Taking the Selfish Out of Selfhood — Part Two
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Taking the Selfish Out of Selfhood — Part Two
An egotistic mind is the devil's mosh pit.
Please read Part One first.
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I still haven’t accepted the fact that it’s likely I will always speak intermediate Hindi. Most English speakers would be more than fine with that, but I already speak four European languages fluently, as in native speakers sometimes as where I’m from in Italy, France, South America. As crammed and stretched as my linguistic and vocabulary limits already are, I naturally want the same degree of fluency for the fifth.
What hampers me is India’s social structure. I’m firmly embedded in Indian society via my marriage to a screenwriter in Delhi — yes, a woman — and my sister’s to a Kashmiri friend of mine she met at my wedding.
I’m not bragging about being a polyglot. I’ve had these abilities since my earliest memories: they are mostly circumstantial; I spent my formative years in Italy. It’s not an accomplishment, more of a “Well, you should speak a few languages given the experiences your parents handed to you, evil privileged White devil.”
I also believe that most of mankind’s fractiousness would be resolved if everyone spoke one language, namely English. I would give up the slushing and the cool factor without a second thought if I thought it would assure world peace, one species under Pax Anglosphaerica.
When you speak languages automatically, you plug into another culture’s viewpoint. Italian culture is so much a part of me that it’s hard to distinguish which is which. French is similar, even if I can well remember struggling to learn that in school.
I learned Spanish when I was living in Puerto Rico in my 30s by having a boriqua boyfriend who spoke almost no English. Italian and Spanish are both dialects of Latin, which made it easier for me to patch into. After we’d been together for a few months, Willy said to some friends of his at a party when I joined their group, “Cuida’o que entiende” — careful, he understands.
Learning Spanish well into adulthood best illustrates why I use language to illustrate the profundity of different realities created by cultural constructs. From the moment I kicked over to fluency, speaking it automatically without hesitation, I saw America and New York in particular from the Latino perspective.
One of the reasons Hindi is so difficult for Westerners to grasp is because of the South Asian perspective, the specific way they — and I imagine other Asian cultures — create the linguistic and cultural interfaces with which they interpret Existence.
For the most part, Indic languages are spoken passively — India is awash in the politics of respect, honor and shame. The active voice is used colloquially, with friends, and certain family members who aren’t senior to the speaker. The upper class will sometimes employ the imperative with subordinates — although not in my extended family — but they’ll switch to a passive voice without realizing it when speaking to social equals.
The simplest example of one of the biggest hurdles in learning third-tier Asian languages is the phrase “I speak Hindi.” Usually it translates as some form of “Hindi comes to me.” Similarly, “Do you speak Hindi?” is “Does Hindi come to you?”
You as an individual aren’t important. To give yourself importance even in the way you construct sentences is arrogant, impolite, as gauche as Trump.
Hindi speakers also put the verb at the end of the sentence, which is why South Asians who speak intermediate Indian English already peppered with anachronisms from the Raj sound like Yoda; their phrasing is a direct transliteration of Hindi, or whichever of the fifteen official Indian languages with completely different alphabets they were raised speaking.
British English has a greater tolerance for the passive voice than American, but it’s still aggressively self-centered by Indian standards.
Google doesn’t pitch up much about the passive versus active voice between Western and Asian languages. It found a website for a coaching consultancy, Authentic Journeys, founded by an American woman apparently married to an Indian, Jennifer Kumar.
In her blog, Kumar is less than truthful with her Indian readers about how Americans perceive soft-spoken, head-swaying Indians using the passive voice; she’s being oblique and polite in a Ghandian non-confrontational way that’s meta to my point:
One reason passive voice is favored in India is due related to the Mother Tongue Influence (MTI). In this case, MTI refers to the cultural use of local languages that favor automatic use of the passive voice (as it tends to be more indirect, a softer tone, especially for a ‘subordinate’ talking to a ‘superior,’ clients already have the assumed status of ‘superior’ in many cases). Using passive voice in India works well most of the time, as it can communicate deference and respect. Often among Americans, the passive voice can express a lack of taking ownership, not getting to the point, and not taking initiative and responsibility. Similarly, the overuse of the passive voice doesn’t build trust. It is common knowledge in the US that people who overuse the passive voice, such as lawyers and politicians, are often thought of as being untrustworthy.
