You Special Snowflake, You!

Seriously: you don't have to be "amazing." You don't have to be "insanely cool", or insanely anything, and I'd rather not be. And so on. I don't get the appeal of memes like this.

More than that, I think sentiments like this are destructive.  They feed the notion that you have to be "good enough" to deserve to live, and of course what is good enough is impossible to define.  Since they are aimed at people who don't feel they're good enough, that they don't deserve to exist, I can't believe they work very well or for long.  Supposedly repeating affirmations is supposed to prop up damaged self-esteem and convince yourself that you're good enough after all; but you have to keep repeating them, and finding new ones, probably because whatever effect they produce wears off.  For people with addictive personalities, I think they just become an addiction in themselves, like therapy.  As you develop tolerance to your affirmations, you need progressively stronger and stronger ones, more exalting and delusional.

I'm also reminded of Amanda Marcotte's remarks (via) about the widespread desire to be a special snowflake.  Lately Marcotte has descended depressingly into Hillarybot-ism, but she was still right that time.  In this case, do you have to be "amazing," a special snowflake, to feel good about yourself -- at least good enough to get up in the morning and live your life, to believe that people who approve of you aren't deceived or trying to deceive you, and to approve of others?  I wonder if this kind of mindset is also a product of the rampant competitiveness in American society, especially in the culture of therapy, and its obsession with being a "winner."  And if you spend a lot of time berating and punishing yourself for spending too much time in your comfort zone, I doubt this affirmation will help at all.

It seems irrelevant to me, mainly I think because I was so affected and influenced by Walter Kaufmann's case against the concept of desert in Without Guilt and Justice, seconded by Ursula Le Guin's philosopher Odo in The Dispossessed:

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.  Have we not eaten while another starved?  Will you punish us for that?  Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate?  No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

Maybe the reason that this insight doesn't work for people who like affirmational memes is that, like the people who (coincidentally) believe they were royalty or high priests/priestesses in past lives, they agree that if you aren't superior to everyone else, you don't deserve to live.  So they repeat the affirmation like a mantra, in hopes that it will silence the lurking interior terror that they aren't really very special at all.  But maybe I'm giving them more credit for articulate thought than they deserve.  If they just have that fear that they aren't special, maybe they're using the wrong affirmation.  Try Odo instead; she works for me.

The Buck Stops Here

I wrote "I find this offensive" as a comment on my friend's repost of this meme on Facebook today.  Not just because she herself posts lots of material that is offensive to various people -- it goes without saying that what is meant here is "Speak without offending me; if I offend you, you deserve it for not sharing my opinions."  Not just because being offended is one of the inevitable consequences of freedom of expression.  Not just because I think it is important to offend many people, nor do I break when I'm offended.

But the other principles here strike me as no less wrongheaded.  Pretending, for example, is an essential part of human life, from childhood to adulthood.  We pretend by imitating what we imagine adults do; we try on various selves and possibilities; and among the harder forms is trying to put ourselves in others' shoes -- which ironically enough, is another platitude beloved in these memes.  Or one might pretend to be a sane, rational, healthy person and try to become that person by practice -- another popular meme.  I suppose the meme-maker had some more specific and limited sense of "pretending" in mind, but I don't know what it was.

"Love without depending" is tricky.  Children, of course, depend on others simply to survive.  It's an unfortunate fact that many people can't be depended on, as we find when we become adults, but we still find people we can and do depend on . For many people (especially, I suspect, women) the dependable ones are friends.  Still, letting others -- and by extension, ourselves -- off the hook for keeping their word and their commitments is not a good way to live.  Here again, a reasonable caution is universalized until it becomes a counsel of fear.  To say nothing of blaming the victim: you broke your promise to me, therefore I was at fault for believing you.

"Listen without defending" is another exhortation that has limited value but shouldn't be universalized to every situation.  The other day I was seated in a restaurant next to a table where two heterosexuals were having their lunch.  The butch one was haranguing his femme for various failings; she was mostly weeping, but quietly.  This is a pattern I've seen too often over the years.  One complaint he kept repeating was that she insisted he should accept her as she is, which for some reason offended him greatly.  I only eavesdropped intermittently, but it was hard to ignore them altogether.  It is important to be able to listen to another person, but not to make yourself into a passive vessel with no needs of your own.  Especially when someone is criticizing you, it's necessary to be able to evaluate the criticism, and defend yourself if necessary.  A few years ago I realized that under attack I first apologize, then realize that I've done nothing to apologize for, and go on the offensive against the criticism.  I suppose that's not such a bad approach, but I'd fallen into it without thinking about it, too ready to assume that I was in the wrong.

One of the really hard parts of becoming an adult, I think, is that you have to learn the necessity of judgment.  You have to learn that no principle or rule fits every situation, and that you have to decide for yourself whether a given rule fits a given situation.  And the decision is yours -- one (but only one, and not universal) of the functions of religion is to enable the believer to pass the buck of moral responsibility upstairs to the higher power.  But this meme is just wrongheaded all the way.