The possibility of publicity brings forth the desire for publicity.
Perhaps the TikTok mania for giving publicity to one’s own life arises from the feeling that what is only private cannot be of any importance. Our lives are real only insofar as other people know about them.
The ability to give a TikTok public voice to dissatisfaction has increased out of all proportion to the reasons for it, thus giving the impression that we live in the worst of times. But even the idea that we live in the worst of times has its consolations, for people are natural seekers of superlatives and do not want to experience the merely average.
TikTok poster people are odd things.
They adopt show dog genderism and sexual intrigues and a Byronic conception of it as a badge of superior sensibility, which is to say that those who own show dogs are in some way morally superior to those who do not, and thus were imbued with a moral authority that others did not share. And yet at the same time ‘they’ demands to be treated matter-of-factly.
The demand for recognition and nonrecognition at the same time must be one of the reasons for the epidemic, becoming a pandemic of self-mutilation in an age of celebrity.
A person who treats their face and body like a Gucci bodega can hardly desire or expect that you fail to notice it, but at the same time demands that you make no comment about it, draw no conclusions from it, express no aversion toward it, and treat they no differently because of it. You must accept ‘they‘ as ‘they‘ is, however ‘they‘ is, because ‘they‘ has an inalienable right to such acceptance.
TikTok teacher transsexualism wants that theyselves and your children, which are ‘they’s’ students to be recognized and not recognized at the same time. The contradiction they demand you abide is that they have a privilege t0 simultaneously enjoy the fruits of being normal and yet also very different.
To be merely the same as others is a wound to the ego in an age of celebrity, and yet we are herd animals who do not want to wander too far from the herd. And in an age of powerlessness we want to exert power.
The End