The Private-Public Self - an 'Inside Out' persona in the post-autistic era of transparency, and how 'cold feeling' and 'hot thinking' are invading politics and our intimate lives

 

I: ALIENATION AND THE SIMULACRUM OF TRANSPARENCY

 

            We usually think of the persona as a public mask that hides your “private self”. The commonly-held view is that in public we wear a mask, we are “fake”, we pretend, and in private we show our so-called ‘true self’. This is, at least, how Carl Jung described the persona when he came up with the concept. The common assumption is that the veil is a function of psychological distance. With strangers, there is less transparency. The closer we are with someone, or the more time we know someone for, the more transparency there is.

            That was, indeed, the case in 18^th century mercantilism. Byung-Chul Han describes it like this:

 

“The society of the eighteenth century was still dominated by ritual forms of interaction. The public space resembled a stage, a theatre. The body also represented a stage. It was a dressed puppet without soul, without psychology, that had to be draped and decorated and fitted out with signs and symbols. The wig framed the face like a painting. The fashion itself was theatrical, and people were properly in love with scenic presentations. A lady’s coiffure was also designed as a scene, representing either a historical event or an emotion. These emotions, however, did not reflect conditions of the soul. The emotions were mainly played with. The face itself became a stage on which various characters were represented with the help of beauty spots. If they were placed at the corner of the eye, they meant passion. Placed on the lower lip, they indicated the frankness of the wearer. The face understood as a stage is utterly remote from that face we find presented today on Facebook. The nineteenth century discovered work, and play became increasingly distrusted. There was now much more work than play: the world resembled a factory rather than a theatre. (...)

With the rise of the cult of authenticity, tattoos have also become fashionable again. Today, tattoos lack any symbolic power. All they do is point to the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space. The neoliberal hell of the same is populated with tattooed clones. The cult of authenticity erodes public space, which disintegrates into private spaces. Everyone carries their own private space with them wherever they go. In public space, one has to leave aside the private and play a role. It is a space for scenic presentations, a theatre. (...)

Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself. Theatrical presentation gives way to a pornographic exhibition of the private.”¹

 

            These days are over. The advent of the internet and other forms of digital long-distance communication have increased alienation. Alienation is not the same thing as separation. Separation is isolation, distance. Alienation is distance in closeness and closeness in distance. It’s when you are lonely in a crowd full of people. The internet is the ultimate alienating force. It allows us to “keep in touch at a distance”, but it is a double-edged sword because it also makes us keep a distance when we are physically close and everyone is on their phones. The contrast between “close” and “far” psychologically is smoothed out by digital communication, resulting in an inferno of the same.

            Today, the dominant ideology is transparency. It is here that I recommend the reader to pause and read my recent article, the commentary on Han’s book “The Transparency Society”². But, you can keep reading the article and still understand it even if you don’t read my previous one. The summary is this: ideology today (in the sense of what society is telling you to do) is transparency in all areas of life: politics, relationship/dating advice, music and hip-hop culture, social media, the cult of ‘mental health awareness’, and many others. The messages today are: “be yourself”, express yourself, don’t wear a mask in public, don’t have secrets, don’t expect people to read your thoughts, interpret every social situation literally, communicate directly, don’t be ambiguous, don’t be mysterious, communication is the most important thing in a relationship, be transparent about your intentions, if you are struggling with mental health ‘talk to someone’, tell every stranger about your suicidal thoughts. It appears like the biggest sin is to have any privacy and personal space left. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!

            There is a catch here. What Han misses in his analysis, other than what I already stated in the article I just linked, is that, like Slavoj Zizek often argues, ideology does not take itself seriously. Zizek gives many examples of codes of conduct that you are explicitly told to follow but actually indirectly expected to transgress “between the lines”: you are a young 12–13-year-old boy and your father comes to warn you about sexual contact with girls, “don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, stay in school”; but between the lines you can feel him alluding messages like “What, are you a loser? Are you even a real man? At your age I had twenty women already!”. He’s explicitly telling you “Don’t do it” while implicitly telling you “Do it, but make sure I don’t find out”.

            It was the same thing in the Soviet Union. Zizek often tells how if you publicly disavowed communism, you were sent to the gulag. But if you were to actually fanatically believe in communism and genuinely think that it is a good system and try to make it work, you were also suspected to be a madman and too dangerous and also sent to the gulag. Ideology, at that time, expected you to publicly pretend to believe in communism while privately disavowing it. Genuinely believing in the system was seen as just as dangerous as publicly not believing it. You were forced to believe in public and disavow in private.

