There’s a larger discussion here in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk to be had about the role of identity – or, more specifically, lack thereof – in the online generations.
I’ve made the parallels that Fascist behaviors mirror people with identity disorders like NPD, and are far more predictable on that pathology than any single ideology.
Going from 4Chan to Tumblr and back again to chase that feeling of validation is not unusual. The pipeline from Ron Paul to Bernie to Trump as people just chased the contrarian personality cult is well documented.
The fundamental problem becomes the construction of identity – it’s far easier and far more incentivized to simply create a delusional, idealized, fictional and externalized caricature of self online that fits with the current trends and gestalts, and then simply perform that identity and defend it at all costs, thus getting overly rewarded for ever-escalating behavior in order to feel powerful, valuable, and valid.
Facing the reality of self, the awareness and intentional examination of true self, the long dark nights of the soul, taking responsibility for your mistakes, learning who you really are and developing, growing, and improving, changing your views and behaviors to better fit with your idea of your best self, that’s hard fucking work my goodness why would you do that when you can just put on a costume and just pretend that bring the shittiest person alive is somehow virtuous?
This is functionally a chosen “cluster B” pathology. And it’s not really ideological. The “radical self love” nonsense is just telling you to ignore your faults and delusional defend your idealized identity as much as any Andrew Tate online course on how to chop off your feelings to make money trafficking women online.
Note: this doesn’t make them equal, or equally detrimental to society, mind you. I’m not trying to both sides the political argument. Nick Fuentes is objectively worse than your local Instagram model.
But the mechanics are the same. Kids are funneled into largely unmoderated online spaces as soon as they can read, and there are zero consequences for getting attention by any means necessary. And that translates into patterns that become hard coded into the operating system.
We’ve seen this a bunch, now, with myriad violent, ideologically confusing murderers. The fact is that these are overwhelmingly people with confused and confusing personal identities, a mish-mash of trolling extremes and provocative-for-the-sake-of-provocation positions, none of which are consistent or held with any real integrity.
The only true consistency is that they have been cooked by online spaces and a lifetime of seeing trolling, pwning, dunking, flexing, hashtag winning, all to feel like the dominant cool kid as the only emotion that matters.
THIS is fundamentally the problem, that we have an entire society built on false selves constructed solely to give the wearer a feeling of supremacy over others, a pathology that uses sociopathy as a cheat code to give people a delusional, idealized sense of self so they can literally ignore reality to just feel like the main character all the time, to be able to hurt others while not getting hurt themselves.
It turns what is supposed to be a complex mosaic of feelings and experiences that draw you across the beauty and joy of the human experience as you expand to fulfill your potential for empathy and love into a monochromatic, monolithic power fantasy of sitting atop a throne made from the skulls of your imagined enemies in a palace full of underage concubines and eunuchs.
Would you rather be Kafka struggling for meaning or Genghis Khan, entitled to all you survey?
The Right, the Manosohere, the crypto spaces, 4Chan pedo gooners, GamerGaters, all offer various forms of this violent, supremacist identity gestalt. Whether teabagging your downed opponent in CoD, posting idiot political memes on social media to trigger the libs, using the hottest “but she’s really a 500 year old demon bro” prepubescent waifu as your pfp, it’s all confrontational cruelty to validate a constructed identity that presents being LITERALLY THE FUCKING WORST as a virtue.
The Left and Center are not immune to this. Tumblr is not nearly as toxic as 4Chan, but the mechanics are the same – get outsized rewards for making up whatever bullshit puts you at the top of extremist mountain.
And so it is still attractive to those who may find themselves getting less emotional utility on one side to simply flip to the other.
This is global, obviously, as relevant to the rise of fascism across the world as it is here. ISIS is as much an identitarian cult as furries, even if the outcomes are different.
Charlie Kirk was killed by the same system of trolling and dunking that he leveraged to fame and fortune. It’s not just political violence, it’s the very construct of identitarian supremacy he was both master of and servant to.
That’s not to say he deserved it, just to point out that this tragedy was the obvious endgame of a system that has already claimed untold lives, that requires serious addressing.
Real politics are wonky decisions on how we should best organize resources in service of the population. Tax rates. Road sign fonts. Food regulations. Boring ass meetings where we hash out best practices to improve outcomes. And our “politics” have not been that for a very, very long time.
The “Spidey pointing at himself” meme of competing identitarian factions putting the cult in culture wars is a front for a crisis of psychological development that has engulfed two full generations and will prevent us from engaging with reality until we acknowledge and deal with it.
Kelsoland.Institute 