| For those who have not read the piece yet, the starting paragraphs of Part 3 are especially good: > In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. > I find it obscene. > There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. We have all met those people. It reminds me of something that PG said: fanboys become your worst haters. That is, it's a small step from intense love to intense hate. He also said somewhere that there is a higher incidence of bad actors/sociopaths among founders of non-profits than for-profits among the teams he's met. The way I think about it is: ideology is dual use. The two uses are collective good and individual gain. Those are often hopelessly entangled, because a good way to get ahead is by presenting oneself as selflessly working toward the common good. Cue Ayn Rand... What that means here is we can criticize both Chimananda and her critic as "playing the game". It's possible to see their actions as selfish or selfless or most likely both at once. The lesson I draw from Chimananda's story, though, is that people who are out to fight dragons (i.e. defeat the forces of evil in society) are liable to turn you into their next dragon. The revolution eats its own. It happened to Basecamp, too. That is one reason why startups that want to thrive should not hire activists for whom being woke is central to their identity. They will outwoke you, too, no matter how woke you thought you were. |