            It is the exact same today with transparency. Transparent communication is autistic. It implies interpreting every social situation literally, communicating directly, not being able (or refusing) to read body language, contextual cues, etc. If you were to actually genuinely believe in the popular messages of transparency today, you would not succeed in society, you would simply be diagnosed with autism. Just like with communism in the Soviet Union, autistic speech itself has become a mask to wear in public – to succeed in society, you have to pretend to believe in transparency and “play dumb” or present yourself as socially unaware, while actually needing higher social skills than ever before.

            This seems paradoxical since autism implies a dysfunction of the persona as a whole, it implies not having a proper persona, being transparent, not wearing a mask. The autistic subject is the authentic subject par excellence insofar as they have trouble adapting the “filter” of their words to the context they are in (no “protective filter” from inside to outside) or in their hyper-sensitivity to outward sensory stimuli (no “protective filter” from outside to inside). Yet, this is precisely our predicament today: authenticity has become a mask.

            Today, the distinction between private and public is broken. The internet has given rise in the past two-three decades to a third monster: the private-public self. The private-public self is not authenticity or simple “transparency”, it is when authenticity has itself become a mask. The private-public self is not the private emerging into the public sphere. It is, instead, when the private has itself become a public performance.

            If we make an analogy and say that the persona includes the clothes we wear in public, transparency would imply nakedness. A transparent society would be a society in which no one would wear clothes, metaphorically speaking. Today’s society is a society that has went beyond transparency and has transformed authenticity itself into a public performance, and thus, the analogy here would be when your inner organs are exposed outside and your skin has turned inside-out, like in that Rick and Morty episode in which Summer transforms into a giant monster with her skin turned “inside out”:

            The private-public self is not a transparent, authentic or ‘autistic’ self. It is the inside-out persona.

 

II: DIGITAL COMMUNICATION AND POST-AUTISM

 

            Today’s culture is a culture of post-autism³. An autistic culture would simply explain the meaning behind every euphemism, hint, veil or other form of indirect communication. In our era of post-autism, the explanation of a message with implications/allusions itself has implications/allusions. Decoding a message is itself a code.

            Let’s say that I say something sarcastic. Right after that, I explain to you the fact that I was just being sarcastic. In many contexts, this can be an indirect way of calling you an idiot (“You’re the kind of person that does not understand sarcasm, so it needs to be explained to you…”). On the internet, the imperative of transparency gives rise to the injunction to explain the meaning of allusive speech. “Tone indicators” are the prime example of this: it is common practice to include “/s” at the end of a sarcastic sentence on the internet. However, we have just established that, depending on context, the explanation of the fact that you are sarcastic can itself have subtle implications. The “/s” is never just an explanation that you are sarcastic, it adds something more. In most cases, even though it presents itself as transparent or “autistic” speech, it actually adds an extra-layer of sarcasm and meta-irony. The culture of “/s” is the culture of a group in which everyone has to “play dumb” and pretend to be autistic while actually speaking with more subtext than ever before.

            Emojis, emoticons, abbreviations and other substitutes for facial expressions and body language work similarly. “Lol” stands for laughing out loud. On the internet, it seems as if every euphemism is explained, everything is explicit, out on the table, exposed. It presents itself as autistic. We all know this is not the case: “lol” almost never means “laughing out loud”. To understand what “lol” means, you need an even higher ability to understand contextual cues – it can be anything from “wow, interesting, I didn’t think of that” to “nose exhale” to an actual, genuine laugh. In real life, you need social skills in order to read facial expressions and body language. On the internet, you need even more social skills, in order to read facial expressions and body language without seeing them.

 

III: SOCIAL MEDIA, ART AND THE ALT-RIGHT

 

            Social media is the advent of the private-public self. Instagram stories and “snapchats” are snapshots of our private, intimate lives – things we would not normally share in public. However, those moments of our private lives are themselves filtered through a mask. It is not the private emerging into the public (this would be “simple transparency”, an autistic structure), it is the private life becoming a public mask (“inside out” transparency, post-autistic structure). Jean-Paul Sartre came up with the concept of “the gaze” or “the look”. Before the internet, in public you were being watched by the gaze and in your private home you could relax, knowing that no one is seeing you. Today’s society is the opposite. When the private life has become a public performance, you are publicly performing in your “private space” while being relaxed in public, where the imperative of conformity gives people a safe space to relax in the “inferno of the same”.

