masks | New Pop Lit NEWS

Alpha Male Wannabes

Posted on March 16, 2018 by newpoplitnews

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THE LATEST NEWS among the established intellectual community is they’re all in a frenzy over renegade professor Jordan Peterson, who’s begun to follow his own thoughts and ideas– independently!– and has left the politically-correct intellectual reservation.

AND SO, every intellectual pretender has penned his-or-her own takedown of the guy, the latest coming from Current Affairs head editor Nathan J. Robinson, whose own project we profiled recently. As in, last week. (See my last two posts.)

LIKE his colleague Briahna Joy Gray’s essay on rock n roll history and cultural appropriation, Robinson’s is skewed and from a narrow viewpoint. Also like her essay (see this) it misses the real story.

It’s by his essay’s one-sidedness that Robinson gives his own game away.

Noteworthy about Nathan J. Robinson is his lack of self-knowledge. He seems to live in a bubble-world constructed of his own role-playing. In his complaints about white males and the patriarchy, he doesn’t notice that he’s a white male, and Current Affairs is a patriarchy.

What bothers Robinson most about fellow academic, fellow Anglo-Saxon Jordan Peterson? That Peterson has the #1 book on virtually all best-seller lists! Robinson mentions this pointedly. Jordan B. Peterson (not he, Nathan J. Robinson) is at the top of the intellectual hierarchy. The alpha male of that scene. And so, Robinson attacks him vociferously.

Jordan Peterson, a Jungian psychologist, must be amused by the attack– as well as what wannabe Robinson misses in Peterson’s ideas. Jordan Peterson is essentially right– that behind our masks we’re brutal animals. Much of our communication and most of our behavior can be explained by subconscious forces which, often against our will, drive us. Nathan Robinson acts this out in his posturing with his magazine.

And yes, Jordan Peterson is right that without the strictures and controls of civilization, relations would return to a more primal reality. Notice what occurs at stray times when civilization leaves. One recent example is the end of World War II in Europe, when Patton’s army moved east and a horde of German women moved west, giving themselves to American G.I.’s to avoid the more brutal celebrations of the New Soviet Man coming from the east. Little acknowledged but able to be found in dusty military histories, or in anecdotes from American vets, is that the end of the war was a rape fest. A reversion to type?

A Jungian would notice monsters of the Id. Those we try to wipe away, like Dr. Morbius confronting his Id near the end of the 50’s sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet.”

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The Jungian would notice hidden forces in Brooklyn hipsters, wearing long beards and lumberjack shirts, markers of masculinization, as their subconscious minds rebel against their own socially-compelled feminization.

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What then of Nathan J. Robinson, who usually appears clean-shaven? Deliberately nerdy and harmless. How does he fit this analysis?

One could surmise the harmlessness is merely a mask, obscuring the ruthless being– the alpha male wannabe– lurking beneath.

-K.W.

Contradictions of the Left

Posted on March 3, 2018 by newpoplitnews

OR, ABSENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC

WE’VE ALREADY examined some of those contradictions, in our analysis of n+1 magazine and of The Baffler. Today we look at another “hard left” publication, Current Affairs, founded and edited by Nathan J. Robinson.

WHAT readers of his magazine and Robinson himself don’t seem to realize is that any revolution which springs from Harvard University– where Robinson is a Phd candidate– is co-opted from birth. Sold out at the start. It wouldn’t matter what label they put on themselves or their system: “Marxist.” “Communist.” “Democratic Socialist.” It’d be packaging. Labels like the kind slapped on soup cans. At the core of things nothing will have changed. The same people will be in charge. The same careerist technocrat mindset would dominate.

Why else does someone attend Harvard or Yale (Nathan Robinson has been enrolled in both places) other than to be at the top of the pyramid? After the revolution it’d be the same hierarchy, with a twist in messaging. (Robinson is said to be good at messaging.) Nathan J. Robinson and his Ivy League editorial colleagues carry that stratified hierarchy within them. It’s embedded in them.

Doubt this? Who runs the civilization now? Two of the richest men on the planet, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both attended Harvard. The founders of Google went to Stanford University, which is almost as elite. Jeff Bezos of Amazon went to Princeton.

Politics? Every President of the United States from 1988 on before the present one was a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Or in George W. Bush’s case, both. Donald Trump went to the Wharton School, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university.

Do we see a pattern?

Oh, but Nathan J. Robinson, like his peers at other leftist magazines, is different. His ideas are different. He’s a socialist. Probably, a Marxist. He cares. He really does.

I suspect that in their New Socialist World they’d be part of Shigalov’s Ten Percent– still at the top of the pyramid, controlling the people– for their own good of course.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Just as in every person there’s a conscious and subconscious, so also there’s the role the person plays– the face shown to the world– and the authentic individual sitting behind the John Keegan “Mask.” They’re not always the same. If ever the same.

Who’s the real Nathan J. Robinson?

Is it leftist radical at the forefront of a neo-Marxist intellectual movement? Or the son of a man who worked in international corporate training? (And no doubt taught young Nathan J. many corporate world tricks.) Scion of money and achievement– is that Nathan’s core reality? At crunch time, would Robinson throw his advantages away? Really?

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THE FLIP SIDE is the person from hardship and poverty passing as an exemplar of class and refinement. This was not only a plotline of many plays (see Pygmalion) and Hollywood movies– it was much of Hollywood reality. Witness the careers of Cary Grant and Clark Gable, who transformed their very beings– their voices, gestures, dress, speech, teeth– to fit the role they wanted to play.

A BETTER EXAMPLE is the career of Elvis Presley. Dirt poor. Born in a shack. The embodiment of “white trash.” When he became massively successful he suddenly found himself playing doctors or suave playboys in Hollywood movies. In “Blue Hawaii,” the slumming son of big money.

Did he fool anybody?

That Elvis was out of place was part of the appeal. It was fantasy. He was living the dream. His audiences knew it and loved it.

Elite intellectuals of the Harvard/Stanford variety (except for a few rock n roll fanboy writers) never accepted Elvis as legitimate and to this day haven’t accepted him. Rock music itself was not taken seriously as an art form until middle-class pseudo-intellectual troubadour Bob Dylan began playing it. That’s reality.

-K.W.