Not Caring Is A Political Art Form

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Or that you have nothing in common with them. Or that they are not real. Or that they are evil. That you owe nothing to them. The right has a terrible fear of obligation they address by denying it and celebrating its opposite, the laissez-faire social-darwinist every-man-for-himself and devil-take-the-hindmost scramble.* This ideology denies how we are connected, ecologically, economically, socially, emotionally. This is an art of disassociation—literally, in the psychological sense of disconnecting from one’s own feelings. A therapist I know talks about how hollow the young men of the alt right sound, how they’re trying out a fun way to not have to care, not have to connect, not have to be responsible (you can see Incels trying out another version in their screeds in which women are in essence not human and not possessed of genuine rights or feelings.). On August 12 of last year, a man drove a car straight into a crowd of people because he disagrees with their politics and Heather Heyer dies of blunt-force injury to the chest. Another young man shoots up a school; many young men shoot up schools; an old man shoots down 51 and injures nearly 900. These bloodbaths, in which strangers are killed, are also exercises in not feeling and not connecting; they arise from disconnection and they celebrate it as a power to do whatever the hell you want, including killing people at random. The fact that guns and bullets are critical to shooting people is widely denied, and porn or “too many exits and entryways” or any other thing is blamed in the disconnection of cause and effect so that guns can continue to express the great disconnection.  

But it’s also political disassociation: I owe you nothing; I have no connection to you or much of anything; my heart is a gated community; my ideology is a border patrol. It’s even a philosophical disassociation: my acts should have no consequences; cause is unhitched from effect; we will not look at how what we did impacts how they live, whether it’s emissions and the climate or foreign policy and refugees or wealth distribution via federal policy and poverty. It’s what I called the ideology of isolation a couple of years ago.

Rebecca Solnit sobre a polémica do momento, aqui.