            Entertainment has broken the private/public distinction too – today, Youtubers do “daily vlogs” in which they pretend to show an authentic, ‘transparent’ snapshot of their day-to-day lives while actually filtering it through a public performance.

Lo-fi music is the private-public self: what is ‘under the mask’ or ‘behind the veil’ of a song (the unmixed and unmastered version – the version which only the producer can hear in the privacy of their personal computer) has itself become a public performance. Lo-fi music is not transparent music. It is not unmixed and unmastered music. It is when the music is intentionally mixed and mastered in such a way such as to sound unmixed and unmastered.

Fashion prepared us for the private-public self before the advent of the internet. The “grunge look” or the ripped jeans are the private-public self. They are a fashion-style that is intentionally modified and prepared such as to look unmodified and unprepared. You change the clothes you wear inside and prepare to go outside in such a way such as to look as if you didn’t change and prepare.

The obscenity of the alt-right today is the private-public self. Figures like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, George Simion, etc. are saying obscene and vulgar things in public that people would have normally only said in private. The Youtube channel “Plastic Pills”, inspired by Jean Baudrillard, calls Trump obscene⁴. Innuendo Studios says that the alt-right is “the death of a euphemism”⁵, his idea being that bigoted remarks would be usually said by conservatives under a euphemism (“we need to protect state’s rights”) while now they are being said explicitly, without filter (“the Mexicans are criminals”). What both of them are missing in their analysis is that the alt-right is not the private emerging into the public, it is the private becoming a public performance. If I must use the terminology of Innuendo Studios, I would say that the death of a euphemism is itself a euphemism, just like “/s” often is an extra-layer of sarcasm and meta-irony.

 

IV: MENTAL HEALTH, DATING APPS AND TRANSPARENCY

 

Transparency was never a function of psychological distance. Transparency was a function of context. Correlation does not equal causation – we used to think that it is a function of psychological distance because distance itself was a function of context. In fact, how “direct” we are or how much we open up about intimate details of our private life (sex life, mental health problems, traumas) is a function of context. Context includes not only the physical/virtual space of interaction, but also the history of all the previous interactions with the people in that space or with other people in that space.

Issues regarding mental health and suicidal thoughts are private matters. Since “privacy” is not a function of psychological distance (how close you are to someone), but a function of context, the advent of digital media has given rise to many contradictions. The TV already started this; the internet amplified it. For example, if you are a musician or some sort of celebrity, you can often easily open up about your childhood traumas and mental health issues in interviews or songs. The moment you do that, you are not talking to someone in particular, but to the world at large. In Lacanian language – you are talking to the big Other. The moment you opened up in an interview about how your father molested you in childhood, the entire planet knows about it. Transparency is not a function of knowledge. Despite the fact that now everyone knows about these intimate details of your life, in a different context, you would still feel hesitant to open up about them. This is why transparency and “play-pretend” are not inversely proportional. The imperative of transparency in digital media gives rise to pretense in the real-life: if I opened up about my sex life and childhood traumas on Youtube, in a song I wrote, in a Twitch stream or in an interview/podcast on TV – I can now go into a more formal environment (work/school) where everyone in that room has seen my video/interview, and yet we still have to pretend that we have not seen it. At work, I cannot talk about my sex life and my suicidal thoughts – we will have to deal with a situation in which everyone in that room knows about it and yet we cannot talk about it directly. This is not because I am not “close enough” with those people – this is because of the context itself (workplace).

We are not becoming “too open” about mental health and sexuality, like conservatives say, or “not open enough”, like progressives say. We are doing both simultaneously. We are becoming more and more open about them in certain digital contexts – only at the level of “cold” transfer of knowledge and information.

The TV and the internet are today’s big Other. It provides a “protective filter” that allows us to directly tell the big Other (i.e.: ‘everyone’) about our private life, and then everyone else taking the necessary information out of it. If you talk one-on-one to someone, questions regarding intentionality start to arise – “why are they telling me out of all people?” If you tell the entire world at once, in a paradoxical way, you are telling no one.

Dating apps and websites are the perfect example of this. In most real-life contexts, details about yourself are revealed gradually, as you get closer to the person, and transparency becomes a linear function of time. The meme “never ask a woman her age, a man his salary…” applies in real-life. It is usually considered rude to directly ask a person from the first conversation details about their age, salary, height, relationship status, etc. Dating apps have created a virtual context in which not only is it socially appropriate to do so, it is an imperative. What is polite or not to say depends on context. The internet gives people the freedom to create from scratch an empty context where almost anything goes. It is the death of culture and the rise of what Byung-Chul Han calls “hyperculture”⁶.

