What Does It Mean to Be a Rebel In a Coarse Era?
The possibilities will make you feel vastly better about yourself
I am sharing portions of a talk I delivered at Digital Void Media’s Meme In the Moment Festival at Caveat in New York City on October 26, 2022. A video of the full talk is also linked within.
“I want to offer you a suggestion for three things. And if these three things turn you on, act on them. Act on them — and burn the fleet behind you. Try them for one hour. See what occurs…
“What is the role of the rebel in a world of coarseness and hostility? Not what you may think:
- Get away from cruel people.
- Greet trash with silence.
- Don’t humiliate people. You’ll stand taller than you ever imagined.
“We don’t talk enough as a society about the problem of intimate human cruelty…
“When you are insulted, the reason you can’t think of a rejoinder is not because you’re mentally slow or that you need a book that tells you how to deal with assholes. It’s because emotions move more quickly than thought…
“The last thing that’s ever arrived at is absolutely severing your ties with cruel people…
“I think it’s wonderful to be nobly alone. I think loneliness has a terrible rap. I think it’s much better to be nobly alone than to be in debased company. You don’t have to attend anything…
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with refusing to go to Thanksgiving or Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate, if those things are sources of pain to you. Why would you?…
“One of the ways that bullies entrap us is that they make us think we have to participate in life on their terms. You don’t have to participate in life on anyone’s terms…
“With the advent of social media, we as a human community have gotten into this groove where sarcasm, rhetorical questions, insults, laughing at other people’s pratfalls have become the lingua franca of our day. But I don’t think that sarcasm, online cruelty, insults, humiliating other people was meant to be common human language that everybody participated in 24/7…
“I believe that we as a human community are not going to make it if we as individuals don’t get out in front of the perverse joy we experience in humiliating other people online…
“We are not at liberty from shame when we insult, kick, and participate in the humiliation of another person. We continue this spiral and it affects how we feel about ourselves…
“I’ve rarely met anyone who doesn’t feel that he or she suffers from a poor self-image. And we don’t know what to do about this poor self-image. So, we go to our shrinks, we bother our friends, we read our self-help literature — some of which is good — and we’re always looking for this antecedent as to why we have a poor self-image. But the one antecedent that we never look to is our own face in the mirror. We never consider the perverse glee we derive, even as we consider ourselves progressive and sensitive people, from seeing another person humiliated…
“And it’s easy to say, ‘Well, that’s a bad person’…and I dig that. But I don’t care. I don’t participate in that stuff…
“If you feel that you don’t possess a sense of comfort in your skin, if you feel that you don’t possess a sense of selfhood, start by considering whether we self-perpetuate that by participating in this feverish, 24/7 manner of humiliating people over social media…
“We’re all suffered — it’s part of the human situation. But we rarely consider the tendency to want to find root causes other than in our own immediate behavior…
“We look for adversity everywhere but that which stems from within. I’m not saying you don’t get to be funny or occasionally snarky or use sarcasm — but when it becomes this constant, unremitting diet we sublimate this shame in ourselves by going back to it over and over again and the ultimate victim is ourselves because it keeps us from feeling comfortable and self-possessed within our own skin.”