"My motive was the same as yours. One day, out of the blue, they just became too much. The faces of people who thought nothing of making endless demands, of being constantly given things. The way they sat at the table simply waiting to be served, not lifting a finger. Their certainty that they would be taken care of, without even having to try. I began, in an instant, to hate them. I couldn't be bothered to buy seasonal ingredients, prepare them, cook, choose the plates, serve up the food, then clear away the dishes and wash up for people like that. When I stopped being in touch, when I stopped doing the housework and the cooking, they panicked. Some of them became hyper-suspicious and their behaviour took on a stalkerish air. Some of them, after returning to life alone, began neglecting themselves, and suffered physically as a result. Like babies, all of them, whose mother had ceased looking after them. It's odd, isn't it? Once I had found their incompetence, their reliance on me adorable. I believed, up until that point, that I liked pleasing them. Yet I suddenly saw that it was always just me, working away frenziedly, all alone."
- Manako Kajii on her suitors/"victims", from Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Very relatable experience. Funny though that this lady hates feminists, I still don't understand why; obviously feminism hopes to dispel this dynamic between men and women.
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"You're right, it is ridiculous. It feels like the Japanese desire to be thin is less about beauty and more... [...] It's like we're all being controlled, so that when you come across a person who's shaken off that control you feel irritated."
- Butter, by Asako Yuzuki
I'm really loving this book. Butter provides a perspective on fatphobia that isn't based in Western culture. And yet even though Japan is on the other side of the world from me, there's so much we have in common when it comes to society's views of women, weight gain, eating habits, and fatness.
The character in this excerpt is speaking to the feelings people have when they encounter someone who eats what they want and how much they want. People really do have a disproportionately aggressive and irritable reaction to someone who doesn't excessively monitor their caloric intake; that's a form of freedom that you often cannot have if you want to fit modern beauty standards, or arguably exist in mainstream society (I won't be the first nor last to say that most places are built for skinny people, not fat people).
"If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we've sacrificed right to might. (That's what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we've left the real world, we're in fantasy land-wishful thinking country. [...] The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she'll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I'd have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks."
- No Time To Spare, by Ursula K. Le Guin (emphasis mine)
Le Guin makes a good point here about history being written by the victor, therefore leading to the victor being painted as the "morally correct" party in a conflict. But I thought her passage on Helen revealed an interesting thought process.
After a war, the victor tends to applaud themselves for their superior virtue. Obviously there isn't a universal moral standard for what's good and what's bad, so every case is defined differently based on the victor's culture. We don't see every winner in war as possessing the same values.
At the same time, might equals right, meaning the winners define what is moral, and in winning they essentially gain the power to do so. Helen being a victor in the Odyssey should lead to her characteristics being idolized, but that is not what Le Guin is doing. Since Helen is a victor (and therefore must be virtuous according to this line of thinking), Le Guin argues that she must revise her perception of Helen as an "innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks." What's fascinating to me is that she takes the path that denies Helen's characteristics instead of the path that idolizes those characteristics.
Just finished "Germans Into Nazis" by Peter Fritzsche, and he talked extensively about how the German "burgfrieden" (literally "peace of the fortress," a sense of national unity in the face of war) during WWI was highly sought after in the years following the war and leading up to the rise of the Nazis. The political landscape of Weimar Germany was very divided and volatile, but people wanted to feel that same sense of national brotherhood that they felt way back in 1914.
The Nazis were really the perfect storm because they were a populist movement that aimed to inspire that same feeling of unity (at the expense of socialists, Jews, and others that they considered to be enemies of the nation). Nationalism was a major part of their platform, and they co-opted tactics and vocabularies of many classes and movements to appeal to an enormously broad base. And it worked; Germans loved the sense of wholeness that the Nazis brought into politics and daily life. The discrimination against the "other" could be ignored - for a while, at least.
But I'm relating this to how people felt after 9/11. My (white liberal) dad was just telling me about how that day was tragic but the NATION was whole and united in grief that day, and he wishes that we could have that sense of unity again. And I said yes well... Everyone was united until they found out who did it. At that point if you were Muslim (or LOOKED Muslim) you weren't included in the nation anymore. I may have been a baby at the time of 9/11, but I grew up in the era after and I remember how they spoke about Muslims. I remember the hate crimes and the mass shootings. That unity that my dad felt was not all inclusive.
To put it bluntly, I think a lot of well meaning liberals would have fallen for the Nazis just like Germans did.
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The gelatin in film stock was made from the hide, bones, cartilage, ligaments, and connective tissue of calves (considered the very best), sheep (less desirable), and other animals who passed through the slaughterhouse. Six kilograms of bone went into a single kilogram of gelatin. Eventually, the demands of photographic industries generated so much need for animal byproducts that slaughterhouses became integrated into the photographic production chain. Controlling the supply chain became key to Kodak's success. In 1882, as Kodak began to grow as a company, widespread complaints of fogged and darkened plates stopped production. The crisis almost ruined Kodak financially and resulted in the company tightly monitoring the animal by-products used in gelatin. Decades later, a Kodak emulsion scientist discovered that cattle who consumed mustard seed metabolized a sulfuric substance, enhancing the light sensitivity of silver halides and enabling better film speeds. The poor-quality gelatin in 1882 was due to the lack of mustard seeds in the cows' diet. The head of research at Kodak, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, concluded, "If cows didn't like mustard there wouldn't be any movies at all." By controlling the diet of cows who were used to make gelatin, Kodak ensured the quality of its film stock. As literary scholar Nicole Shukin reflects, there is a "transfer of life from animal body to technological media." The image comes alive through animal death, carried along by the work of ranchers, meatpackers, and Kodak production workers.
âSiobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography
what the fuck is going on this year. january through june didnt happen. july is a distant memory. august and september were the longest months of my life. october ended in 5 seconds. why is november here already this isnât right
Join a community. You canât fix the climate on your own, but you can fix the other stuff.
Join a community that has time-keeping celebrations. Even if itâs just âsummer partyâ and âfall partyâ etc. Join people who say âitâs summer - time to do a beach cleanup this weekend!â Join a community that will say âWinter is coming up, so letâs get the coat donations going!â Join a community that plants a garden in the spring, maintains it in the summer, and harvests in the fall. Join folks who plan hikes in the fall to see the trees changing color, who plan summer camping trips, who birdwatch during different seasons to see different birds.
I feel the exact same âunmooringâ from reality as OP. Part of why Iâm converting to Judaism is for community and timekeeping rituals. Now, Iâm not saying religion is the answer for everyone, which is why none of the examples I listed above are inherently religious!
But you have to reconnect to the people and the world around you.
Individualism and Conservatism: Weimar to Present-Day America
There are many similarities and differences between the Weimar conservative and the modern conservative, but today I want to look specifically at their perspectives on individualism. What were the Nazisâ views of individualism? How was the individual defined, limited, and perceived? Most importantly, do these views carry into Americaâs modern day political sphere, and if so, how do they manifest in Americaâs seemingly individual-centered society?
This may be surprising for many who grew up with American conservatism, but conservatives in Weimar Germany were actually broadly opposed to individualism. According to point #10 of the Twenty-Five Points, the Nazisâ original platform of 1920, âThe activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for general good.â This may sound conducive to happiness and common good, but this entire quote is obviously very vague and subject to interpretation. What are the interests of the whole? How are the whole and the community defined and limited? How is general good measured in this framework? Of course, when the German Workersâ Party (which would later become the Nazi Party) drafted this, their interpretation of the community was exclusive to their conception of German citizens - Aryans. The interests of the whole and the general good referred to the interests and good of the German nation and culture exclusively. The individual is only permitted to act and exist within these narrow parameters. Not only does this exclude Jews, but enemies of the German nation and culture as well, including sexual deviants, communists, and other groups that were eventually persecuted by Nazis.
In other writings from this time, individualism is associated negatively with Jews and modernism. For example, in Struggle of the Age, Adolf Bartels claims that the modern art style of Expressionism, âin its Jewish disfigurement, elevates the puny individual to the measure of all thingsâ (Weimar Republic Sourcebook p. 124) Not only is this sentence an expression of hatred for the elevation of the individual, it is an expression of hatred specifically for those who are unique, unfamiliar, and incomprehensible to nationalist conservatives of the time. This line also demonstrates conservativesâ discomfort with the idea that human experience is subjective; it undermines the principles of uniformity, authority, and objectivity that undergird their belief system. Furthermore, many other conservative groups, especially churches, railed against the individualism and egotism of modern (read: Jewish) life and called for a return to a time when God was the center of peopleâs lives (Weitz pp. 337-338).
To summarize, the admiration of the individual, in the eyes of Weimar conservatives, was broadly seen as an unsavory product of modern Jewish corruption of traditional German society. The individual was expected to be a part of and contribute to the preservation of the dominant German culture; one was free to act as long as they acted in service to the fatherland (which is a roundabout way of saying one isnât truly free to act as they please).
Comparing this to the modern-day conservative and neo-fascist movement of America, we can notice differences and similarities. The rabid individualism so characteristic of American culture and history cannot be ignored, and that was certainly lacking in Weimar conservative circles. But is it truly individualism or just a facade? (As a side note, there is certainly a conversation to be had here about propaganda, but we wonât get into that today.) Though many conservatives (especially libertarians) constantly use terms like âindividual libertyâ in their rhetoric, they advocate for policies that fundamentally restrict these liberties. For instance, gender-affirming care bans prevent individuals from seeking specific kinds of treatment. Forbidding drag in public restricts the right of the individual, cis or trans, to present as they like. Banning abortions and restricting birth control take bodily autonomy away from the individual and give it to the government. Allowing people to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people for âreligious reasonsâ reduces the liberty of those seeking services.
All of these policies, overwhelmingly supported and implemented by modern conservatives, run directly counter to their supposed veneration of individual rights. Modern conservatives and Weimar conservatives do have one thing in common then, and that is their de facto dislike of individual freedom. As much as modern conservatives claim to love the individual, they only actually support individual freedom so long as it is defined as the freedom of an individual to act on dominant nationalist, Christian, capitalist, exclusionary, traditionalist values. In the eyes of a conservative, people who do not conform to those values, who appreciate the uniqueness and subjectivity of the individual, and who recognize the variability of humanity and malleable nature of culture are not deserving of individual freedom and must be regulated by the government. Modern conservatives permit individual liberty primarily when it restricts the freedom of undesirable individuals and simultaneously upholds the values of the dominant culture. As previously mentioned in the section on Weimar, this is because individual diversity and subjectivity conflict with the conservative craving for uniformity, authority, and objectivity.
Sources:
The Weimar Republic Sourcebook edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg
Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy by Eric D. Weitz