There is a negative side to this. Without secrecy, mystery and ambiguity we are moving into a monotone, planned out inferno of the same. On dating apps, seduction and play are dead – communication resembles a cold, rational, business-like transaction where you are “probed for compatibility” in an objectifying manner, and what you say is more important than how you say it. It provides a “safe space” in which people can close and open the app anytime they are psychologically prepared to talk, and so, anything goes. Three things become very hard to almost impossible on dating apps:

1.     Taking other people by surprise

2.     Being taken by other people by surprise

3.     Taking your own self by surprise

Without surprise, uncertainty, chance and contingency, there is no venture into the unknown. Without the unknown, everything is planned out and predetermined in advance. We want love without falling in love: love without risks. Alain Badiou put it best:

 

“We should be wary of love and in particular, what happens on dating websites. Where we try to guarantee a romantic encounter in advance by ensuring that anyone you meet is just like you. They have the same tastes, same wishes, and the same determination. I think that goes against the very definition of love. Because it means there’s no element of adventure, no risks are taken, mutual satisfaction has to be guaranteed, like some kind of business contract and that I think is a serious threat to love.

Love is, in a way, a lesson in courage. In arranged marriages there is no risk. The same with dating sites. You try to avoid risk. Avoiding risk by calculating how to maximize a relationship with another. I think that all creation, all truth with any real significance is always linked to an event. Anything else is just a normal consequence of everyday world. It is neither a creation nor an invention, just a continuation. What does it mean to start something? If you want to consider something beginning, you have to consider there is an element of chance. If there isn't a chance involved then it’s not a start because it's something that already exists and is predetermined. So when I focus on risk, I focus on the fact that, love as a creation, as an invention is closely linked to a meeting, A meeting which is risky. And can be a meeting with people form completely different worlds. It's precisely because of the role that chance plays that love can have a creative dimension that is really interesting and universal. Love, true love, makes possible what was previously impossible.”⁷

 

            Dating apps go beyond transparency, however. It is when private, intimate details of our life are becoming commodified and turned into a public performance, as an exhibition. If the actual “public-public self” can be compared to clothing, then today we live in an era of the private-public self in which, metaphorically speaking, the skin itself has become an object to be modified and presented as a mask to wear in public. Behind the mask, there is another mask.

            Most major dating apps, like Tinder, Bumble, Meetic, Match, Hinge and OkCupid are all owned by the same mega-corporation (“Match Group Inc”). Even if you avoid them, you will probably still end up talking to a person that uses them, or to a person that talks to another person that uses them and so on… You are always indirectly under their influence. The dating world has become monopolized – if we can continue the joke about “the CEO of racism”, then today, the CEO of Tinder has become the CEO of dating (Bernard Kim).

            There is no transparency in regards to how the algorithms on social media or Tinder work. In the real-world, the small other (the human being individual in front of you) is less transparent while the big Other (the context – the reason you got there in the first place, etc.) is more transparent. Dating apps reverse this. On dating apps, the individual human in front of you is more transparent. This is a simulacrum to distract us from the fact that the big Other is less transparent – the algorithms are not open source, so you don’t know how you matched with that person in the first place.

Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga used to distinguish between Paradisiac thinking, based on rationality and knowledge (destroying mystery) and Luciferic thinking, the lyrical thinking that attempts to preserve mystery and the unknown. The latter is often times better because it leaves things open-ended, it is oriented towards the future: questions are not answered, there is still something to look forward to. Understanding kills mystery. If you kill mystery, you kill creativity. When you fully understand a person or a theoretical concept, there is nothing new to look forward to, you become bored with it/them and you move on to the next thing. Lucian Blaga, like Jacques Lacan, is against understanding, prioritizing the creative function of mystery and secrecy.

People are mysterious in real-life. On dating apps, the only thing that is mysterious is how the algorithms work. In order to be successful on them, you have to waste more time trying to figure out what the big Other wants than what the small other wants – we live in a dystopian sci-fi world in which people are paying the CEO of dating a rent (ex: “Tinder Gold”) in order to maximize their chances of finding love while trying to “hack the algorithm” for the same reasons (“only swipe in a certain pattern, at certain hours…”). Tinder is a metaphorical slot machine. It gets you addicted through variable-schedule reinforcement, and then turns people into gambling addicts who try to “hack the algorithm” in order to maximize their wins.

