Contrary to one frequently expressed popular opinion, the culture war seen online is not at all “only an online thing”—it is, after all, what produced the march in Charlottesville and, just last week at the time of this writing, “laid siege” to the U.S. Capitol. More important to my project though, insofar as one tries to organize politically for the sake of a better future, the “online culture war” with its group-think, tired ideological scripts, and toxic reactive behaviors leaks out into actual organizing spaces.
If you want to organize against fascism, imperialism, or capitalism, or even just start a sustainable community garden—then you are likely to run into some pretty fundamental issues activists have been dealing with since the 1960s. These predictable problems have only intensified as critical literacy declines in inverse proportion to the increase of online platform fragmentation of social life.
If you only ever really organized “IRL” (a very-online person way of saying “in real life”) or stay off of YouTube and Twitter for the most part, then you might not see the carry-over between very-online activist culture and physical meeting spaces. If you only ever really get involved with political discussions or organizing virtually, then you may be blissfully unaware, if not in outright denial, of how the most toxic dynamics of the culture war manifest themselves in everyday life. Having a lot of friends who are more or less on one or the other side of this divide between very-online and IRL, I see a lot of ignorance about these things proliferate. This should not be attributed to malice, but probably just stems from the fact that people rarely understand how many things they had to experience or think through to get from where they were to where they are, or they have inculcated where they are, their ”bubble” of common sense, without purposefully applying critical distance and tarrying with the discomfort of making sense of it all from an outsider’s perspective.
Nowadays it seems almost like a rite of passage for certain “leftist personalities” who want to build a presence on YouTube to downplay and dismiss concerns from regular working people about how toxic leftist spaces are to people who do not already all agree with a litany of articles of faith. I do not need to name names because if you are in that world you should be familiar with how often these concerns are said to be “statistically rare” and “mostly just an online thing.” Having been in this world, and having participated in this dismissing/downplaying behavior, this is also a form of self-criticism.
Not only do real experiences today beg to differ, but a walk down memory lane with books like The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, or The Culture of Narcissism, one quickly realizes that activism has been stuck in certain toxic, self-defeating, and yet addicting theoretical and practical ruts for over half a century. Ultimately, that is why we need a multi-generational effort by an emerging class of working-thinkers to develop the means towards a new symbolization.
Timenergy theory comes from my personal experiences trying to organize with people who have no time with energy or energy with regularly repeatable time—as well as from trying to organize with people who are attention-starved or energy-sapping. Likewise, structural stultification and psychological gerrymandering are not just the result of running a bunch of thinkers, systems, and concepts together from an armchair—I’ve been organizing for almost a decade while maintaining relationships with people who are all over the place politically. Throughout all this, I’ve been reading philosophy and theory. The concepts I am developing are just my attempt so far to make sense of what’s going on while using the conceptual resources ready-to-hand while doing so. So what follows are some examples of how I have tried to apply my academic work above to practical life and organizing.
A note about “The Right”
Although I tend to focus my critical capacities on deadlocks of, and possibilities for, emancipatory education and organizing, I have also done my fair share of meme-ing. Before I ever started my Theory Pleeb presence on YouTube, I organized the conference “Responding to Jordan Peterson in Lieu of a Debate.” Below I give an explanation as to why this conference matters, where I respond to both Peterson fans and his haters in my life. If you are not convinced that we should use the tools of philosophy and theory to critically respond to “pop intellectuals,” then I hope you will read on.
And a note on “The Left”
After introducing the conference justification, my critique piece, and, after a reflection on how it went, I’m going to turn from the right to the left. If you remember my acknowledgments section of this book, my conclusion now is that ideology matters less than character virtues like hospitality and reliability—a practical insight that comes directly via experience living in poverty before college, and being housing-insecure on a couple of occasions since. But with that said, I do think that the left is ideologically not equivalent to the right. Though behaviors and forms are often mirrored, I think ethnic nationalism is the most dangerous ideology of them all. Of all the freedoms, freedom of movement and association comes first. Ethnic nationalism, especially in its most militant totalitarian form (fascism), necessarily opposes freedom of movement, association, and speech.
That was just a disclaimer because I know I can’t critique the left without catching flak from a bunch of people who will say “both sides” are not equal, or that one is necessarily the lesser of two evils. I don’t care about measuring evil. Nor is moralizing for the goal. I aim to develop concepts that will aid future building projects and, more importantly, to supply arms to the emerging working class intelligentsia. It’s about strategy and goals, not feels.
Not only are most of “us” not yet born, but few of “us” already born can be assumed to already have strong and based political commitments—my assumption being that thinkers don’t usually come by way of group-affiliation so much as a profound estrangement from such things. My experienced hunch is that organic intellectuals are being cooked up from the ranks of workers who listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and videos while stocking shelves, driving delivery, and building houses. Not so much at universities or on Twitch.
Workers with earbuds have, in my experience, immense curiosity and big hearts, but they are deeply suspicious of the group-think and toxic socialite behaviors seemingly inherent to NGO (nonprofit) social change circles led by self-professed “radical professors” and their students. Our jouissance (addictive and excessive delight) is also wired into our own exploitation in crucial ways outlined in a soon-to-be-published critical case study by Michael Downs calledŽižek at Work: How Jouissance Factors Into Wage Labor. Such issues will not be overcome from above, but only through our own deliberate efforts to come into a freer relationship with desire so that we can turn our enjoyment-addicted eyes away from one another and to the real culprit: Capital.