Yes, in learning how to change from one style (known by interculturalists as code switching) to the other, many headaches happen. These are two very different styles of communication and thought.
Those aren’t the true reasons Americans dislike the passive voice. If Kumar were addressing Americans at a coaching session, striding across a TED Talk stage, she’d be more forthright and candid: “Americans assume that using the passive voice makes you look weak, servile, incapable of making decisions and taking decisive action. You come off as a pussy, probably a homosexual.”
American use of the active voice suits our cultural swagger and machismo, our entitlement as individuals to grab whatever we can from life, knock everyone else out of the way, our own families included, and run with it over the goal line for a touchdown.
For South Asians, use of the active voice makes us appear rude, disrespectful, arrogant and aggressive. Most of all, we come off as shamelessly egotistical. Combine that with our larger physical size; our nation’s power and legendary military aggression; the menacing posturing of our musicians and the daunting hyper-sexualization of our pneumatic entertainers; and that snarling eagle ferociously clutching a talon-full of arrows over the consulate entrance and on the cover of our passports, and it’s no wonder we’re scary as fuck to Asians.
It’s because of this essential linguistic viewpoint, which is the basis for the entire pan-Asian self-abnegating culture, that makes it “easier for a camel pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a Westerner to achieve enlightenment,” according to a dervish of my Order during my first years on the Sufi Path.
New Yorkers are the most aggressive of Americans. Compared to us, Texans look like two-stepping, grace-saying pansies so God-fearing and fearful in general that they have to go around armed to the teeth. New Yorkers don’t have time to fear God — we’re already late and that light’s about to change. Step on it.
My Hindi improved when I was finally able to adjust from a New York veni, vidi, vici conquering mindset to a gentler passive attitude — it doesn’t suit me at all, feels unnatural, but I know it’s courtesy toward the person I’m addressing, not about my Americanness.
Speaking Hindi directly from my intentions, rather than in cross-translation via English, plugged me into India’s passive, ego-abasing reality, albeit with a loose, sparking connection. Being unplugged from the Western matrix, the full scope of what the active-voiced Western ego has wrought both on itself and mankind revealed itself. It’s by no means all bad when it comes to our liberal-democratic, free-market influence over the rest of the world.
But we’ve done a number on ourselves; if I free associate, I see a wrecked young woman locked in a bathroom, self-harming with a razor while sobbing to herself in the mirror. As scornful as I am about the egotism of identity politics and rightwing Identitarianism, I’m even more concerned about how people are suffering needlessly, how warped their AR goggles must be to see Meiguo — “the beautiful kingdom,” as the Chinese call America — as a festering dystopia of injustice and oppression.
From that unplugged vantage, “The essential American soul,” or ego-consciousness, which D.H. Lawrence described as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” has been amplified by tens of thousands of Hollywood movies and shows. It’s mesmerized by its own reflection, unable to break away, starving itself to death like Narcissus. Isn’t the disorder named after him the most bandied about in the Selfie Age? At least we’re also somewhat self-aware, I suppose, but not enough, in my opinion.
The ego that we value so highly, which we are assured constantly is a personal temple within us, has been slowly destroying a significant number of us. It’s right there, screaming at us through the depression and anxiety; the self-mutilation in the name of identity; the mass shootings and the lack of compassion from gun advocates whose rights are more “sacred” than children’s lives; the belief of millions in the lies of individual and collective narcissists; the elevation of gangsterism and violence as aspirational; the lust for luxury goods; the deliberate creation of FOMO envy; the rampant addiction to reality-numbing-and-altering drugs; the paranoia, the demonizations, the scapegoating, the prejudice, the deafness to truth, the Karen-ness, the unhappiness.
SASHWAY AWAY!
An early piece for this newsletter, ‘Drag Is a Form of Blackface. So Now What?’ has already alienated so many people that I’ve had to unpin it from the main page of this site, even if it was one of the most popular I’ve written so far in terms of engagement.
Attacks on drag culture and legislation curtailing their activities in red states have become such a trigger — creating santo subito martyrs of bitchy female impersonators, of all aggressive male stereotypes — that even people who support gender-queer activism passively don’t feel the need to read the essay. Their judgment is reflexive simply based on the title: I’m a terrible person. With a couple of clicks, they sashay away in disgust.
