It Appears That Quasi-Mystical Self-Empowerment Culture Will Just Keep On Getting More and More Deranged

I mean, really. Where are we going here?

Early in the life of this newsletter, I wrote a piece titled “Women Do Not Need Lunatic Overconfidence.” With the caveat that I don’t have any particular insight into what’s best for women, I argued that Instagram women’s meme culture had developed into an absolutely bizarre amalgam of vague spiritualism and a corrosive vision of adult success. An understandable desire to inspire insecure and anxious people to feel more confident became, through the various awful incentives of the internet, an insistence that healthy and successful people are relentless self-interest maximizers who stop at nothing to get what they want, ever. Indeed, this species of mysticism holds that if one’s desire is pure enough, their desires may be “manifested” in a conveniently abstract display of incredible cosmic power. Further, this ideology insists that anything or anyone that obstructs the individual’s pursuit of everything they want is, necessarily, the hand of injustice, typically expressed in the usual identity terms that have become the basic unit of coercion in American life. Though there’s plenty of this stuff that appeals to men, I do think the phenomenon is gendered. And as I have suggested, all of it seems straightforwardly disordered to me: “If you don’t get everything you want, you’re a failure” is a cruel standard, and there’s never any consideration of what happens when two people are trying to self-actualize themselves into a zero-sum outcome, as will happen constantly in the real world.

It’s fair to say that, since I wrote that piece, things have not improved.