"It's Not About You, Sunshine:" Kevin D. Williamson on the #HashtagLife

@Benk84 linked this earlier, but it's so good (and I'm so overdue for a post) that I want to give it its own post.

Imagine, if you can, the abjectly juvenile state of mind necessary to contemplate the hundreds of Nigerian girls taken into slavery by a fanatical Muslim anti-education militia — whose characteristic activity beyond slave-taking is setting fire to children — and, in the face of all that horror, concluding: “You know what this situation really calls for? A cutesy picture of . . . me!” Bad enough when your cousin Caitlin at Bryn Mawr does that — but senators? State Department officials? These are men and (disproportionately, I think) women of power and influence, who have the ability to engage with the world and change it. But they are enchanted by the unique witchcraft of the age of social media, the totemic power of the digital expression of the self....

Bishop Berkeley, the early-18th-century champion of the philosophy of “immaterialism,” which held that all things exist only as subjective sensory experiences, condensed his thought into this slogan: “To be is to be perceived.” Bishop Berkeley’s works were regarded with some skepticism at the time of their publication; today, his proverb is more influential than the Nicene Creed. God forgive me for my lack of charity, but I hope that, on his way to Abraham’s bosom, His Excellency got at least a brief taste of Purgatory for planting that seed in the mind of mankind.

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If your reading on public affairs has not progressed much past Internet memes, you have a responsibility to your country: Don’t vote. In fact, you probably should not even speak about those things. There is no shame in that; all of us are mostly ignorant about most things, as my poor father is reminded every time he tries to talk to me about sports. But please, if you actually care about the world and the human beings who inhabit it, stop — just stop — subordinating girls taken into slavery in Nigeria to the satisfaction of your ego. Go read a book. This is not about you.

These two phenomena, taken together -- Generation Selfie, and the mob-rage directed at anyone expressing virtually any thought except the stupid Happy Lies blessed by the mob's controllers -- strongly suggest that they way to profit politically, and indeed the way to make an easy billion dollars, is to sell a product which permits stupid people to think themselves smart, the unaccomplished and lethargic to think they've put in "a solid day's work," and so on.

In an age of vanity, selling falsely-flattering mirrors is a one-way ticket to success.

You'll never lose money selling the unwell a way of thinking well of themselves.

posted by Ace at 02:28 PM

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