            If striptease is a gradual unveiling of the skin, then seduction is a gradual unveiling of truth. The lack of seduction on dating apps also functions as a simulacrum to distract us from the fact that it is the big Other that seduces there, not the small others. The real seduction is from the dating app itself. The CEO of Match Group Inc. seduces us all through marketing and Psychopolitics⁸ into getting people addicted to their desiring-production machine.

 

V: THERAPY SPEAK, THE ALIENATION BETWEEN THINKING AND FEELING AND HYPER-COMMUNICATION

 

            Carl Jung separated rational judgment into two psychic functions: thinking and feeling. Thinking is a rational, discriminating truth-judgment. It prioritizes truth over people’s feelings. Feeling is also a rational function, a value-judgment. It discriminates between multiple options based on value. Thinking is concerned with criteria such as truth, efficiency, productivity or consistency. Feeling is concerned with criteria such as useful, important, valuable, like/dislike or good and evil.

            According to the commonly-held “pop-Jung” understanding, the primary dilemma between thinking and feeling in social situations is this: “do you say the truth even when it hurts people’s feelings?”. If you prioritize thinking, you prioritize truth over people’s feelings – you will be cold, blunt and logical even if it risks offending people. If you prioritize feeling (which is just as much of a rational function, according to Jung!⁹), you will make a rational assessment discriminating between criteria such as importance and value – and as such, you will likely prioritize not saying the truth and instead appealing to people’s feelings or to the emotional atmosphere in the room.

            This fundamental dilemma of diplomacy, saying the truth vs. protecting people’s feelings, is so ingrained in our folklore that we might as well call it ‘archetypal’ by now. Despite that, in the past decade or two, it no longer holds. Thinking and feeling, in society, have themselves become not separated but alienated. Marxist thinkers hold that capitalism “smooths out” contrast, differences and boundaries between things and people, leading to an “inferno of the same”. Turns out it has also destroyed the boundary between thinking and feeling.

            For the past one-two decades, the political situation is upside down. Thinking is used to protect people’s feelings and feeling is used to offend. The cultural “progressive” left is using thinking in order to protect people’s feelings in the infamous “political correctness”. Political correctness is a mutant form of feeling. It is feeling under the mask of thinking. There is no emotionality and no soul left in it. With politically correct (PC) speech, you are cold, rational, logical and detached in order to protect people’s feelings. Meanwhile, the cultural “conservative” right is using feeling in order to hurt people’s feelings in their new obscenity. They want to intentionally provoke and appeal to emotion – both to their supporters (populism, striking the emotional chord of voters) as well as to their opponents (intentionally offending “the libs”). It is a mutant thinking under the mask of feeling. It appeals to emotion, but not to protect people’s feelings, but to intentionally hurt them.

            In the past decade, we appeal to “cold” rationality in order to protect people’s feelings and “hot” emotionality in order to hurt them. From this perspective, the world is upside down: we have “hot thinking” and “cold feeling”. Slavoj Zizek often talks about capitalism ‘taking the essence out of things’: beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar… To add to this list: thinking without reason, feeling without passion.

            “Cold feeling” extends beyond political correctness. It has invaded intimate aspects of our lives, including love and mental health. “Therapy speak” is an example of cold feeling, and it strongly resembles PC-speech. The modern TikTok/Instagram therapist suggests you to guide your friendships and relationships with messages like “I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework. I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”¹⁰. This feels generated by a robot. I could make Chat-GPT generate something with more passion and soul in it. This is neither thinking nor feeling in the classic Jungian sense, it is a mutant form of both. Only musicians are passionately talking about their feelings today. The rest of us are engaging in “therapy speak”: we are hyper-rationalizing our feelings. Intellectualization used to be considered an unhealthy defense mechanism – now it is becoming the new normal.

            They say that communication is the most important thing in a relationship. What they don’t say is that when a statement starts with “they say”, then it is inscribed into what Lacan called the big Other. If “they say” something, the big Other says it. This is how ideology works, according to Zizek. The less accurately you can define who “they” are, the more ideological it is. Ideology can work even if no one takes it seriously at an individual level, if “they” are saying it – the message will become an annoying voice inside your head destroying your mental health, the new super-ego, the moral conscience. Ideology today is transparency. But we’ve established that transparency is a fake. The message that communication is the most important thing in a relationship transcends the sphere of advice, it is already “post-advice”: it doesn’t even tell you what to communicate, just say something. It prioritizes quantity over quality communication, noise over meaning. It doesn’t matter what you are saying, just keep talking. “Be yourself” is a similar post-advice, it doesn’t even mean anything specific, it might as well tell you “do something!”.