By not reading, they don’t find out that I’m not backing rightwing policies; rather, I’m explaining that the appropriation of the Shakespearean and British Panto traditions that I grew up with and performed myself, in drag, were false comparisons, a pernicious form of presentism that rigged history to suit a gay-bar tradition that has outlived its subversive purpose, namely by becoming a multi-million-dollar, twenty-something-Emmy-winning commercial juggernaut, RuPaul’s Drag Race.
As a burlesquing of the worst stereotypes about women, it’s misogynistic; as an instrument of diminishment and ridicule for an entire sex, it is philosophically no different from blackface. Minstrel shows were wildly popular a hundred years ago, too; every town had a troupe; the first sound film is about a blackface performer.
The fact that people enjoy RuPaul’s Drag Race doesn’t automatically make it a good and wholesome thing, especially for children. To believe that is to place the egotism of personal merriment over the greater good of 51% of the population, as well as the perception about another 10%-plus that drag queens insist on representing, who are already the most persecuted group on the planet.
A few months ago I was texting a friend I dated briefly 30 years ago, asking him what he thought about the newsletter, if I could sign him up for a free subscription.
“Maybe if you take back your drag is blackface post lol.”
“Oh? What didn't you agree with about it?”
“Honestly, the size of that article made me dizzy, there was no way I could read it. I’ve watched Drag Race for, what, 10 years? I’ve seen more inspiration and determination and fabulousness in that show than…anywhere else. Kids coming from nothing, determined, making their way despite the most vulgar of opposition, and not only surviving but conquering. What else has that character arc, let alone in real life? Maybe I should read what you wrote. But Jesus Christ, that length.”
He never signed up, but never came back and argued why drag isn’t blackface, either. Nobody has. It’s just click, click, sashay away, gurl.
The important part of that exchange is the point of view. The “kids coming from nothing, determined…” takes priority over the maligning women, by men who are the way they are because they don’t like women. In old-school tranny parlance, a biological woman is a “fish.” Being fully self-expressed at the expense of others is “not only surviving but conquering.”
I was pleasantly amused by the expression “gender is a pretzel” when I first heard it back in the mid-Aughts, when all this was kicking off and I was still the frog in the pot of water that didn’t know it was set to boil. Then it came to represent the tortured constructs connected by intersectionalities of gender-queerism. I retooled it as “pretzels of logic” to mean bending reality and the truth for self-serving purposes.
When I engaged a gender-queer activist once over the falsehoods of his faddish identity-based religion, he said, “Gender is complicated.”
“No, it isn’t.” He ghosted me. Click, click, sashay away, gurl.
I also thought the glitter bombing in the early Tens was hilarious — I thoroughly supported it. Now these clashes in Twitter videos between female-impersonating clowns and dour, unattractive activists confronting hyper-macho alt-right bullies with twirling rainbow umbrellas remind me of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, named after the smaller special-needs kids’ bus at American public schools.
Looking over an orgy, Justin Vivian Bond, one of the funniest live performers I’ve ever seen, says, “It’s just like the 60s, only with less hope.”
When I saw him perform as half of Kiki and Herb at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004, Justin-as-Kiki quipped, “Let’s face it: if you weren’t molested as a child, you were not a pretty child.”
That’s back when drag was still somewhat subversive. In these dreary times, as the West trudges across a cultural conversation mined with triggers and traumas, microaggressions and implicit biases, White privilege/fragility/supremacy and toxic masculinity, Justin would never get away with a line like that.
On the Right there’s Trumpism, the ultimate cult of personality that transcends anything we’ve seen before. But as I pointed out in an essay I published a couple of days after Trump was elected in 2016 in an attempt to calm my network,
As an American who has lived a healthy portion of his life abroad, I assure you that Trump represents how much of the world sees America: loud, brash, bullying, vulgar, stupid and uncultured, rich, ostentatious, oversized, crypto-fascistic and more often than not mendacious. Obama is our aspiration, and it is a noble one. Trump is our reality.
