[vomitnest]

white supremacist corporate police state neoliberal fascism rules the world from the shadows by jacketing me in their image, spotlighting me, and manipulating mass consciousness into scapegoating me as being the core of the problem or else as being some kind of silly tourist attraction/ bitch ass whipping-boy for everyone to indulge their narcissism upon. Well i do not exist for your convenience, or your entertainment, or for you to make into a stepping stone so you can bolster your sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical ego.

[boof-chamber]

this shit needs to be called out, it’s so absolutely sickening and pervasive among the so-called “disability justice” and “neurodiversity community” movements.

i am a victim of human trafficking. i have been ignored by every institution that is supposed to help me. my cries for help have been ignored and even mocked by the “online left” community. so much so, that my circumstances and my fear and desperation to escape them have been repeatedly exploited by predators who have only done me further harm for their personal gain.

i had emailed the Stimpunks Foundation to express my frustration with the isolation, apathy, and utter absence of community and solidarity that allowed the violence that was happening to me. i asked them what they meant by “community” - i described my circumstances and what my needs were, and said that i didn’t see anything on their website that indicated anything other than symbolic “community” - i said i was in need of genuine solidarity because that would have made all the difference.

this was their response.

this is not just isolated to the Stimpunks foundation though.

i had been attending groups with Fireweed Collective, and I had also been enrolled in the “transformative mental health curriculum” through IDHA. Both of those organizations also ignored my repeated cries for help.

I know that the toxic element in online leftist spaces is more than likely to bring aggressive and hostile responses to my observations and experiences - people will condemn me for being critical of organizations that are “trying to help.” i need y’all to understand that accountability is necessary for things to get better. criticism is not an “attack” - it should be viewed as an opportunity to reflect and grow, to continually improve. it’s not me destroying these movements, it’s the fear of accountability - theirs.

you CANNOT make a difference by defending this shit - if they were legitimately interested in walking their talk, they would not send a email like this to a community member who is currently in a human trafficking situation and who is begging for legitimate community care. this email only shows that they have no intention of offering legit community.

this is utterly disgusting behavior and it’s way past time that it was called out for what it is. in no world should this be seen as acceptable, and yet here we are. when you attack the messenger to defend this shit, you are part of problem. do you actually want to help? or do you just want credit for it?

[nando161mando]

I Worked For MrBeast, He's A Sociopath Dogpack404 Part 2

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NHFvR0ArXPs&si=qVOB-fQsO-D-AZO6

[allael]

"To state our argument directly: under conditions of hyper-­marketization, family subjectivity experiences the rise of a different form of the superego. This is a crueler and more aggressive form of superego because it lacks the same relay system to ideal egos in institutions and more local vectors of family and community life. There is thus a certain cynicism and ironic distance in how people believe in and relate to institutions that is concurrent to this hyper-marketization. In these conditions, the superego is strengthened in direct proportion to the depletion and the diminishment of the efficacy of ego ideal identifications (Lasch, 1991, p. 12). The social superego is a mediating force, and in what follows, we aim to discuss its effects and how it comes into existence.

The rise of the social superego gives way to a different form of self-making, which for Lasch meant that secondary narcissism—or pathological narcissism—is released as a normalized form of social personality. In other words, narcissism breaks down and undergoes a crisis wherein more pathological forms of “secondary narcissism” become more common: aggressive identifications instead of self-love tend to be the more dominant form of mediation of ideals. Primary narcissism for Freud is akin to Spinoza’s conatus or the necessity of striving and self-preservation. In general, narcissism is marked by a libidinal form of self-love that is sexualized. Lasch replaced the Oedipus complex with the “Narcissus Myth” as the guiding form of subjective life in the early neoliberal period. In so doing, he pointed to this subjective shift in the process of primary narcissism, more precisely, to a pervasive stunting of primary narcissism.