            There is a catch to this, however. Transparency is a trap that subtly tells you to do the opposite thing, as we’ve established. We usually think that “to communicate your needs” is a gesture of transparency and intimacy – you do that with people you are close with, not strangers, and thus, it must be the ultimate gesture of love. The common understanding is that in public, we censor ourselves, we put “a veil” over our needs, but in private, we can relax and open up more easily, and thus communicate our needs more precisely.

            With a slight shift of perspective, we realize that the opposite holds true just as well. To communicate your desires, intentions, feelings, needs, etc. is this mutant form of “cold feeling”. You are not passionately or emotionally talking about your feelings. It is like political correctness, or therapy speak: you hyper-intellectualize it. By coldly rationalizing your feelings, you are distancing yourself from them, not allowing yourself to fully feel them. Psychotherapist Orion Taraban put it best: “Talking is to doing as imagination to reality (…) You want to have sex, not talk about sex, you want to experience feelings, not talk about feelings”¹¹. The point is that talking is not the only form of communication. “Mutual understanding” is intellectualization – by talking about your experiences, you are engaging with your experiences “at a distance”, you are not allowing yourself to fully experience them. In other words, talking is alienation. Orion Taraban suggests that talking is best suited in relationships for logistics, and for certain deal-breakers, but not for meta-communication (talking about the relationship). When you talk about the relationship, you are engaging in an act of subtle depersonalization – by talking about the relationship, you are situating yourself outside the relationship, and thus, are no longer in the relationship. You must live the relationship, not talk about it. He also notes how we never talk about our positive feelings – it is always complaints (only bad news come after “we need to talk…”). He is right, the happiest couples are the ones who synchronized their personas so well that they can understand each other without even needing to communicate – best friends and lovers are so used to each other that sometimes they can just look at each other and understand what they want to do, while in other times, being able to enjoy silence together: staying in the same room without talking. Hyper-communication is neither a cause of problems nor a solution – it is usually a symptom of an underlying cause.

            We notice, yet again, the advent of the private-public self. What presents itself as private, as transparent (“take the veil off, take the mask off, stop hiding and tell me what you want”) is commodified into a public performance, and while presenting itself as shortening the distance between two people, it actually increases the distance in other ways. It is distance in closeness and closeness in distance: alienation, just like the internet. We treat relationships like logical systems or machines that dysfunction and must be repaired:

 

“The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, points of weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance. (...) In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation.”¹²

-Byung-Chul Han

 

            While “cold feeling” is infecting your depression and your love life (and your depressing love life), “hot thinking” is invading journalism, politics and advertisement. Love is stripped of seduction while seduction is invading the areas where we actually need more logic and coldness. If we hyper-rationalize our feelings with therapy speak and neoliberal dating advice (“cold feeling”), then we are too passionate and emotional about our rational, logical thought. In love, it used to matter less what you say, and more how you say it. Transparent ideology presents it as the opposite. Meanwhile, politics is a shitshow. Now in politics, it matters more how you say it and less what you say. It matters that it sounds cool. Journalism is image-based clickbait. There, we need reason. It is too hot and emotional. And love, suffering, depression and anxiety are no longer hot and emotional for everyone other than musicians, they are now cold and intellectualized. Our persona is "inside-out" in a world that is "upside-down".

 

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES:

1: Byung-Chul Han, “The disappearance of rituals”, Chapter 2: The Compulsion of Authenticity

2: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/byung-chul-hans-transparency-society.html

3: See my previous article where I introduce the concept of ‘post-autism’: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/decoding-hidden-meaning-behind-message.html

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOoA6egWx8

5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg

6: Hyper-culture: https://www.amazon.com/Hyperculture-Culture-Globalisation-Byung-Chul-Han/dp/1509546170

7: Romantic advice from French philosopher Alain Badiou - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CytC6A-K8c4

8: See: Psychopolitics - https://www.amazon.com/Psychopolitics-Neoliberalism-New-Technologies-Power/dp/1784785776#customerReviews

9: See, for example: Carl Jung, “Modern man in search of a soul”, Chapter 4: A theory of types

10: Is therapy-speak making us selfish? - https://www.bustle.com/wellness/is-therapy-speak-making-us-selfish

11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3H5meXju1U

12: Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: neoliberalism and the new technologies of power