There’s a hilarious video floating around the internet of Fox News calling Mr Rogers “an evil man”.
They claim he’s ruined a generation of kids, by telling them that they’re special. To the people in the room here, the idea that people have inherent self-worth and value is offensive. They constantly make the point that self-worth and self-esteem must be earned through actions. Now, I could go into the practical and talk about how it’s bad childrearing to expect children to excel before you give them the tools needed to excel. But I want to go into the theoretical today and ask “What’s with the right’s war on self esteem?”
Participation trophies are the obvious example of a symbol of pride that reactionary media likes to villify, and furthermore to blame on the children being given pride instead of on the adults giving it out.
But what about Pride? Gay Pride? The reasons for homophobes to be opposed to gay pride are obvious, but I’ve seen people with no homophobic intent ask why we should encourage gay pride. It’s a good-faith question. But what is not questioned is the idea that undue pride is bad. People ask this question without even realising that they platformed this idea that you need a good reason to be prideful. It’s not an opinion they’re trying to push, it’s a background concept they’ve always seen followed without ever thinking about it.
Pride. Arrogance. Entitlement. Superiority. Vanity. Sanctimoniousness. Condescension. Ego. Narcissism. Cockiness. Conceit. Pretentiousness. Smugness. Hubris. Self-esteem. Haughtiness. Confidence.
The vast majority of pride-related words are negative. They didn’t get that way out of some intrinsic badness of pride, they got that way because the people who speak English have a cultural disdain for pride. People wanted a lot of different ways to insult someone by calling them prideful, so they made words for it. They wanted a way to call someone prideful and call them bad at the same time, without even acknowledging the possibility that these two concepts could not be related.
The reactionary push against Mr Rogers, Participation Trophies, and Pride is not necessarily pure hatred. It’s a cultural value that reactionaries have been taught, and when these movements and practices and people rise up who oppose this cultural value, the reactionaries leap to the defence of the status quo. In clear terms: There is nothing new about calling Mr Rogers an evil man. It’s just plain old fashioned conservativism. Thinking self esteem is evil is the way it’s been done as long as the English language has existed in its current form.
This fact becomes really obvious if you’re forced to live with the disability that is Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Having witnessed countless instances of hate and stereotyping, I noticed something. The ableist’s first attack on people with NPD will be to say that the disorder causes abusive behaviour. And they will watch you like a hawk waiting for you to speak out of turn and prove them right. But if you stay on your best behaviour and prove the first stereotype wrong by your own existence, you will see the arguments change. You will still see hate. And the argument for the hate will morph into a new assertion: “Having a big ego is itself an act of abuse.”
What a strange assertion. It abandons the former justification that ego causes abuse, and goes right to ego is abuse. And it eerily echoes the claims by Fox News that Mr Rogers is an evil man. That he ruined a generation by teaching them that they have inherent self-worth. That participation trophies produced a generation of entitled snowflakes who dare to think that they deserve affordable housing.
Originally the insult “snowflake” wasn’t about fragility or melting. It’s a shortening of “special snowflake”. People who believe that they are a unique and beautiful being. It’s another insult that says pride is bad, just like the ones I listed above. This one taking on a reactionary character as it’s associated with the kind of people who hate participation trophies and narcissism.
I went into detail in another article about how narcissism has some unique synergies with communism and anarchy. Such as entitlement provoking a furious determination to seize the means of production and ensure fair treatment. In that article, I sought to create an association between narcissism and left-wing politics. But I’m not the first to do that. Before Me, there was Fox News talking about entitled narcissistic SJW snowflakes.
It seems clear to Me that the philosophies of Mr Rogers and the gay pride movement represent a new (or perhaps just newly popular) kind of thinking that is uncomfortable to conservative social values. A thought that all people deserve fair and just treatment, with equal opportunity and inherent self-worth, perhaps even with universal basic income.
A leftist looks at a homeless person and sees a failure of the system to provide the right environment for everyone to do well. They see a waste of resources that could have been spent helping people. A rightist looks at a homeless person and sees a pathetic bum who needs to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop asking for a handout, because nobody owes you anything, pal. Yes, I believe modern leftism is linked with a universalised sense of basic pride and dignity for all. While traditional rightism is linked with shame and pressure to perform for others in order to secure basic needs.
What an irony it is that a culture of shame and pressure is exactly what inflicts narcissistic personality disorder onto abused children. But I suppose that is the irony at the heart of NPD itself. Without the dignity and entitlement associated with the left wing, a person with NPD who has not accomplished tangible greatness feels that they don’t deserve to live. I think it no coincidence that this is the same way reactionaries tend to feel about poor people and minorities.
But why? How did the culture of shame overtake our society so completely as to effect such changes in our language that we find it difficult to positively describe pride without modern words? Why do conservatives feel the need to attack pride? How did it come to be that the progressives and socialists stand in opposition to this?
I don’t have a firm answer, but I have a theory. I think it’s related to the way that when white supremacy is effectively functioning, whiteness is socially equivalent to racelessness. The privilege of being white is the privilege of never experiencing racialisation. White fragility is simply a matter of white people not being used to being treated the way they treat others.
The Aryan Brotherhood might talk about white pride and white power, but when you look at the capitalist neoliberal status quo, it’s a different story. Whiteness isn’t “superior”, it’s “normal”. In the opinion of white supremacists, other races would ideally not even exist. Perhaps white supremacy is even a misnomer for this ideology. Most white supremacists are not proud to be white, they feel that whiteness makes them normal. Neither prideful nor shameful.
I’ve seen transphobes call “cisgender” a slur. And aphobes deny the existence of the word “alloromantic”. Bigots attack the words “neurotypical” and “allistic”. I think there’s a perception here on the left that bigots think themselves superior for their normative identities. But no, in the cases of the casual racists, homophobes, misogynists, and ableists, they feel normal. Misogynist men see themselves not as explicitly having a gender, but as hu-men, members of man-kind. This is why conservatives hate “gender ideology”. Gender is what those women and queers have, not men!
The conservative worldview simply does not have room for pride. It only has shame and neutrality. Shame on all those minorities, and neutrality on “good hardworking christian men.” Pride is a sin, as the Catholic Church has been saying for a long time. Pride is what made the devil bad.
The existence of men like Mr Rogers is an insult to everything about reactionary ideology. It insults white supremacy, it insults the heteropatriarchy, it insults capitalism, it insults the state, and it insults the lord.
Pride itself is an attack on all of western civilisation. No wonder reactionaries think narcissism is abuse. Our very existence dismantles consensus reality fundamentally.
