• Ben Dreyfuss, “The Queen, She Is Dead”
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Truth! We must tell the truth! Even if it is uncomfortable! This is my answer to everything but that is only a coincidence! The truth is the queen is evil and anyone who is sad that this evil woman is dead must have their nose rubbed in the blood she spilt.
POLITE POLICE
Why?
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Because this is how we make a better world!
SUSAN
How will it make it a better world?
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Because we make clear to everyone that in this life there are two types of people: the good and the bad. And the queen was bad. And when bad people die we rejoice! We rejoice! We dance until the sun rises and we kiss and sing!
TOM
Why was she evil again?
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Because the monarchy is bad!
CLIVE
And colonialism!
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Oh right yes and colonialism.
RACHEL
But the queen wasn’t in charge of British foreign policy?
CLIVE
We’re tired of excuses! She could have done something!
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Something!
CLIVE
Anything!
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Anything!
CLIVE
She could have done some speeches!
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Speeches!
CLIVE
A tweet about how bad colonialism was!
LEAGUE OF RUDENESS
Tweets!
POLITE POLICE
I think we should all just stop saying these nasty words.
ALL OF THEM
Fuck you!
• Ian Leslie, “Being the Queen”
Queen Elizabeth II (I can only call her by her impersonal title, the formality acting as a reminder that the illusion of ‘knowing’ someone famous is just that) delivered some fine words over the years: “Grief is the price we pay for love”, she said in condolence to the families of those lost in the 9/11 bombings. In the early stage of the pandemic, she struck exactly the right note, harking back to an even bigger national crisis, one that she had lived through: “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” But really, words were not her thing. One reason she was such an effective figurehead for so long is that she said so little. Unlike Charles, she didn’t communicate her thoughts very much (whether Charles will do less of that now he is King, we will see). In a world of endless jabbering, she just was.
It’s not that she didn’t have thoughts – you can tell that she did from the avidity with which she engaged the statesmen at the 1991 G7 summit. Prime Ministers have testified to the wisdom of her advice in private, and to her great curiosity about the world. But she knew her legitimacy rested on not having a view, on not becoming part of the argument. Not just her legitimacy, but her capacity to unite, comfort and console. Emotions are pre-verbal. For all that we are encouraged to talk about them, it remains true that sometimes the best way to cope with our feelings is through symbols and actions rather than words. That’s what rituals are for. The Queen intuitively understood the advantages of being and doing over saying, which is why she was the perfect person for the role.
• Richard Hanania, “How I Overcame Anxiety”
One overcomes social anxiety in the same way one overcomes a fear of flying. Understand that your fear is irrational, don’t make excuses for or indulge in it, and then just practice the thing that makes you nervous. Eventually, it gets through even the thickest skull that nothing bad is going to happen as a result of flying on an airplane. This is the idea behind “exposure therapy,” which the PUAs seem to have independently discovered on their own.
If we told people that fear of flying was something everyone struggles with, that it was the result of what others have done to them, or structural racism or whatever, I’m sure we’d get more of it. Imagine further if TV, music, and movies taught kids that fear of flying made them deep and interesting, and schools and universities had fear of flying awareness weeks. This is pretty much the modern approach to mental illness. Our tendency to discount the benefits of exposure as a natural way to reduce anxiety and naïve faith in the professional management of the human psyche help explain mistakes in how we have responded to covid. It’s been a massive experiment in which we have taken away people’s ability to socialize normally with others – and no, doing so while wearing a mask is not anywhere near normal – with predictably disastrous results.
A series of data points converge on the idea that navel-gazing and the medicalization of things like anxiety and depression are themselves major causes of the conditions they are meant to fight. I see nothing else that can explain why we see such skyrocketing rates of mental illness among young people today. If it’s all explained by the rise of the internet, one needs to explain why the mental health crisis hits liberals so much harder than conservatives.
• A. T. Roberts, “Screaming Match”
Enter the landscape of modern noise. It’s televised, digitized, and auto-tuned. It comes at you through speakers made to look like rocks in gardens. It barrages you from screens in every room of your home and in your pocket, and even gas pumps now have flatscreens. Commercials blare at decibels almost painfully louder than the mindless noise you’re already half-watching while scrolling through more noise on your smartphone. It’s even in text, the trash that passes for journalism and education today is no less noisy than an eighteenth century wagoner cracking his whip or the bimbo next door playing Nicki Minaj songs on repeat.
The ghost in the machine that drives this noise can be the focus of a separate examination. Whether it’s Guy Debord’s spectacle, Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model, a combination of the three, or something entirely different, the obvious outcome of the legions of pro-noise adherents are proof of its effectiveness. Babbage and Schopenhauer would have immediate heart attacks if they were alive today, but it’s important to emphasize that the concept already described by the world’s two most crotchety thinkers hasn’t changed: the noise is designed, from inception, to prevent you from thinking. Know this, but don’t dare acknowledge it. You’ll be hated for it.
• Jason Peters, “Reading in Unprecedented Times”
But it is important to remember that material circumstances alone no more made my eyes move across the page than they made Defoe’s and Poe’s quills move across the paper. It may be that “Men are as the time is,” as the bastard Edmund said in King Lear. But men and women nevertheless have agency. They can refuse to let their thinking be dominated by the news cycle or by these “unprecedented times.”
That is to say, all of us can make an effort not to be as the times are. If we cannot step outside the tyrannizing present, we can certainly resist the reach of its presumptive scepter. It is an ancient dictum attributable, I believe, to Cicero that a liberal education should help us do just this.
…One reason we can’t “rise to the occasion” is that there are no shortcuts to any such rising, and yet we are incorrigibly prone to take whatever shortcut the nearest cliché offers us: “It takes all of us.” “Together we’ll get through this.” “Science is real.”
Jolly good for science, but so are ghosts. Exactly what pressing issue does the schoolmarmish yard sign needlessly reminding everyone else of an obvious reality—or, what is worse, telling everyone else what to think—put to rest? Nothing that fits on a sign or a bumper sticker or the back of a power forward’s warm-up jersey absolves us from the unrelenting demands of careful deliberation.
Another and more important reason we cannot “rise to the occasion” is that, like Lear, we know ourselves only slenderly. We no longer have a serviceable doctrine of Man, an anthropology at hand capable of helping us know ourselves better than slenderly. So we set about to “end racism,” as the moral philosophy elaborated on the wide receiver’s football helmet instructs us to do.