The valorisation of surface level positivity as moral and the declaiming of negativity as immoral is the hallmark of apolitical attitudes. The media goes on and on about extremism and depression and now everyone has the relationships all wrong. Notice how the critical analysis about Hitler becomes hyperfocused on his failed art career and his general negativity. Thousands of thinkpieces about sad white boys becoming Neo Nazis.

While it may temporarily inoculate you from getting radicalised by chud propaganda if you have this attitude, depression and anger is created by your material conditions and biology. If you're unable to critically think about ideology outside of tonal attitudes, you're left vulnerable to bullshit when depression and anger strikes.

Additionally you are easy prey for neoliberal capitalism, which markets you murder cheerfully. Democrats almost constantly fetishise this positive == good logic. This is also why the alt right coopts things like My Little Pony. We shouldn't forget that Hitler rallies weren't masses of depressed, frothing people – they were usually experiencing something transcendent. I don't understand why the concept of the cheerfully evil, while present in pop culture is generally absent in evaluations of ideology.

  • extraterrestrial5 [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    ban all incel fiction

    they were usually experiencing something transcendent. I don’t understand why the concept of the cheerfully evil, while present in pop culture is generally absent in evaluations of ideology.

    https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/

    "Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’tonly want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”