The divide between thinkers and doers is as old as slavery, but in our current times, it has ossified into a professional managerial elite who considers itself vanguard of the oppressed. I sympathize with anyone skeptical of the authenticity of professional marginalized group spokespeople or their self-flagellating allies—authenticity and sincerity are, after all, poor metrics to navigate the social, considering that both are usually performed. Given that people typically go to college in order to “social climb,” the sincerity of any performance, or ability for one to claim authentic spokesmanship for a community, is already in-itself suspect to anyone not already indoctrinated into progressive circles.1
While I will never cease to criticize the anti-SJW (social justice warrior) industry that has emerged online, I think we are fools to dismiss the basic truths seemingly monopolized by right-wingers today, i.e. virtue signaling is real and self-defeating, cancel culture is both real and toxic, and social change spaces do have a tendency to coddle perpetually infantilizing behaviors.
Everything someone like Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, or Jordan Peterson points at in criticizing the left is likewise applicable to the right—especially accusations of infantile or snowflakey behavior, which Trump supporters in our lives today seem perfectly fine with reclaiming. But just because the right is wrong doesn’t justify any and all means to battle it if the means in question undermine the intended ends by confirming negative stereotypes of ourselves…
My presumption is that the left has the most morally unquestionable ends but, insofar as its means fundamentally defeat its stated long-term goals, it instead perpetuates our current deadlocks—thereby doing even more damage by alienating most regular people. What are some ways social change culture gets its means twisted? For now, I will speak in assertions with the hope of a more rigorously-based analysis in future work:
Insofar as politics deals with human populations and not the experiences of individuals who may prove exceptions to the general tendencies within any given human population, I assume without argument2 that
• Phobia cannot be scared out of existence.
• Ignorance cannot be scolded into enlightenment.
• Bad ideas cannot be quarantined into extinction.
For example, purposefully scary aesthetics or bullying behaviors (discrimination, snobbery, etc.), what most people at any time will interpret as social surveillance, censorship, policing, and elitist or exclusionary attitudes and practices, are all stupid for the fact that they do not produce intended results—unless the intended results are to create more of what is being fought against (a great idea if you would prefer to perpetually fight the good fight instead of ever actually getting anywhere).
So why not just exit politics if I detest it so? First of all, I am not so sure any of this spectacle is really “politics.” That’s why I’m focusing on culture war. While there are those who will be quick to write an opinion piece for Jacobin or Current Affairs arguing that those who complain about the culture war need to just focus on organizing and real material politics, the point is that, even though politics and the culture war spectacle are more or less two things, it is the cultural situation that has made organizing masses almost impossible.
Mobilization is less of a problem, as 2020 made clear, people can be mobilized, but organization is how that movement gets put to good use and made to outlive its moment.
Personally, I think we can evolve, but not without first acknowledging that there are real issues. If there is to be any serious chance for the left to become a force for longer-term good, it must first come to terms with certain fundamental realities posed against its current aspirations and strategies.
Towards that end, the audience I am preparing to speak to is not the already actually-existing left (if some people who make primary identifications with, and spend a lot of time responding to, mainstream media even count). Instead, the audience I am preparing to speak to are the very kinds of people who are disaffected by established modes of thought and behavior in general—regardless of psychological disposition or value prioritization. By this, I do not just mean “the fringe.” For it does seem like most people are more or less incredulous and disaffected by these two-parties of movement energy capture.
In conclusion, on the one hand, critique of what gets called “the left” endears anyone who does it to the people who fundamentally distrust politics as usual—and by “politics as usual” I mean social change on a spectrum of reformist to revolutionary, seeing as radical rhetoric has been monopolized since the 1960s by the protest and academic wings of the Democratic party.
With that said, I am far from being ready to truly speak to the politically disaffected podcast junkies who will inevitably get bored with hearing people-who-read talk about things and eventually attempt to dig in deeper to theory and history on their own. I am not even ready to write the book on psychological gerrymandering, though everything I’ve been saying throughout this work lays the basis for that project. For now, I have only experimented with practical theory or putting theory into practice.
Of the many experiments I am still learning from, the one we will now turn to was a conference that intentionally made a viral meme of the fact that Jordan B. Peterson refused to debate Marxists—an event that, without which, we most likely would have not seen the debate between Peterson and Žižek six or so months later in 2019. I will explain why this matters for anyone not sold on it yet in the next section, then present the concept of “ressentiment” as a critique of the Anti-SJW industry. Afterwards I will use “ressentiment” and “timenergy theory” to critique cancel culture.
Keep in mind that when I say “critique,” I do not mean the same old tired tropes about how people just engage in toxic online dynamics because they are chasing clout—the goal of critique is to illuminate the conditions that make possible the subject of normal criticism. In other words, it will be a first attempt at a structural analysis of the attention economy. I will then finish with a structural analysis of infantile behavior today—the left and right as well as old and young in society often accuse one another of childish behavior, so I will use timenergy theory to illuminate some essential conditions that foster the opposite of enlightenment: perpetual immaturity.
1 For a thoroughgoing critique of normative and institutionalized authenticity and spokesmanship, I recommend the essay “The ‘ColorLine’ Then and Now” in Renewing Black Intellectual History.
2 Anyone who wants to argue to the contrary has a pretty tremendous burden of proof to bear. Good luck satisfying it.
