Just another symptom of a very sick American culture:
There is a late 19th century/early 20th century German philosopher and sociologist who probably has a sounder claim to the title of prophet than anyone living in the past few hundred years and his name is Georg Simmel. His analysis of culture offers a very powerful explanation why the video above is gaining rapid popularity on the usual list of social media platforms.
Simmel makes a compelling case that culture (what we would call our modern culture anyways) doesn’t directly represent anything near what might be called the “Human Spirit” but something else more detached and “spiritless” so to speak. His example was the disappearance of local entertainers, story tellers and singers that were being replaced by experts who produced entertainment and exported it on a mass scale by new emerging mediums. With the rise of technocrats, culture eventually comes to exist in a parallel universe that never again touches the human condition.
Simmel gives us a discourse to talk about a culture that more or less opposes the life we all live individually. To Simmel, our pop culture not only stands outside of us, but it also goes a long way in destroying us as well. To use his term, our popular culture and the various sub-cultures that fester just beneath it can aptly be called a “world of things”. This “world of things” inflicts upon us all a paradoxical state where we are in a “state of simultaneous dissatisfaction and over-satiation.” That is exactly the phrase I’d use to describe people who seek motivation from President Kid.
We exist in a culture that constantly exhorts us to be awesome radical individuals that take every aspect of life to new extreme limits. Being different makes you stand out and standing out is a good thing, because it marks you as an individual who “doesn’t give a fuck” an attitude that many display with pride.
Naturally, life isn’t like any of the above. It is hard to maintain being different for the sake of being different, we have more in common with “the folk” and are more average than we like to admit. Try as we might, our lives are boring routines lived in a sea of similar faces and what we amount to will never impact humanity in the way we’d like. This completely separated and alien illusion we call “culture” fills us with anxiety, because we can’t live up to that impossible standard.
So we need motivation from a cute kid on Youtube who is quoting Robert Frost and mentioning a generational landmark via Space Jam. Of course, the vast majority of people who are watching this video are doing some from heated shelter, are well fed, belong to families and/or communities that care deeply for them, and have many of their desires fulfilled at mere convenience. See how at once we are both dissatisfied with our lives and at the same time saturated with creature and psychological comforts?
Make no mistake, I am just as much a part of this as anyone. Here I am, writing a blog that I’m not sure I want to make, for an audience that probably doesn’t exist and if it does, doesn’t care in the long run. I’m no different than those poor saps who wait for hours in line to try out and get the inevitable rejection for American Idol. You can’t help but be display this symptom if you live in the modern and comfortable West.
