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Live-fisking David Brooks about his sore fee-fees [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-11
Hey, America, Grow Up!
Hey, Mr. Brooks: you suck! (What’s funny is that I’m saying the same thing you are, but better.)
If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.
My God, man. How did you emerge from such a devastating decline in… wait a second… wasn’t this a period of immense material prosperity for the American psyche, having emerged nearly unscathed from World War II? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to point to the way that… oh sorry, I guess that would be Marxist of me to point out the idea that economic forces shapes culture rather than whatever excuse you’re going to throw out as to how you, blessed Brooks brother, emerged from this ruined landscape that you once called home.
It would probably also be Marxist of me to point out that the development of ‘therapeutic culture’ could be more accurately traced to such things as the nephew of Sigmund Freud (via Sigmund’s sister) opening up the market for cigarettes to women via a ‘Torches of Freedom’ marketing stunt on… Easter Sunday 1929. I don’t know precisely when Black Friday fell in 1929, but I feel safe assuming it came after this, and thus places Brooks’ analysis as skipping both The Great Depression and World War II themselves as having a relationship to ‘therapeutic culture’.
I think it would be very interesting to analyze how marketing itself is the problem, and perhaps much of the ‘therapeutic culture’ of the sort that I could find myself agreeing with David Brooks about, such as the Goop/weed-to-conspiracy-theory pipeline that I am led to understand is a very real and dangerous element of the US zeitgeist.
. . I simply must have a Djarum Black, one moment . . .
. . Terribly sorry, I have to spend some time with my family . . .
Back. Let’s see what Mr. Brooks has to say.
In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace. But in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves.
You’re right. How could such a culture produce films like Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, Network…
Oh wait, those are all movies of your generation about greed destroying people and culture. You know, the thing that might be on everybody’s minds since Clary Thomas is living the bougie life and alleged sex pest Brett Kavanaugh has a case of the disappearing baseball season ticket debt worthy of Encyclopedia Brown. And those esteemed public officials did their assigned duty and overturned Roe v. Wade like they swore under oath that they wouldn’t do!
But yes, somehow the therapeutic culture is the dominant culture in the American psyche today. Sometimes, talking about things that don’t make any sense for a length of time and then smiling smugly to oneself is an effective rhetorical tactic. Thanks goodness the Supreme Court is protecting us from a world where money is not speech, or…
Darn it, I did it again! I meant to agree with Mr. Brooks, but I found myself arguing that the business of America is business again. I’m so sorry, Mr. Brooks. I am being off-topic and disruptive, and I certainly behaved in an inappropriate manner when addressing my better in my previous post, which of course an important person like you is not even aware of. It’s frankly an act of utter insanity for me to continue writing in a style as if you or someone connected to you had ever heard of me!
It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves. As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”
You’re right! It was displacement all along.
Lasch continued: “Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”
Didn’t Bronze Age Pervert do this better? Oh, but he’s not a grown-up, so he doesn’t count. I’m sorry, you’re right, you’re different from that brownshirt jerk. Yes, stoicism and clarity of mind can only be achieved through references to graey alien. And a book called Designing The Mind, which I have just learned is a #1 Amazon bestseller!
Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain.
It was so much easier when good gentlemen could just eat the Irish babies, wasn’t it?
Social media became a place where people went begging for attention, validation and affirmation — even if they often found rejection instead.
Yes, because there’s absolutely nothing intuitively spiritual about social media. Even though your articles have a comments section. Jerk.
Slate magazine proclaimed 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Concepts like “microaggression” and “safe spaces” couldn’t have lagged far behind.
Yes, and it only took 4 more years for the most flagrant sexual abusers in Hollywood to get ‘canceled’ for their open secrets. Now powerful straight white men are terrified of hiring women for fear of facing a lawsuit, because they’ve been castrated by — oh sorry, lapsing into the kind of thing that Bronze Age Pervert would write. And you’d certainly have nothing to do with a fellow like that.
This was accompanied by what you might call the elephantiasis of trauma. Once, the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences.
‘Upsetting’. Really? Unless you have a caveat about the uncovering of sexual abuse, your quality ceiling is now Ingmar Bergman, noted narcissist, and there’s a very bright spotlight on you.
A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era.
I never really got into that one, though I dabbled in several. I most enjoyed Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, which I didn’t have to finish because it had two hilarious anecdotes:
1. A recounting of the time he was, I think, riding his bicycle and got into a car crash.
2. The time a patient of his was having an extreme panic attack about a tiger attack, and he just went ‘eff it’ and was like OHMIGOD THERE’S A TIGER OH NO and Calvinballed from there, and this act of empathetic play actually healed the patient and recover a memory of a traumatic experience. From which the title came from.
There’s also After The Ecstasy, The Laundry by Jack Kornfeld, which has a hilarious anecdote of (IIRC) a nun telling off the Dalai Lama and other people about how male-dominated all of ‘this’ (what she was doing at the time) was.
And there’s also the delightful speech by Jon Kabat-Zinn at Google in 2007 about his innovative development of mindfulness-based stress reduction. But I guess those guys at Google were pretty stupid to be listening to him! Unless you’d like to argue that it’s a stretch to make a direct connection between mindfulness-based stress reduction and The Body Keeps The Score. ;)
For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.
This is the most anti-Black thing that I have read today.
Apparently, every national phenomenon has to turn into a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis.
Old Man Yells At Cloud (While Cultural Marxists Make Fun Of Him)
In one camp, there were the coddlers. These were the people who squarely faced how much abuse, mistreatment and pain there was in society. They sought to alter behavior and reform institutions so that no one would feel emotionally unsafe.
