The day after I discover Weltschmerz (world-weariness, depressed resignation about the state of things), here comes Jason Pargin writing about the most recent species of it on the left. Specifically, Pargin published a substack post about Bo Burnham's 2021 Netflix special Inside.
The special (which I have not watched, save for the "Welcome to the Internet" song) features an increasingly unkempt, shaggy-haired Burnham seemingly creating a one-man musical performance piece about (and over the course of) the pandemic. Burnham has proven himself a talented artist. I find the internet song clever, funny, catchy, and thoughtful. I imagine the special's other pieces are equally so.
Pargin starts with a long peon-disclaimer attesting Burnham being "a treasure" and "better than I am at absolutely everything." He then unpacks the fiction of Burnham's special persona--I'm so isolated and depressed making this special about how isolated and depressed I am that I'm becoming dangerously isolated and depressed--noting that (1) it's a curated falsehood (Burnham was living with his girlfriend in a multi-million-dollar house and doing interviews about his latest Hollywood projects during the making of the special), and (2) nothing about this fiction is wrong or dishonest. Burnham is a performer. He plays parts. That he stages his show is no more a strike against than noting that Bonnie Raitt still sings "I Can't Make You Love Me if You Don't" with first-time pathos even after all these years. That's craft, not dishonesty. (Pargin does suggest that many of Burnham's fans mistook the special as a documentary--He's really that isolated and depressed. Depressed he may be, but the portrait of that suffering, unkempt artist was, Pargin maintains, a performance.)
Pargin focuses his annoyance on the tone and target of Burnham's show: "misery" as Pargin puts it. Weltschmerz. Despite all his talent, wealth, fame, and good fortune, Burnham is still (at least the "Burnham" in Inside is still) suicidally depressed. And this, Pargin argues, is a flex, a kind of extended, virtue-signalling boast whose cachet is unique to a particular phase of Web 3.0 (2012-). It's a flex that communicates, I'm a good person because I am miserable.
Pargin:
Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.”
They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).
But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders. That means the despair portrayed in Inside is also a flex, Burnham proving that his misery is bigger, deeper and more watchable than yours.
Though he doesn't say so explicitly, Pargin tracks the impetus for this subcultural misery-mania to online left-progressive woke politics. I don't mean he's a right-winger. He seems to endorse the broad--and, as he mentions, actually very popular--range of social/political positions that make up the US left (pro-reproductive rights, pro-affordable healthcare, pro-environment). But, he contends, this collection of beliefs got conventionally repackaged with a coating of performative hatred of everything enjoyable:
They insisted that everything was better in the past but has steadily gotten worse due to capitalism, and thus our misery won’t end until that system is violently overthrown. They always portrayed themselves as in poor mental health but said it was simply a rational response to modern life (again, due to capitalism). In general, everything about the subculture was designed to repel the normies on both side of the aisle, asserting that everything loved by Middle America (religion, cops, the military, nice cars, big houses, hamburgers) is, if you think about it, a form of literal genocide.
Add to this drumbeat of guilt a reflexive ridicule and dismissal of any expression of joy or happiness, Pargin continues, and you get--well, a whole younger demographic of men (not women, tho? and probably he means white men?) rejecting what the left has to offer:
Politics is always just a backlash to a backlash and when young men surged to the right in 2024, you only needed about five minutes on social media to realize the online left’s pitch to those men had become absolute dogshit. Regardless of what any actual candidate was saying, what young men heard/perceived was:
“Come join the Left and be miserable! Listen to us talk endlessly about how awful your demographic is and how you should keep your mouth shut unless it’s to apologize! Abandon any hope for the future, as you either need to become poorer to protect the environment, or endure the horrors of climate disaster! Relentlessly police your own language according to rules that change hourly and be prepared to be totally ejected from your personal and professional network the second anyone even accuses you of stepping out of line! If you criticize any aspect of the above, that means you’re a literal Nazi! And don’t worry about the crushing malaise, that’s just a sign that you’re a Good Person Who Cares!”
Now, there's lots of this criticism that strikes me as partial to completely off base.
First, briefly: clinical depression is real, and it isn't always or necessarily simply a reaction made of Weltschmerz. Moreover, there were plenty of no-fooling, actually traumatic triggers for depression in the late 2010s and early 2020s. (COVID, anyone?)
On another level, I'm weary of 2024 election postmortems that participate in the left-blaming chorus of Well, what could independents and right-leaning people do? The left was so horrible that they had no choice but to support someone like Trump. That's Murc's Law in action: "Only Democrats have agency or causal influence in US politics." Conservatives and independents are hopelessly reactive, like animals, goes this line of thinking. Holding them to the same standard of self-reflection and critical thinking as we do the left is foolish. We should know better, but we can't expect them to. I do not excuse Trump voters (or even "I just don't like either side" folk) of responsibility for supporting the leopard currently ripping off all our collective faces. (I'm deeply--alarmingly--furious at them, but that's a post for another time.)
Finally: hyperbole aside, our capitalist system really is lethal for vast swathes of people, especially folk outside of the protections of US citizenship. There are literal genocides--or near enough--going on right now, directly supported by US arms and monies. Future generations will curse us mightily for our collective capitulation to global warming. Even in the US, we countenance--even praise!--a great deal of suffering for groups we deem ignorable (unhoused people, the elderly, disabled folk, those who live in vulnerable places) and/or hate-worthy (the poor, the incarcerated, non-citizens). I don't think the existence of those less well off justifies constant self-flagellation. But neither am I good with passive acceptance of mass immiseration in the here and now.
That said. . .
Pargin scores some palpable hits when he notes how performative misery at one's lot in life (late capitalist Weltschmerz) seems like the only viable position for anyone who lands on the "privileged" side of the room after a "privilege walk" exercise. (And there's no one living in the US who isn't privileged in at least one dimension.) Even as books like White Women's Tears castigate the white women having tears for their misery and solipsistic guilt, there's just no other or better affective position for activists on offer in the social justice space.
This is a problem some scholars spotted early on in with privilege discourse: what exactly are privileged folk supposed to do with the knowledge of their privilege? Systemic inequities are systemic. Most of the time individuals aren't able to snap their fingers and magically become unprivileged. Nor is that always the desired outcome. The point is to spread the goods of liberal democracy to everyone. The point is to make privileges like access to healthcare or livable wages rights that everyone enjoys, not get rid of them altogether. The danger is that privilege discourse--especially the corporate-workshop-for-sale style that became so popular around 2020--does nothing but encourage repeated, empty gestures of "confessing" one's privilege. Gestures of confession--and miserable guilt.
Sure, aside from guilt/misery/Weltschmerz there's righteous anger now and then (for those who are not privileged). But (A) righteous anger is a fuel that burns hot and quick but doesn't last long, and (B) righteous anger gets in the way of signalling solidarity with those groups who aren't more privileged than yours.
I agree with Pargin, in other words, that, if the left is to regain power, it needs something more appealing than misery and guilt and Weltschmerz.
No comments:
Post a Comment