Here is how stupid things get.

The mainstream left has simply lost its mind.

Guilty of being “privileged” for being “average.” No. Just no.

Average: “Of the usual or ordinary standard, level, or quantity. Mediocre.”

Privileged: “Having special rights, advantages, or immunities.”

Now the average are supposed to check their privilege and feel guilty on that account. For the “privilege” of being “average.” Seriously, somebody wrote this, and somebody else published it.

This is all about the squishy SJW left, whom I can not stand and who have effectively driven me out of the left and away from academics, wanting to be sure that no one ever suffers and nothing is ever described as “less than.”

Some harsh news: Some people get the short end of the stick. Some people draw the short straw. That’s life. Some things suck. The idea that even being average is now a form of “privilege” for that very reason and by definition goes well beyond the usual vapid, virtue-signalling feel-goodism and into the territory of the offensively pureile.

Yes, let’s feel guilty about having, say, hair. Or legs. Or skin. Let’s feel guilty about being healthy, because after all, some people are sick. In fact, let’s feel guilty and check our privilege for being alive. After all, some poor people are dead, and why should being alive be the standard that everyone is judged by? I mean, how bigoted is it when I fail to feel guilty for respirating? There are people who can’t!

And that word—”dead”—is microaggressive In the extreme. They are “differently and diversely animated,” that’s all. I need to check my living-person privilege and never use the D-word again. Come to think of it, that word “animated” also makes presumptions and is thus micoaggressive against those who are not animated. Differently extant? No, what about all of those who don’t exist? After all, dead privilege applies there. Let’s go with “ontologically distinct.” There. Let’s all check our privilege and remember the struggles of the ontologically distinct amongst us.

(I interrupt this rant to make a philosophical point: To this crowd, it is specificity that is offensive and microaggressive, as specificity marks difference, which is—as has been pointed out by their very own postmodernist intelligencia, albeit early on before they recognized the extent of their collective sins against tolerance—the very purpose of language and signification. Thus, justice can only finally be achieved not when everyone speaks only in general terms that have no specific meaning, as this still constitutes microaggression against those who are unable to speak at all, but rather only when everyone is rendered eternally mute. Even then, there is the risk of microaggression against those who cannot be silent. We must therefore strive from some state of permanent subjective nondifferentiation and non-agentive-initiative that goes beyond even that. Can you see how this all dissolves into nihilism?)

The ontologically distinct. Sure, we can go there. And it buys us… what, exactly? Fuck all, that’s what. It’s pointless. It’s just badgering to feel good about yourself for being an “activist,” which somehow people presume “makes the world a better place.” This is what the left has come to. This is literally the way in which the left is attempting, these days, to make the world a better place. Not by feeding the hungry or by fighting climate change or nuclear proliferation, by and large, but by fighting mathematical concepts like “average.”

This is why Clinton lost. This is why Sanders is so hated, and also why he has become so powerful—because he is the only figure on the left illustrating deftly, by his actions and statements, the degree to which the emperor has no clothes and the virtue is, in fact, vice—the mortal sin of vanity.

Yes, let’s all prove how morally above-average we are by beating down the merely average on account of their undeserved privilege, the Nazis.

Fuck off, SJWs. Let us have our sensible left back. Go check your virtuous SJW privilege, whatever that means.

Did some laundry. Did the dishes. Mowed the back lawn.

Now it’s 3:00 pm.

— § —

Was a time when I’d have been pushing the mower along in the heat while chewing over the nuances of the complex arguments I wanted to make—but at times couldn’t quite formulate—for my dissertation. Lost in thought and citations and concepts, I’d push it along and dissertate intensely. Was a time when I’d have been pushing the mower along fuming about some reason my then-wife was so pissed off at me, and about how I could improve our relationship and somehow save our family. Was a time I’d have been pushing the mower along thinking about finances and financial strategy to get us through the lean years of graduate-school-while-working.

These days, when I begin to do laundry, or to wash dishes, or to mow, I do it more or less by accident, rather than as the purposeful initiation of a necessary chore, and as I do it I think nothing.

There is nothing but the air on my skin and the passage of time.

“Going through the motions,” I think they call it, and it is stereotypically associated with people just my age.

— § —

When you’re younger you imagine that middle-aged folk “go through the motions” because they—to be ungentle about it—suck. They are essentially unimaginative, uninspired, unagents—previous models or revisions of the human subject so inferior as to be lacking a soul. They operate, you imagine, essentially from a series of written and unwritten rulebooks, the aggregate and bureaucratic code of society and convention, with nary a thought of their own.

When you reach that age, naturally you’ll be different—just look at how your imagination bursts at the seams, how you are chomping at the bit to confront the world!

Of course when you get there you realize that in fact one goes through the motions as a matter of being able to survive and to function. The mind must be off for this to work; when the mind is on, it must not only contend with the problems that are at hand (and by middle age they are manifold and quite serious), but also with History.

— § —

History is the bugaboo here, because as one ages, it grows—the part of life that is behind you, the part with the consequences that echo forward to the present, and that multiply like weeds or rabbits—continually gets larger (as does the canon of consequences that you will and are enduring), while the realm of possibility—that is to say, the future and the things that you’d plausibly like to do or plausibly might do, and that thus inspire planning, agency, and purposive agency—continually gets smaller.

By middle age, the past has become the Past; history as become History, and as one tries to march along through the day, these represent significant, stumble-worthy debris along the road underfoot. The cognitive overhead and costs associated with having to conceptualize and cope with History at some point surpass the cognitive and motivational benefits of aspiration about the ever-shrinking future.

To have any hope of functioning, you must find a way to make History into mere history again, but given that one’s history comes to tower over one’s consciousness as it grows, this is very difficult to do.

“Going through the motions” isn’t a strategy; it’s a tactic. It’s a way of buying time, of bogging the blitzkrieg down in trench warfare so that there is some hope of finding a way to win.

One does catch hints, now and then, in one’s mind of minds that virtually every resource is being dedicated to this tactic and a kind of stalemate has been reached, since with every moment, history grows and the equilibrium must be pursued and recreated anew with mindful mindlessness.

“Going through the motions” is, in fact, thus an active strategy in pursuit of passivity, with the goal of arresting the avalanche of time that will, ultimately, come down on your head and result in your personal—emotional, cognitive, physical—death.

In short, “going through the motions” is buying time. Time to live. Even if that isn’t much, it’s not nothing—and unless you were born an elite, it’s what you’ve got.

— § —

It falls by birthright only to the elites on the coasts, to the legacies and to the bureaucrats’ sons and daughters, to be alive and conscious and engaged after forty. To have ideas. To think a thought every now and then.

Thought is, in fact, a form of hereditary privilege.

For the rest of us, ours is to try to merely stay at least one step ahead of History, so that tomorrow comes again.

Do laundry. Wash dishes. Mow lawn. Work hard not to think ever again—even about not thinking ever again—because you stand at the edge of the cliff of irreversible decline and once you do, your days are short and numbered.

So long as there are people who depend on you, your job is, first and foremost, to carry them as far as “going through the motions,” too. Then, they’re on their own.