I understand that you’re a Morpheus-type who’s trying to soothe the flesh-bag batteries of a robotically managed hellscape*, but this strawman is so pathetic that I want to ask you if you need your tummy rubbed.
The problem is, the coddling approach turned out to be counterproductive. It was based on a series of false ideas that ended up hurting the people it was trying to help.
There it is. The most generic, thoughtless, stupid, and ridiculous method of argument ever.
You have written a one-sentence paragraph that can be applied to literally any ideology in the world.
I suppose you’re going to argue that you provide evidence for this assertion, but I just want to make clear to you that this is the epitome of bad writing and obvious sophistry.
You’re actually less thoughtful and complex in your argument than, like, Disney’s Pocahontas.
The second false idea was, “I am a thing to whom things happen.” The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life. He is defined by suffering and lack of agency.
Wait, somebody wrote a book about the phrase ‘locus of control’ and nobody told me? [Narrator: the writer is being openly facetious, to an absurd degree that broaches on sealioning, although the performance of self-awareness brings a meta quality to the facetiousness that removes any real liability for being ‘charged’ with such.]
The third bad idea is, “If I keep you safe, you will be strong.” But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones. To quote one of the best long-form articles on the Internet: But the truth is that, while The Drama of the Gifted Child was highly regarded at that time, there is something essential missing from it. Miller believes that it is so harmful for mothers to want their kids to “perform” and whatnot, that they’re stealing their childhoods from them, not letting them feel their feelings; okay, yes, at one extreme there’s the controlling mother, the Vinegar Mother, the Tiger Mother, who really literally won’t let the kid feel his feelings ever. But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-worshipping monster who believes that her child’s every Feeling is somehow Sacred — to which you’re all, hoy, lady, your kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to be happy or well-adjusted adults, either. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad.) It’s almost like nuanced conversations have been happening in public, but Mr. Brooks feels best about addressing the ones that don’t come from the corners of the Internet that have thoughts like ‘huh, I wonder if Mr. Brooks is maintaining his career on the basis of being cognitively associated with Mr. Mel Brooks because of the pretentious mode of address that is the fashion at his employer. Really makes me wonder...’ The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. Oh no you don’t, you massively overspending jerk.** This was led by Jordan Peterson One would imagine that the very public devolution of Jordan Peterson into a textbook version of the very state of fragility and dependency, to the point that he may be betraying his country of origin in seeking ‘emergency’ Russian detox treatment, that you claim to be critiquing would make for an extremely weak and in fact poof-worthy argument in favor of the ‘counterreaction to the coddlers’. And you would be right. Ah. I read further and see that he’s actually arguing that we’re all doomed. Interesting. Spotlight turned off. Left or right, apparently we’re all victims now. Yes, it would be much easier if we could just say ‘we’re all Shylocks now’ or something, but there’s something not quite right about making that comparison, and not just because I don’t want to mimic David Mitchell’s Upstart Crow quite that closely. By the way, did you intend to imitate the writing style that I would feel comfortable saying that I’ve pioneered, of saying “we’re all [X] now”? Because that’s kind of my thing. And props to you for doing it and acknowledging that I’m a more current and witty writer than you! The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day. The people with these loudest voices often operate in that histrionic manner that suggests they are trying to work out personal wounds through political expression. People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight — another classic symptom of immaturity. The core problem here goes back to the therapeutic ethos itself — the way it cuts people off from the larger sources of a moral order; the way it charges people to create yourself by yourself, out of yourself; the way it refuses to recognize the reality that we see ourselves as others see us. The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.” Not saying you’re The Grand Inquisitor, but it kind of seems like you might be The Grand Inquisitor. Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me. Getting money and status in exchange for writing*** this, class, is what is called irony poisoning. Learn it well, and solemnly vow to avoid it, because it is a crippling illness with a terrible prognosis. In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic. You haven’t explained how social media somehow doesn’t figure into this. Because you can’t. And your failure to mention The Social Dilemma is part of the problem. Mature people are calm amid the storm because their perception lets them see the present challenges from a long-term vantage. It would have been better if you just stopped there and linked to better writers with much more astute takes. Or me. David A. Bednar, a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once observed that “one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.” Is this your attempt to be multicultural? Wow, you really are slower than South Park. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Look, I did a better job than David A. Bednar. You know what? I’ll refrain from a snide remark. Let’s see how you wrap this up. In other words, a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior. Hmm, I think you’re intentionally missing the point here. This metaphorical poker player says that it’s not nearly as much about the opportunity to feel superior as it is about the temptation to take advantage of others’ stupidity as a sign of weakness. This is the sort of emotional insight that is obvious to anyone who watches anime or even decent Nick cartoons for almost any length of time (it’s sort of built into the very nature of reaction shots), but is uncomfortable for a mediocre millionaire or billionaire to think about. Or explain to their kids. The best life is a series of daring explorations launched from a secure base. Sounds like a one-liner from one of my worst shitposts from a looooong time ago. The therapeutic culture undermined that inner security for several generations of Americans. You’re kind of a fascist, but at least you’re a polite one! /s Maybe we can try to build a culture around the ideal of maturity, and its quiet strength. Maybe so. But it won’t be by your example — it’ll be much more like John Oliver’s. Isn’t that just one of the beautiful things about the “melting pot” of the United States of America? But you know this, because you’re paid to be a stooge. Just admit it to yourself, and perhaps take a break before you end up crying at your keyboard, as my thoughtful analysis of pungently bad writing has been known to do to writers.
* — this is a reference to the movie The Matrix, which you may be familiar with. I think it’s gonna make it big!
** — In a game-changing scene, the character starring in this clip directly quotes the meme that Mr. Brooks is trying to slyly reference here by adding a dash.
*** — typing, technically, I’m schur
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