This stunting is directly correlated to the socialization of the family and the increasing dominance of the market intervening in more and more areas of individual psychic life. Socially determined ego-ideal and ideal-ego identifications break down in this situation of pervasive “pathological narcissism,” and the subject perceives the rules of the game in terms of the superego, not the ideal ego grounded in more concrete social relations that are less hampered by capitalist marketization. There was thus a certain reprieve or distance from marketizing logics within the family prior to the rise of this hyper-marketization that meant subjects could manage authority more thoroughly; that is, they could more adequately work through the paternalistic identifications that are constitutive of any family structure. The breakdown of stable ego ideals is what leads to the emergence of the irrational and cruel pre-Oedipal archaic superego, that is, the “social superego.” In this dynamic, the “social” becomes, as Simone Weil wrote, “the only idol,” that is, the social envelops collective life in ways that are all-enveloping and suffocating (Weil, 1955, 117). We can thus understand Thatcher’s dictum “there is no such thing as society” as giving way to the precise opposite reality. Everything is socialized, even the core of our psychic life."

📚 The Palgrave Lacan Series, Daniel Tutt - Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation , 2022.

[philosopheast]

The narcissistic feedback loop of neoliberal positivity focuses on what feels good, rather than what is gracious and just.

Tell Me It’s Going to be OK

[desertsongpdf]

VIDEO ESSAYS (part ??? 2/2) [parts: 1 / 2 / 3 / 3.5 / 4 / 5 / 6], *=personal fav

why are batman movies afraid of robin?

a world of gothic horror: the problem with modern batman stories

batman and robin: when the abyss stares back

how the mandalorian solved hollywood's helmet problem

andor: anti-fascist art

the craft behind succession

how succession crafted the best episode of the year

destroying the old lie: what makes a film truly anti-war

why gods and generals is neo-confederate propaganda (and objectively sucks)

the green knight: the uncanny horror of masculinity*

tenet: nolan has an exposition problem

chicken little is neoliberal propaganda

oops! disney's cars did eugenics*

tim burton's alice in wonderland was a mistake

alice in wonderland's not good sequel

the decline of tim burton*

sherlock is garbage, and here's why*

the kingsman franchise could've been great*

the tom cruise paradox

the autistic horror of don't hug me i'm scared (s1)

the art of overanalyzing movies

james cameron's avatar: dances with white saviours

dont look up - a problematic metaphor for climate change?

dont worry darling: an enigmatic mess

why don't worry darling doesn't work …

3 interpretations of summer

ferb fletcher and the power of stoicism

why 'literally me' characters are so important

analyzing evil: lou bloom from nightcrawler

fight club: a warning for weak men

the time disney remade beauty and the beast

how i wrote fight club

how did they make this?

the revisionist world of disney: mary poppins, walt disney and saving mr. banks

what makes terence fletcher one of the most terrifying villains in film history

sustaining stupidity: cinemasins is terrible

dahmer (2022) should not exist

marvel's defenders of the status quo

the rise and fall of disney's weirdest sitcom

loki, the mcu, and narcissism

why cosmic horror is hard to make

the conspiracy theory iceberg*

pewdiepie is a nazi

jake tran's rise and ...

nft's are legally problematic

why are nft’s so ugly

the most hated artist you probably recognize

who's afraid of modern art: vandalism, video games, and fascism

the nightmare artist

alexander cabanel: fallen angel and academicism

the canvas of babel

ivan the terrible and his son ivan*

the death of graphics in fashion

'degenerate art' in nazi germany

banksy, kurt cobain, and the paradox that claimed them

money killed art. here's how we take it back

7 deadly art sins

everything is television

the manipulative power of design

the hidden histories of queer art

[communist-ojou-sama]

... Do people on this website know that the overwhelming majority of leftists in the third world, where the left is actually making a difference and improving people's lives are ML? Marxist-Leninists organized the farmer protests in India thst forced the actual-fascist Modi regime to walk back neoliberal policies while all the western left has ever done is engage in navel-gazing narcissism. "Red fascism" my ass, have some shame you fucking losers.