Most people blame Trump for our spiral into this war of attrition between the tiny minorities of the Identitarian alt-right and the identity-politicking left that is keeping the majority hostage. The sound of silence from their fear is almost deafening.
In my view, Trump is merely a product of that war of attrition that kicked off at the turn of the century. Both alt-right and identity politics arise from French ideological movements, the latter from the neo-fascistic Les Identitaire, the other from neo-Marxist critical theory.
It’s just like the 60s, only with less hope. Meh, I survived daily clashes between real fascists and communists in Italy in the 70s. “It all comes out in the wash, pet,” as Julie from Melbourne says.
May they cancel each other out.
THE TRUE GREAT SATAN
Like most people do with life-altering events, I placed a significance marker on the moment I found out that our egos aren’t merely the middlemen in the struggle between the id and superego — our most precious, fragile possession, to be tended to, protected with boundaries, fertilized and watered by “healthy self-esteem” — but a potentially lethal danger to be wary of.
Crunch Fitness wasn’t always a gym in the weight-training and cardio-machine sense when it began. Located in a narrow brownstone building on 13th Street in Manhattan, it was a warren of exercise studios for aerobics, jazzercise, and something new called “Power Yoga,” taught by a disciple of the founder of America-style fitness yoga, Rodney Yee.
I’d been introduced over the summer to Yee’s tapes up at The Park. Like a small comet hitting the atmosphere and burning up, I’d been coming apart emotionally, perhaps intellectually. I noticed that I felt better after an hour or so of yoga every day. I kept it up and brought it with me on my next trip to India.
Indians didn’t practice yoga back then. It was exclusively part of the physical meditation practice of self-abnegating Hindu ascetics, therefore only for men.
Rampuri was a Jewish-American expat friend and neighbor up in Mussoorie, a Raj-era town built on a ridge of the Garhwal Himalayan foothills overlooking the Gangetic Plain. The only White to be initiated into the powerful Juna akada of the Naga Sadhus, Rampuri is best known for his memoir Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Yogi.
He dropped by one afternoon for tea and philosophical discourse, but had to wait while I finished my daily exercise routine. As arguably America’s foremost authority on all things yogi — other aging Western hippy expats of all nationalities spoke of him reverentially — he found the term “power yoga” to be hilarious.
“I always thought yoga was about breaking the body to break the ego,” he observed in his Indian-inflected accent. That’s a typically passive Eastern way of saying, “Man, you’re doing it all wrong. Making yourself feel better and physically fitter is the opposite of its intention.”
The notion that someone, especially an American, would want to break his ego, his selfhood, his individualism, his me-me-me-ness was so radical it fracked open a place in my mind and buried the seed of an alternate perspective. Over the subsequent months, it grew until it consumed my “very being,” as that illuminating cliché puts it.
All magic is transformational. I firmly believe in the notion that words spoken in the right combination at the right time when someone has his or her guard down and is most receptive — for example, under hypnosis or in the final minutes of a yoga class — will cast a transformative spell.
A few months later, I was staying with Rampuri’s friend Beverly Coburg in her Midcentury villa in West Hollywood, having run away from a screaming producer’s house in Los Feliz, sleeping on an ornately carved Chinese opium bed in Marilyn Monroe’s former bedroom with its own Zen garden.
A native Angeleña and the former wife of screen actor Jim Coburg, Beverly had been at the center of Hollywood’s transformation and renaissance in the 60s and 70s. Now she was an eccentric, reclusive freebase addict who napped like a cat in different parts of the house as the whim seized her, even in the oversized bathtubs.
I’d meet her at night in the villa’s sprawling, indescribably eclectic living room, sitting on the floor layered with Asian rugs under the gaze of an oversized gilded statue of Buddha. I drank a new brand of vodka called SKYY while she arranged shells and beads on the carpet. I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about Sufism, having been introduced to it by Muzaffar Ali, the director of my first film as a screenwriter, who now heads a popular annual Sufi music and poetry festival in Delhi and Rajasthan.
The following day, one of the longhaired, barefoot surfer dudes who were part of the taciturn household staff — they were more spirit than human — knocked on the door of the Monroe suite.
“Beverly would like you to have this,” he said, handing me a copy of Idries Shah’s The Sufis. A note inside read, “Let me know if any of this resonates with you.”
