The Enlightened Values of the Tea Party | Clarissa's Blog: I just had his sudden insight overnight because of something this would-be troll said. It seems to encapsulate something about Rousseau and — if I may go so far — about the modern personality.
They seem to think that by being childishly idealistic and harsh, they reach the height of their beings. Its very spiritually middle-class and perhaps we can know who is very middle of the middle by how much they implicitly subscribe to this notion. To try to clarity this, when they criticise others by “being harsh” they feel they are expressing the nebulous core that is the real them — their “childish idealism”, if you will. It’s nebulous and they don’t know why they are criticising, but it comes from a feeling, “I just don’t like this. I wanted something more or something different from what I seem to have received in life.” After they have this feeling, they strike a blow against something, something “out there”, by being harsh. Maybe its the way the McDonald’s service attendant hands you your burger or maybe something else that can be determined to have fallen short of your expected standards. In any case, you express your childish idealism by being harsh.
And after that (which marks you as spiritual middle-class) you feel that is all that can be known about the matter. You feel triumphant — as if you have justified yourself as a childish idealist in the world. They may have an excuse as to why the burger was presented to you poorly, but you’re not falling for that, because your childish idealism comes first. And harshness is its guarantor.
Honestly, without a troll to inform me about such things that normally make so little sense to me, how would I understand the contemporary world?
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