OK: sitrep: I am drinking and taking off some meandering voicemails I left myself, which I am going to leave largely unedited because there are so damn many voicemails and I have other things to do, and just don’t want these epiphanies or meandering imbecilities–however they get scored eventually–unuttered.
I wonder if our confessional culture is not in some measure a predictable response to the demand for the renunciation of individuality. What I am contrasting is the behavior of game show contestants who are expected to be perky and self revelatory, and the Maoist practice of group confession.
When you go to a psychologist, it involves telling a complete stranger details of your personal life. The analogy is with physical medicine, in that the parts and pieces of your internal life are assumed to be thing-like, such that they can be put without psychological effect out into a relatively committment-free environment. You can depend on the shrink as long as you pay them. Fail to do that, you are on your own.
Add to this the TSA intervention, which is seemingly intended to eradicate the physical barriers between our bodies and the State. I have talked about this repeatedly, and want to be clear that the symbolic importance of the TSA’s warrantless strip searches cannot be overstated.
I wonder to what extent the people who embrace “confessional culture”, in which all personal boundaries are eradicated, and the private made public, are in league to some extent or other with more generalized efforts to remove the locus of moral order from the individual to a police state. The ideas are congruent.
One need not view this through the prism of conspiracy theory. Ideas with legs will permeate all aspects of life over time, especially when propagated by people in pulpits of various sorts. What I think orients this social system is moral imbecility, which is to say an inability to articulate and follow codes of conduct that are not constantly reconciled with external Others.
It is the triumph of what Riesman called, if memory serves, “other-directedness”, as opposed to internal directedness. One might visualize the latter as a compass that always points North. The other points in whatever direction the wind is blowing, and if everyone changes at the same time, it approximates moral order, but requires the cessation of individuality, and the links with the past needed for a sense of stable identity.
A rolling stone gathers no moss. In the Japanese idiom, as I understand it, unrolled stones are fascinating objects, which gather moss in individually interesting and unique ways. What some want for us–many, as an escape from a freedom they can’t use and don’t want–is a giant polishing machine, such that we are all moss and defect free, and perfectly alike.
One giant step in that direction is eradicating all sense of personal boundaries, as seen on Facebook and other places. To be clear, I myself offer up personal feelings at times, but I am not offering them to the group: I am offering them to God, and to spirits from whom nothing can be hidden anyway. I am offering them both directly, and as they may be used by you for your own improvement.
My ship is my own, though, and I am the Captain.