I lay on the opium bed and began to read. On the sixth page, the perspective tree that Rampuri had planted in Mussoorie burst into bloom. I had a “spiritual” awakening — I prefer the term ‘mind event’ — the first of a handful over the next twenty-five years, after I joined a traditional Persian Sufi order and surrendered my ego to the care of an anointed master of a lineage dating back to the 14th century who barely spoke English.
The first step on any Eastern esoteric path is understanding the goal of defeating the “lower ego,” or ego-consciousness, known in Persianate Sufism as the “nafs.” I believe it has thirty-plus more meanings across the regions covered by this Islam-plated atheistic tradition, which is often accompanied by the subtitle, “the Path of Love,” alluding to the importance we place in altruism and loving-kindness toward others. In Kashmiri Urdu, for instance, nafs also means “the hungry, greedy stomach.”
As I’ve explained before, those who practice the tradition I follow are called dervishes; to call oneself “a Sufi” is essentially claiming enlightenment, which no truly enlightened person would do; it would be akin to a Tibetan lama calling himself a “living Buddha.”
When you are initiated into any Eastern spiritual tradition you are given a mantra to aid in your meditation practice, called zikr in Sufism. The goal of meditation is to quell the nafs by means of group and self-hypnosis and thereby attain “unity of being” with the divine.
Most Sufi orders meet for meditation on Thursdays. My Order meets on Sundays as well, perhaps because Westerners need double the work in their struggle with egotism, given its sacred place in modern American-influenced culture.
The struggle with base egotism is called the jihad-e nafs, although the Masters of my order tend to avoid words that are associated with extremism, especially ‘jihad.’
The Old Master of the Order had to flee the inquisitions of the ayatollahs after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and go into self-imposed exile in the West, never to return to Iran. With typical wry humor with layered meaning, he flipped Khomeini’s nickname for America, Shaytan-e Bozorg, the Great Satan, and applied it to the nafs. The same sentiment is reflected in the Western proverb, “The idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.”
At no point in my Sufi practice have I ever been told to celebrate myself, to salute my inner luminosity, to be grateful for XYZ, to know how loved and special I am. Rather, I have been constantly reminded of a list of fourteen selfless ideals, principles and codes of conduct so impossible to attain they would make the most ambitious Randian individualist give up without even trying.
The one hopeful guarantee we are given after we are told we will never attain enlightenment is absolutely true: I am a far better person for trying than I was before I embarked on my Path.
According to the Wikipedia entry for the history of psychotherapy, three prominent Sufi masters who lived in the Persian Empire during various dynasties — the poet Rumi, and the polymaths Avicenna and Abu-Bakr — are credited as the progenitors of modern psychotherapy, together with the Hindu author Pathanjali and the India-born Tibetan Buddhist master Padmasambhava.
The Old Master of my Order was the head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Tehran. I use that fact as incontrovertible proof of the centuries-old bond between psychology and Sufism, and to point out to other dervishes that they’re really in an outpatient program at a glorified mental health program.
The mundanity of that comparison meets with some resistance from those attached to the magical mystery tour of Sufism. I believe it serves as a point of reference that bridges the Islam-wary Western worldview with a beneficial practice that is forced to cover itself up in a full body veil printed with Koranic verses written by Arab jihadis and Persian ayatollahs.
I consider the “work” that I do with my psychotherapist, Dr. Borkheim, to be the second phase of my Path. I treat him with the devotion, deference and respect that I would accord a master of the Path. I’ve never used his first name, never called him “my shrink”; you’d might as well save your money and time if you have such a diminishing attitude about what you’re doing. I’ve found that if you allow the therapy to break past the desires, attachments and expectations of your nafs, your mind will expand, not shrink.
I am as disciplined about being punctual for our sessions as I was with my attendance at Sufi majles. It’s one of the many notable synchronicities of my life that for seven years now my weekly sessions with Dr. Borkheim have been on Thursday evenings, at the time dervishes of all orders at khaniqahs around the world gather for group meditation, music, teachings, and loving, humor-filled reminders of how hopeless we are as individuals.
Chief among those reminders is our chivalric duty toward all mankind. Per the Wikipedia entry about my tariqa specifically, the Order “has rejected seclusion and quietism with an established principle of meaningful participation and service to society.”
