The workplace is transforming in the era of liquid modernity, and Sennett analyzes the workings of the corporate workplace. Remember that manufacturing is dead, so every workplace is a corporate workplace today.

The qualities of company loyalty, steadfastness, experience, focused expertise, rootedness, orderliness are no longer wanted in the workplace. They are actually a drag on you, so drop them now if you haven’t yet.

The qualities that are in demand are the capacity to change, the adaptability, the love of newness, the ability to generate new ideas, rootlessness, ease of movement. A person who stayed at the same company for 20 years is viewed with suspicion. Reliability is out of vogue, it’s boring.

More than skill and experience, the workplace values talent and potential. Employees and employers are so invested into the hunt for talent that they bring the same attitude to politics. Voters don’t give a hoot about a candidate’s knowledge, experience, record, and expertise. They only care about potential. And potential is obviously all in the eye of the beholder.

Sennett wrote all this in 2006, by the way.

It often feels like all I do is read theory. But every single criticism of my scholarly production can be boiled down to one idea: I don’t read enough theory. I am fortunate in that my reviewers tend to be fantastic, really helpful, so I believe them: I need to read more theory. Especially since I never stay on one subject and move from feminism to the nation-state to the economy to queer studies to urban studies to the Spanish Civil War.

So I’m watching Gilmore Girls again, and since I saw it many times before, I started concentrating on the background, just to mix things up.

And I noticed something weird.

In the scenes that take place at Yale, at least 80% of people moving silently in the background are black. They never say anything, never participate in the action, their presence is never replicated in the classes Rory takes, people she hangs out with, her coworkers on the paper, etc. The black people just hover around noiselessly. And then disappear.

I’m guessing the show was trying to offset its all-white cast in this very bizarre way.

As a result of their complete dependence, infants become extraordinarily perceptive. Their only way to escape from intolerable terror is to develop perception skills. If an infant perceives that she is loved the way she needs to be loved by the huge all-powerful creatures around her, the anxiety that the creatures will not come when she needs them is alleviated. 

But if she feels that she is not loved as she needs to be loved, the doubt of, “Will I be left here to die?” remains.

As the infant grows up, he becomes less dependent and more capable of caring for himself. But the foundational memory of being put at the risk of extinction by lack of love remains. And it’s not like the people who didn’t love the infant enough will suddenly feel overcome with love for him when he is five, fifteen, or thirty. So the constant reminders of the destructive lack of love are always present.

This wounded person will be so overcome by anxiety that he will try to regain control over the situation. The only way to do that is to convince himself that he caused the lack of love that threatened his existence. And if he caused it, he’s at least somewhat in control. (It’s the exact same mechanism as the one used by victims of crime, for instance.)

This is why he will cling to the belief that he’s not good enough. Because if he is good enough, then it must mean that this horrible experience of being unloved is not about him at all. All this suffering, and it’s not even about him! It’s much easier to convince himself that it is about him and he has provoked the lack of love by not being good enough.

So she will travel through life, seeking out proof that she is undeserving of love, fat, ugly, stupid, useless. Because if that is true, there is always hope that once she makes herself deserving, beautiful, thin, smart and successful, then the love will come. And if, God forbid, it turns out that she is already deserving, beautiful, thin, smart and successful, then that means the love is never coming. And that’s the hardest thing in the world to accept.

So why do such people use the belief that they are not good enough as a survival mechanism?

In Lisa Gardner’s recent novel Find Her, the protagonist was kidnapped by a rapist and kept by him for months in a wooden box. She was completely dependent on him, never knowing if he’d show up and bring her food, clean her up, help her move. She was so helpless that a small object stuck under her head was causing her torture because she couldn’t move her head to find greater comfort. As a result, her personality was completely erased and she became insanely attached to the rapist.

This all sounds horrifying but aside form the rapist part, we all have had this exact same experience. Actually, this helplessness, dependence, incapacity to move on our own are the foundational experiences of all our lives. We were all this helpless as infants.

An infant is entirely dependent on the mercy of incomprehensible, enormous creatures who have to show up to feed, change and help her move. Or not. Like Lisa Gardner’s character, they never know if the all-powerful savior will come back or leave them to perish. 

Wow, it turns out there is now a fourth review of my first book. It came out in a very good, important journal, and the author is, again, an important older academic. The review is hugely laudatory.

This doesn’t suck at all.

You know these people who go through life thinking, believing, repeating, “I’m not good enough, not attractive enough, I’m fat, I’m a loser, I can never do anything right, I have bad people skills, I always mess everything up, etc.”? 

One can tell them many times that it’s not true, that they are not ugly, worthless, fat and stupid, but they won’t believe it. Want to know why?

Because that’s how they survive. This is their survival mechanism. Take the mantra of “I’m no good” away from them, and you are putting them at what they perceive as an actual threat of extinction.

So if you keep asking, “But why doesn’t it help him that I keep telling him how fantastic he is? Why doesn’t he believe me?”, remember: believing that he is good enough would be devastating to him. He is profoundly invested into maintaining the belief that he’s worthless.

In the following posts I will explain why.

In English-speaking countries, intensity is a sign of being low-class. People who speak loudly, excitedly, wave their hands around a lot, make a lot of ruckus, exhibit a lot of public emotion are more likely to be found in a trailer park than at an expensive restaurant or a social gathering of academics.

People of higher social classes, on the other hand, speak monotonously, don’t gesticulate very actively, and exhibit muted affect in public.

In Russian-speaking societies, it’s the other way round. Unless they get violently drunk, the humble classes speak quietly and monotonously, their public affect is flat, their speech is uninflected, their movements are constricted. One of the reasons they get drunk is to allow themselves to step outside of these boundaries.

Members of intelligentsia, on the other hand, speak loudly, excitedly, their emotions effervesce, they easily become overwrought. They make more noise discussing Silver Age poetry than an episode of Maury. Emoting in a public space is an entitlement of their social status.

This is a result of a very different philosophy of social class. English speakers value self-control and self-discipline so much that it becomes its own reward. Russian-speakers impose self-control as punishment on the less deserving.

Surgical interventions aimed at correcting “weird looking” genitals of infants are not even the worst method of “normalizing” the intersex. There are doctors who believe in starting treatment early in gestation to ensure that babies are born without any funky and unconventional sex organs. For this purpose, they give pregnant women steroids that are supposed to prevent their future babies from being intersex.

“But wait,” you will say. “How can anybody know if a fetus will turn into an intersex baby?”

And you’ll be right. Nobody can know. The absolute majority of fetuses that get doused with these steroids run no risk of being intersex. They are subjected to this drug for no reason at all. But they do run the risk of serious health consequences, including mental retardation and all kinds of disorders.

And as for those fetus receptacles that are not even human we call “pregnant women”, nobody cares about the danger of pumping them full of entirely unnecessary drugs for the dubious benefit of maybe catching a fetus that might have a slightly differently shaped genital area.

The only place where the long-term effects of this methodology were actually studied is Sweden. The results were so disturbing that the whole thing was banned immediately. In the US, however, the FDA keeps approving the treatment and the NIH keeps funding it in spite of overwhelming evidence that the pregnant women to whom this shit is administered are never warned about the dangers and are actually lied to egregiously.

Here is a link to the website where people who are fighting this insanity gather relevant information.

Russian Liberals are also making excuses for the Cologne rapists. But at least there is a clear logic behind their position: anything bad that can be attributed to immigrants in Europe makes Putin happy. And their job as Liberals is to contradict Putin. Not that this excuses the woman-hating assholery of their position.

The only actual difference I’m noticing is that in Russian-speaking media, only men justify these sexual assaults. And in English-speaking media it’s mostly women.

I’m wondering in how many languages I will hear the narrative of “This is just their culture, we have to be understanding. And it’s not them, anyways. It was all a setup by neo-Nazis. And if it wasn’t, then this is the behavior they picked up from Germans.”