/lit/ - Literature

>>16376951
>jacking himself off
No kidding. Haller actually has a lot in common with some of 4chan's users. Besides the fact he clearly sees himself as superior to "common people" then humbling himself by claiming he prefers them to the snobbish elites--he finds their "simplicity" charming--he thinks of himself as a stoic, but his stoicism is just thinly disguised narcissism. He doesn't jerk himself off the typical boastful way; he strokes his ego BY humbling himself.

4chan expresses this trait in the following example (I can't seem to find the pic): girls vs. guys format; girls with depression vs. guys with depression; girl says to other to get treatment, guy has head blown off by shotgun. This is just 4chan's version of Tik-Tok: look at how important I am. We use the fact that males are more suicidal than women to show off how we're sad, we aren't so privileged as you think, yada yada yada. Trauma, mental illness, poverty, ect. (i.e., anything outside "normal experience") become a sort of badge which many people, not just us, wear. This is how stoicism/martyrdom leads into narcissism. "Ooh, look at me so sad, don't know you how bad I have it," it's literally just games-playing and manipulative rhetoric. In the case of the meme, yes, it's just a joke, but I can't help but feel whoever made it (and whoever posts it), though laughing, are simultaneously reassuring themselves that they, too, strive; it no longer functions as coping or reconciliation, it becomes masturbation.

This is manifested in the doomer meme. Some anons relate to it, others internalize it and the doomer becomes their mascot. They WANT to identify with it, because being unhappy is cool. And the bitches on Facebook, desperate for attention, posting about their depression--"MY depression," they call it, and that possessive pronoun alone says a lot of their character--? Not very different. The reason we don't feel so guilty over it is because it's anonymous. The responsibility to our ego-stroking is totally relieved. This is part of what's behind this site's occasional sexism: simple projection. And yes, I'm aware that I also might be projecting. Why do you think I was so repulsed by Steppenwolf's narrator?

Then again, I wasn't able to finish the book, so I can't judge it properly. I'll definitely pick it up again, but I still have my hopes that it's satire.

lol nope

>>10669036

>Sowell
You have to go back

>>10427001
>false flagging/satire
all your efforts are in vain
the alt right is here to stay

>>10408988
right here op

>>10380370
>peterson
>aurelius
back to the_donald

>>10368831
>sowell