I consider this newsletter as my attempt at that. If I’m sometimes “ferocious,” as one reader called me, and scathing in my criticism, to quote what a senior dervish told me when I protested after he kicked another snoring dervish awake, “There are many kinds of loving-kindness.”
While writing about the fusion of my Sufi path with therapy, I think I’ve cracked the puzzle as to why it’s been more successful for me than most people I know: I didn’t begin therapy because I was miserable and wanted to feel better about myself. I assumed that how I felt about myself was there permanently, unchangeable.
I went into therapy believing my family’s gaslighting of me as the scapegoated child: that being the terrible person I was caused me to struggle professionally and romantically. I went in to find out to fix my defective nature, although I doubted it was possible.
It was during the process of revisiting everything that had happened to me as a child and throughout adulthood that I gradually — so very gradually — came to understand that I wasn’t the one who needed fixing. I was Piggy the Scapegoated Blach Sheep of my family, the receptacle for their dysfunction. It was because of the relentless, ongoing abuse that I suffered from PTSD-related depression and anxiety; however, all things considered, I was “lucky” it wasn’t CPTSD, or complex trauma.
Lucky, lucky me.
In other words, I was more receptive to being fixed because that’s what my goal was when I started, not because I was miserable and wanted to feel better about myself, to be happy, to stop the voices in my head caused by an ego that had splintered from becoming unmoored, like many others with mental illness.
When I actually overcame depression and anxiety in 2019, it was like one of those post-surgery videos of the blind seeing for the first time, of someone born deaf hearing sounds, of a paraplegic being able to walk. I’m still not fully used to it. May I never forget and take it for granted.
BEHOLD, THE AUTISTIC SUPERMAN!
Having decried the lack of traditional altruistic individualism in America, let me also proclaim it alive, kicking and tripping balls on ayahuasca in Silicon Valley. And what a role model we have in an Africa-born American named Elon Musk.
Musk is the altruistic-individualist answer to Wall Street’s greedy, merciless, secret-Trump-supporting Randian egotist. He’s almost as much of a thorn in the side of the sort of wet, sycophantic socialists for whom Ayn Rand had so much contempt that she gave them children’s-book-villain names.
In proper old-school Anglo-American style, Musk doesn’t burnish his halo and personal brand when he gives away part of his fortune to philanthropic causes, plumping his ego on stage with Bono to rapturous applause from sycophants at Davos. According to Philanthropy Roundtable,
Musk donated roughly $5.7 billion of Tesla shares to charity in 2021. No tweet or public announcement preceded or succeeded the gifts. They came to public light through a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Publicly, Musk rolls up his sleeves, invests in mankind’s future, and works so hard at getting that done that he sleeps on the floor under his desk, not even on a cot. So what if that’s theatrics — isn’t everything we do in public? At least it’s inspirational, not drag queen identity-boosting theatrics, not to mention more American than a Jimmy Stewart movie.
His major initiatives so far:
The electric car, technology we’ve known about for two generations, but nobody until Musk dared take on the American auto industry.
Pushing Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for all mankind” envelope with reusable space rockets and dreams of Mars.
Way overpaying — and laughing about it while holding a kitchen sink — for the world’s most volatile, dysfunctional, dangerous public forum, and trying to make it work for everyone, in a balanced way, and still at least break even.
Tackling LA’s nerve-fracking traffic problem with the hilariously named The Boring Company, which after being thwarted by Los Angeles and California’s Byzantine Chinatown governments, has gone on to build tunnels at one-third the average cost in other cities, in under one-eighth of the estimated time for conventionally burrowed tunnels.
Lastly, his Neuralink is developing an interface between human brains and computers, which might have the flavor of self-interested transhumanism, despite the promising applications for people with neurological disorders, were it not for the fact that we started merging with machines with inventions like the pacemaker in the late 50s — it’s an inevitable step in our controlled evolution.
That’s not my idea of a terrible person. Most Liberals would disagree, but those are the AR goggles they’ve put on themselves — doesn’t mean they’re anything near accurate. Plus, he’s charming in a self-deprecating way that no Progressive could imagine being — they’re too busy sashaying all over Washington throwing shade, gurl, click, click, mhmm!
