Public Rage Co.
or, OH DID YOU HEAR THAT ON YOUR FOX NEWS!?!?!?
Seen in Pasadena on Tuesday night:
It’s a big building.
Finishing the thought about yesterday’s post, Boris Pasternak wrote that Doctor Zhivago and Lara found themselves helpless in a world that had lost the habit of thinking. They discovered that they had become citizens of “the dominion of the ready-made phrase,” a political culture of ritual chanting. Language worked as rails, sending people down the tracks of a fixed course; ruined, individuals lacked the words to turn other people in a new direction.
I wrote about this in December of 2021, in a post that still describes December of 2022:
We do not advance. The dominion of the ready-made phrase doesn’t provide a path for advancement. It provides a locked language for a long stalemate that edges into steady decline.
(Stella Morabito covers this ground in a new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer, excerpted here in a short package of tremendously useful ideas about the way we shape ourselves to the prevailing discourse to avoid the feeling of isolation.)
So Tracy Beth Høeg graduated from medical school in 2006, and later completed a PhD in epidemiology, then a medical residency. She does medical research and treats patients; you can go to her clinic and get medical help. Another person who went to medical school but then decided not to complete a residency or treat patients or publish peer-reviewed research casually dismisses her as “this Hoeg hag.”
In the dominion of the ready-made phrase, the many prevailing and easily grasped terms of social disapprobation provide comfort. The well-known denunciatory words and phrases give credentialed but unaccomplished people who live with social panic and status anxiety a way to elevate themselves by standing on someone else. That fucking hag, that anti-vaxxer bitch! Something something Koch Brothers something something! This ritual use of social denunciation as a status signal is precisely the dynamic Milan Kundera described in a series of novels about the social practices of late communist societies. The grab bag of social ruin trigger terms is easy for mediocre minds, which are empowered by the ability to shit on people for status without having to do much work.
It’s a psychological wall: white nationalism Fox News anti-vaxxers Koch brothers! You can be important and powerful without doing anything, by performing the degradation of someone who has — using the useful shortcut of the ready-made phrases. You don’t have to do or be; you can signal and display. Status is a performance of familiar words directed at the usual and useful targets. It’s lazy, it’s mindless, and it gets a good number of people through their days. Imagine being the 34,567th public intellectual to slam a Covid vaccine critic on Twitter. So fresh! So brave!
We have a well-timed reminder, this week, of the uselessness of the slogans. Last year, parents in Loudoun County expressed serious concern about the condition of their public schools, and a father was slammed to the ground and arrested during the public comment session of a school board meeting while trying to speak about a sexual assault that had taken place in a school bathroom.
Responding to parent anger about the condition of Loudoun County schools, school board president Brenda Sheridan explained to the news media that parents are stupid.
I also wrote about this last year:
And so, a year later, the morons and conspiracy theorists, the idiotic parents who didn’t understand things with the sophistication of school board members, were — brace yourself for this huge surprise — entirely vindicated by a report from a special grand jury that led to the immediate termination of the Loudoun County school superintendent as a liar who harmed children and covered up his own failures. Here’s the grand jury report, also available at this link:
We do this cycle over and over and over again. Stupid conspiracy theori— shit, the grand jury! The recourse to the social disapprobation grab bag, the storage facility at Public Rage Co. that provides ready-made phrases, never succeeds. But it frequently succeeds for a while, which grants the illusion of success, and it succeeds as a general shaping of discourse while invariably reaching failure in particular cases. It clogs and clouds the public sphere, which is what it’s meant to do.
Sometimes it even succeeds long enough for Meghan Markle to collect prizes for the lies she tells.
Last night -- she threw her husband's family under the bus with unsupported claims of racism and today she won the People's Choice Award for her podcast -- also shown to be full of lies. The main whopper is that in South Africa, black people danced in the street for her wedding like they did when Mandela was released. from prison. Seriously. She said that. There is a shared psychopathy at work in the highest levels of our society. We live in a post-factual world. And the average information consumer is too stupid to know that.
I stand in awe of this sentence.
But it frequently succeeds for a while, which grants the illusion of success, and it succeeds as a general shaping of discourse while invariably reaching failure in particular case”
For a while! With those three little words, you encapsulated why this sort of thing works. Most people do not track stories to see what happens but accept those stock phrases as proof  that they are on the right side AGAIN. Great column, Chris.