One can readily infer from this the great social comfort Americans derive from “getting ahead”, since this form of rationalism retains some hold on this, and comfortably avoids the issue of who we ARE, by defining us by what we DO. But there can be no rest in this system.
And equally logically, the authoritarians–like the kid in the anecdote he relates who asked if we “should go back to sublimation”–infer that if non-conformity is punished, there must be an order, that the way back to Eden is to stomp out and destroy all outliers.
One sees many people desperately trying to break rules to affirm the presence of an order. At the present moment I see this in transgenderism, with perhaps bestiality, pedophiles, and necrophilia waiting as final possibilities. They want to hated, in some respects, since that hate implies an order they can juxtapose themselves with, and in so doing find a community of sorts.
This reminds me of gays I have read publicly lamenting their success. When they were outside they had something. Now that they are inside they suffer the same Last Man Syndrome the rest of us do.
To my mind, nothing could be more insipid or uninspiring than to define oneself by ones sexuality. We all feel sexual urges, but that urge, as a simple physiological tension, is easily dispelled through masturbation, and I think much contemporary sex is scarcely above that. I read kids are having less arc now, and I think it is because they too have realized this, that sex does not imply emotional intimacy, and that the feeling of being felt, as Dan Siegel puts it, is vastly more important, and vastly harder to satisfy.
I see kids experimenting with fluid gender red not out of innate psychological need, but as a means of forming SOME identity in a world denuded of way-markers; where, because everyone belongs, no one belongs.
This effort, it also seems to be, is a vulgar misinterpretation of the already bad ideas of Sigmund Freud.