Musk advances humanity with him by dragging us on his exuberant, high-octane Path. So do thousands of lesser-known altruistic individualists in Silicon Valley; to my constant shame, there is nobody to compare in Hollywood, quite the contrary.
Musk’s former business partner, Peter Theil, a Randian Libertarian and full-on misanthrope, sits around like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons trying to find ways to subvert the unsubvertible, planning an anarchic island state from government control, peopled with other delusional, self-absorbed Hank Reardons who seem to think that human social groups can get by without systems and hierarchies.
That’s some classic American World Series Syndrome right there: If such a thing as a government-less society were possible, we’d be able to observe it elsewhere, failed states like Somalia not included. Randian Libertarianism is even less practical in real-world applications than Marxism.
Just as I’ve never met a Brit who’s even aware of Ayn Rand, much less read her, I’ve never met a fellow Anglo-American who’s mentioned her, either. I’m sure there are a few, probably a clique of teen boys at Choate testing the boundaries of incipient adulthood, fired up by the faux-Americanness of Atlas Shrugged, but it won’t last — Yankeeshire always prevails.
If people don’t take the time to understand Anglo-American culture, they’ll never understand what America really is, how that other “essential Americal soul” — the spirit of altruistic individualism — is the mortar that keeps the foundations and structure of our system intact.
The alt-right might flaunt their violent, killer souls, fight to preserve their guns, evangelism, flags, and football. They might win small victories for their selfishness in court or in a former slave-state legislature, but they will always be beaten back by an apparatus founded by the genius of a people they think they represent but barely understand, even though they might speak our language and share our race. It’s a system that reflects our principles and ideals; nobody ever said it was flawless, which is why it is designed to be self-correcting.
Progressives thrashing in a bog of identity politics might accuse us of not sharing, they might call us racists even if we’ve never uttered a racist word or had a racist thought in our lives — certainly not on the level of the casual racism of the antiracism movement.
They might call us “elite,” “establishment,” “privileged” — none of us dispute that — and think it’s an evil requiring this neverending, unnecessary “social justice” inquisition, but they’re merely parroting and appropriating words and thoughts that we’ve been passing down through the generations since the beginning, from one distant, coldhearted parent to the next.
Theirs are secondhand thoughts that have no value in a system that has always taken them into consideration. Having no value, they will never affect meaningful systemic change — diversity casting The Little Mermaid isn’t meaningful change, just a bad business decision, like everything tainted by DEI.
Activists need to dry their tears, drink their freedom, lie down for a nap, and dream of America like the rest of the world does. If they hate America for something that happened to their ancestors at the hands of people long dead, they should tell Spike Lee they’ll call him back and sit down to watch a more entertaining movie.
America doesn’t need Randian Identitarianism or Marxism in any form — they’re overkill, tautologies. Having no significant purpose other than minor adjustments to social status, they’ve become destructive and polarizing.
On behalf of my befuddled, frigid, well-meaning people, let me lay down the ultimate DEI, the reality of American culture as expressed through all-important language, not individual perceptions bolstered by specious, self-proving “nuances”: If you speak English with an American accent of any kind as your mother tongue, you are an Anglo-American, one of many types. Rather than calling yourself “African-American,” “Italian-American,” “Jewish American,” culturally speaking you are an Anglo-American of [insert ethnicity] descent, just as I call myself an Anglo-American Yankee.
Thanks for reading.
ON THAT NOTE:
The Q&S Shop will drop soon. I’d like to keep the newsletter donation-based in terms of paid subscriptions rather than mandate them by restricting access to posts, letting sales of merchandise fund the operation. At least people can add something tangible, perhaps fun to their lives, rather than words on a screen that vanish in the next click.
Instead of merely whining and slamming activism on both sides of the aisle in this newsletter, I’m promoting productive, selfless activism with a category called Activist Saints.
Meet St. Liam Alone, patron of altruistic individualism. St. Liam was an Irish dockworker who abandoned his Friday-evening after-work pint of Murphy’s — his one true pleasure in his hard life — ran out of the bar without hesitation, and was martyred defending his co-workers from union-busting goons:
FURTHER READING
About India and Mussoorie:
My views on female impersonators:
On living Buddhas: