Clarissa's Blog

I found the two 7-year-olds discussing the importance of the freedom of speech and private property. It’s incredibly cute.

I know I keep harping on Ann Napolitano’s novel Hello Beautiful but it lays out the woke philosophy of life very clearly and openly. The book utterly lacks artistic merit, but its insight into wokeness makes it worth the time.

So what is the woke worldview?

It posits that there’s something called “your true self” hidden inside every person. Our task in life is to discover this true self and accept it. The issue of who puts this true self into us is never raised. It is simply there.

How do we know that we have found that true self and fully accepted it?

It feels good. That’s how we know we are on the right track in life. Feeling good shows that we are accepting our true self. Not feeling good means we aren’t.

See the problem with this way of thinking?

It’s an inward-oriented closed system.

There are no external elements at all. There is no gauge of good and bad aside from my feelings.

The problem is that my feelings can be caused by all sorts of things. Maybe I’ve been damaged by bad past experiences. Maybe I have an upset stomach and it’s coloring my perceptions. Or maybe I’m a shitty person and instead of accepting my true self I should be trying to improve it.

Another problem with this approach is that it’s very lonely. If other people don’t enter into my calculations of how to behave and there’s no external morality to guide me, I’ll end up using and discarding people like paper napkins at a barbecue joint. Napolitano’s novel shows what this looks like when followed through to its ultimate consequences. A father discards his infant child because it feels good to be rid of a squawking baby. A woman seduces her sister’s husband because it feels good. A woman draws pornographic images to explain sex to a kindergartner because why not? If how something makes you feel is the only measure of good and bad, that’s where you’ll end up.

Napolitano tries to talk up these barren, self-immersed lifestyles but they still look grim. If you are already born with the “true self”, it means that there’s no need to develop, grow, try to be better. The characters in the novel either find their true self in doing a particular job, and then their personal lives turn into a cavalcade of episodic, interchangeable partners, or the true self consists in being in an unconventional sexual relationship. Then everything besides this particular sex partner becomes easily discardable. Beyond the job or the sex, the only other “true self” can reside in a physical characteristic or a health condition. So people who are very curly or unusually tall need to accept their height or hairstyle and… well, that’s it. Their task in life is done.

I told you it’s grim.

But that’s what the universe that revolves around the self looks like.

In the USSR, there was a time when rape was a capital crime. That law had to be repealed soon enough because you know what happened?

When the rapist knew that he’d get capital punishment whether the victim survived or not, he simply murdered her to avoid having a potential witness. Murders of rape victims began to spike. The Soviet authorities had to go back on this law because it was very counterproductive.

What I’m saying is that even the Soviets were smart enough to understand this.

We are surrounded by congenitally stupid people on all sides.

In Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, every character is a despicable human being except for the lesbian and the black guy who are angelic.

Of course, the novel made it onto the Oprah Book Club.

And here’s the birthday dinner board my sister prepared for my husband:

It’s N’s birthday, and here’s the breakfast my sister prepared for him:

Enjoy your Wednesday!

The system of development levels I wrote about recently is actually very helpful. I’m reading the novel Hey Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and it’s incomprehensible without the knowledge of these levels. The characters do the most outrageous things to each other for absolutely no reason.

A mother treats her grown daughters like absolute garbage. They’ve done nothing wrong. She simply feels like hurting them.

A man tries to commit suicide, and when his parents learn about it, they say, “we don’t care. Please leave us alone.” The man never had a fight or a conflict of any sort with the parents. They simply don’t understand why they are supposed to care that their only son has been fished out of Lake Michigan half-dead.

A young woman decides not to inform the father of her baby that she gave birth to his child. He never hurt her in any way. She just feels like excluding him, so that’s what she does. Nobody asks why she does it. People accept her decision stupidly, like they accept everything else.

A man decides to walk out on his wife and newborn baby and relinquish parental rights. Why? Why do these people ever do anything? They simply feel like it.

The amounts of casual cruelty these characters engage in towards each other is stunning. These aren’t stupid or uneducated people. They get college degrees, go to graduate school, and love books. It’s not a problem of low IQ or being congenitally stupid. So what’s causing this?

Everything becomes completely clear once you realize that these are first-level people. They don’t have even the most basic philosophy of life or a moral code. They have no insight into their own behavior or feelings. They don’t even know it’s possible to have insight. “But I wanna” is the main – no, the only – driving force of their lives. As a result, they often can only exist if they are constantly and aggressively medicated. Otherwise, they become too destructive.

The book is very enjoyable if you know about first-level people. If not, it becomes completely incomprehensible.

Turns out that Klara already memorized the definitions of verbs, adjectives and nouns at school.

This is a good school. I have college students who have no idea what an adjective is.

Good as it is, we are skipping school again today because it’s still better to be out of if it.

The quote I posted above is great. But its author, David Kingsbury, spent his life ploddingly rewriting Dune. This is the strange thing about the clumsily called “genre literature.” It attaches to a single plot, and recreates it endlessly, sometimes for centuries.

Romance literature, for example, is hung up on the plot where the male character treats the female heroine horribly but then it’s revealed he was doing it out of love. This trend can be traced from Pride and Prejudice to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Gone with the Wind to 50 Shades and on and on into infinity. I was once forced to read nothing but Harlequin romance books because there was nothing else, and pretty much every book was a variation on this plot. I guess women are desperate to believe that shitty men are actually in love with them. This is what a psychologist would call an archetype. It’s an idea or a story that humans are use over centuries to grapple with difficult things in life.

In sci-fi there seems to be a fixation on re-possessing the human body by either drinking its fluids or eating its flesh. There’s also a trope of women with secret knowledge of the “mommy knows best” type. These are clearly male archetypes, and I don’t understand them well.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

David Kingsbury