this column by charles blow is ridiculous. first of all, it's just an exercise in manipulation and propaganda. "extremist extremist extremist': it doesn't engage the opponents or characterize anything about their positions; merely hurls insults at them, in an attempt to join a bunch of people together into a gantlet to spit on, dehumanize, and degrade their enemies. it's amazing that people who, say, could endorse the occupy movement, just uncritically use words like 'revolutionary' in a completely pejorative sense. as soon as your people get power, everyone does the same thing: our noble protests have won the day, and now disagreeing with us is illegal. sentence after sentence is quotation from hundreds of other columns by hundreds of other columnists: blow can't even write his own shit, despite the fact that he has been entirely liberated from cognitive or empirical content.
this, let's say, is the difference between individualism and collectivism as applied to op-ed columns: blow's column was written by a vast committee of people whose collective identity is founded on (1) hatred of their enemies, and (2) sentences that they all chant in the same order. the first move in establishing a collective consciousness is to stop thinking or trying to formulate ideas on your own. just kind of look sideways at what the folks around you are saying, and say it too, even if you're a bit late. for us all to flow together like the waters, each of us will have to be submerged. for us all (or at least, or rather necessarily, everyone except the Enemy) to become one thing, each of us must cease to be anything. i hope charles blow's people have celebrated his annihilation/expansion, as he has become one with all that is, or at least with his portion of the political spectrum.
one slight loss connected with the emergence of collective consciousness is that the voice of all us is very non-distinctive, as it has to be. well, art is going to be impossible in these conditions. they're incompatible with any sort of stylish or distinctive prose. that is a small price to pay for the ecstasy of unity, however.
i just might say: it's amazing what people say about white guys these days. if you tried that with any other group, the pc police would tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. stereotypes, profiling, a string of sheer generalized insults hurled at the group: all acceptable in this case. there are some reasons for that, of course. that doesn't make the structure of thought plausible or decent. 'thought,' however, might be inapt: the idea is to find a slogan or a word and then recite together like maoist schoolchildren.
really, i think that the idea of collective consciousness is basically a fiction or a simulation. but it is a fiction that has to be enforced by myriad social pressures and, as its real enthusiasts have known, if not said, by pervasive coercion. and i do think that you cannot have even the simulation of a collective consciousness that does not rest fundamentally on exclusions; our unity is proportional to our hatred, and there are just no clearer examples of that than the approach of people like blow, in fact just exactly like blow or indistinguishable from him. if someday he condemns partisanship or says all americans need to pull together, just snicker.
the favorite trope of leftists these days is condemning 'individualism,' which is self-evidently the essence of evil. but they need in the process to square up to the various dark sides of their own position, for example that solidarity is proportional to extrusion. we're all in this together, and that's why these monsters among us with the incomprehensible temerity to disagree with me must be silenced and exiled. this is completely obvious from their own expressions of their own positions: their plea for togetherness starts by attacking as evil idiots anyone who disagrees or who resists complete incorporation.
