Posts Tagged ‘individualism’
Juggalos: a less theoretical analysis
(Note: This is essentially a more accessible tl;dr of my last post.)
The alt-right blogosphere got juggalos wrong. They are not “decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization”; they are just another subculture, a subculture that happens to be far easier to attack than others, for two reasons: natural opposition to outgroups and the demonization of the white lower class (‘rednecks’) that is pervasive in American culture.
Subcultures exist to solve the problem of alienation, a problem created by the lack of social capital in liberal society. They provide a shared identity for those who cannot acquire one from their environment. However, they are not wholly positive; their existence increases cultural diversity, a key cause of alienation.
It is possible to have the negative effects of subculture without the positive effects. This happens when subcultures fail to develop the sense of shared identity and instead remain nothing more than clusters of individual preferences. Upper- and middle-class subcultures are far more likely to do this, possibly due to the closer adherence of those classes to the ruling ideology, part of which is atomistic individualism, and part of which may be due to the tendency toward isolation caused by the neurotically self-critical and anxious tendencies (‘beta’ in PUA theory) common to those classes.
Contrary to what Mangan said, we are not doomed if our future resembles the juggalos; we are doomed if our future resembles the ultra-individualist hipster neurotics of the middle and upper classes. Juggalos have a shared identity, whereas individualist neurotics, by their very nature, do not, and it appears that that sort of alienation can survive indefinitely.
