>"The next real "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels" who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue.
>These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval.
>The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows?
- David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", 1993
there are no rebels anymore, nobody even knows who is in power, there are no kings to guillotine and even in 1879 there weren't. reality has been a larp for centuries now
Oliver Myers
Conservatism is the new punk rock.
Ian Smith
are you people capable of expressing yourself outside of 4 year old left twitter memes?
Michael Wilson
And are they raping you?
Colton Rodriguez
>Status quo uses sneering and bitchiness to attack the youth The future is now, old ma'm
Grayson Adams
This is why I despise social media and this is what you get, retards parroting shit they find funny
Jose Gutierrez
>I mean are they paying you?
...It really would explain a lot!
Apparently he is on tour with Hanity ad Carvil and Donna Brazile....
Kayden Robinson
The only interesting thing here is that the original rebels were either utterly impotent or the system is pretty damn robust.
Jack Gomez
I need to reread this essay, it's one of my favorites. Thanks, OP
Caleb Ross
Crazy that DFW predicted the potential popularity of someone like Peterson twenty years back, along with the exact strategies his critics would use. Without a doubt, naivety is the biggest crime his leftist opponents accuse him of - being ignorant to the true power of the structure holding them down. They accuse him of being pro-capitalist because he doesn't spend time meditating on the billion ways the system is set up to exploit you, against which 'stand up straight with your shoulders back' seems pretty insubstantial.
But he's not stupid, he sees this, he just doesn't dwell on it. Like Stirner says - >"The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes confirmed."
By this standard, Peterson is just teaching manchildren to grow the fuck up, which is indeed an act of rebellion in a system which profits best when they are kept idealistic children. The people on the left or right who believe we need nothing short of a full-on revolution to fix the political/economic state of this country are the ones who will never make any change whatsoever. It takes a man to humbly assume a place in an obviously broken system and start to work his way up through direct negotiation with it.
Nicholas Smith
Isn't it a slave's mentality ? What makes you think that you can negociate with the system when you're part of it and oppressed by it ?
Well, in a way, yes. Imagine someone who takes all of Peterson's advice to heart - he becomes a family man, probably works as a blue-collar tradesman or middle manager for some retail store, spends his free time with friends or his kids or maybe a couple hobbies - basically a normie in every way. But hey, he's got his shit together, he's not living in his parents' basement fapping and playing videogames.
And anyone who's going to make a real change in the system has to do so from within. This is the 21st century, biopower has replaced sovereign power, you can't hack it as a pirate anymore. Bernie Sanders would probably love to lead a reenaction of October 1917 in America but he realizes that fighting his way through the slow, corrupt, retarded election process will do more good in the long run than taking to the street.
Isaac Adams
The real rebel is not into political economy, but is against the mode of production itself.
Cameron Cook
Is this the thing where we pretend that "the right can't meme" isn't literally the Left ripping off a right-wing meme?
Benjamin Cooper
look at what happened to the actually militant elements of the 20th century cultural rebellion (eg black panthers)...
its the the system is super robust
Kevin Allen
based
Jacob Williams
This is delicious. You fucking proved him right, triptard.
Liam Cook
>And anyone who's going to make a real change in the system has to do so from within So we are screwed?
Angel Watson
True for the privileged urban class, I think what Professor Wallace describes is the role of Cassandra. These new rebels know we're way off but that couldn't seem more ridiculous. I wonder if refugees and migrants, briefly stateless people, are the ones who ever escape The System, however transiently. The informal economy welcomes them and there's little one cannot acquire through it, but many of those economies are run by secretive criminal elements. One day you're flush from broken cargoes and the next your stuff is the wares.
James Reyes
Well, at some point the Chinese empire will recede and you can try an alternative system for awhile.
Brandon Cooper
imagine being so immersed in some kind of hyperbolically faggoty ironist milieu that you'd pen something like this
Logan Wood
I think in that ironist immersion it was pretty obvious where culture could shift to get a new edge or take on things. Staking out sadboi martyrdom is maybe a longer term play for public sympathies or anticipates a different emotional intelligence becoming predominant. For the moment, most Americans are terror conditioned rodents, little different from North Koreans but much better fed. This shuts the aperture on most of our emotional capacity. There are now many extra protocols to adhere prior to permitting an emotion to unsettle our wellness. And what Professor Wallace describes is our "social media suicide," much the same thing as the tuxedo frog giving expletives to protected classes. The social media suicide manifests that mockery and derision in a way that radio or television or film seem to resist. For some reason those mediums stay polite.
Liam Ortiz
The most amazing thing about this post is I know you didn't understand the irony of it. It's absolutely incredible.
Gabriel Cooper
Congratulations OP. You managed to fuck a lesbian.
Wars and revolutions are perfectly possible. Plenty of empires in history have had unprecedented ease and prosperity, and had it crash down in spiraling crisis.
Grayson White
then get the ball rolling already
Ryan Davis
>your age >your image >your post fucking lmao
Hunter Phillips
stop it
Jaxon Watson
rebellion isn't a value
Connor Hill
Well who are the real rebels these days? Who is being censored?
Chase Powell
Chomsky as always ;^)
Seriously though, a lot of Chomsky's ideas don't get the attention they deserve.
Dominic Taylor
A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.
He isn't censored, also he and his followers vote for democrats despite claiming that both left and right are two sides of the same coin. It's a bullshit distraction, besides the rich families that he talks about are mostly Jewish and the military-industrial complex serves Israel and it's interests.
Matthew Rodriguez
>He isn't censored I was being a little cheeky and a little facetious there. He does seem to have been censored at points though. His linguistics stuff deserves more attention outside of linguistics.
>also he and his followers vote for democrats despite claiming that both left and right are two sides of the same coin As a counterpoint, I would suspect that more than a few might have voted for Reagan (as that seems to have been a thing at the time), and I'd bet a lot didn't vote for Hillary.
Zachary Stewart
It's kind of funny to see "lie, then deny, deny, deny" used as a tactic on a forum where everyone is aware of the actual truth, which is that the left just rips of right-wing memes. It's even funnier when you realize they think this is a good strategy that will work. I guess they don't know how to do anything other than lie cheat and steal.
You don't understand how power works. Read Foucault.
Gabriel Jackson
holy cringe and seethe
Daniel Morgan
This isn't as prescient as you might think. By the time it was published these "anti-rebels" had already been around for a long time. Allan Bloom was a notable one, Thomas Sowell, Christopher Lasch...
Joshua Russell
True. Peterson definitely channels Bloom and Lasch and repeats a lot of their ideas. And really, none of his philosophy is 'new', it's all just a rehashing of past values that have since been discredited or forgotten, at least among millenials. But undoubtedly Peterson has gained a following far beyond the scope of these predecessors. DFW does deserve credit for outlining the rise of the context in which such ideas would suddenly seem 'rebellious' and therefore attractive to the ever-growing mass of depressed, alienated kids.
