Snowflakes-- The Right's War on the Individual

in testimony to a Senate hearing on PBS funding Fred Rogers described the philosophy of his television program mr. Rogers neighborhood this way you've made this day a special day by just your being you there's no person in the whole world like you and I like you just the way you are in 2007 the Republican Party via its propaganda team at Fox News called disbelief evil to support this assertion Fox and Friends was citing at then recent report by a louisiana university professor and grumpy old jerk named don chance after the episode aired chance later said this the reference to mr. rogers was just a metaphor i have no professional qualifications to evaluate the real problems or proposed solutions mr. rogers was a great american i watched him with my children and wouldn't hesitate to do so again if i had young children please make special note of the phrase professional qualifications don chance has none on this subject he is a professor of finance not a professor of child psychology a fact which fox and friends chose to omit by referring to him as merely a professor or on experts this comes out of Louisiana State University professor there has examined just what damage mr. Rogers may have done these experts are saying that the kids of today who grew up with mr. waters now why would thoughts and friends want to misrepresent professor chances qualifications I mean that's not up to the impeccable standard that we would normally hold Fox and Friends and the larger Fox networks journalistic capabilities but seriously folks it's because they're bootlicking servants of the billionaire class who disdain institutions like PBS for having the unmitigated temerity to educate the filthy Poor's without at least having the decency to charge them for it that's really more of a side benefit though the real reason is is because it's always in the interests of social conservatives for people to be forced to conform to the dominant paradigm that's pretty much the definition of social conservatism so it becomes necessary to shame people if they try to step outside of this paradigm or if they just you know I think they should be allowed to step outside it if they want to if you think that you're a you're a fucking snowflake buddy you so entitled you fucking snowflake Chuck the right presents itself as individualist the defender of personal freedoms they like to frame the left as collectivist the left they say only cares about the common good and ignores the personal freedom of the individual that's often how both groups are modeled along an axis by right-wingers this model has become so prevalent that even people on the Left have started adopting it but it's it's wrong it's it is wrong though I mean the right have a very prescriptive view on who you're allowed to marry or just fuck how you're allowed to dress how you're allowed to refer to yourself or even think about yourself what religions you're allowed to practice what you want to do with wrong goddamn body the right our rugged individualist who must conform to the following criteria or or be purged the left don't care about individuals they're collectivists their unique precious little snowflakes that only care about themselves that proves they're collectivist I think the choice between individualism and collectivism is kind of a false dichotomy pretty much by definition that which is good for the collective must be good for most individuals because all collectives are made up of individuals and all individuals are part of some larger collective the right would have you believe that if things were economically more fair that would be bad for you individually but that's only really true if you're part of the very small group of people who own most of everything otherwise your percentage of things would go up and even if you are part of that group nobody's asking you to starve or to go without we're just asking you to live like the rest of us it's it ain't prison see the weird paradox of all of this is that collectivism is more in line with your individual self-interest than so called individualism so to get around this the right has chosen to frame collectivism as selfish something that might be good for you personally but it's bad for the collective so you shouldn't do it look pal you might personally make more money if we increase minimum wage but that means there will be less jobs and and everyone else will have to pay more for goods and services it's bad for the collective look we could make sure all of your basic needs are met and that might be good for you but people won't work without the threat of poverty if nobody works hard which I cannot stress enough people definitely would not do if they got to have a house and food no matter what we'll have less stuff and you won't be able to meet people's basic needs you see it's actually to provide people's basic needs that we have to withhold people's basic needs look affirmative action it's gonna hamstring competition and give some people an artificial advantage when looking for work that's not fair that unfairness matters a whole lot but for some reason the unfairness of hiring biases against people of color don't if people are biased against hiring you that's your individual responsibility just work harder it's funny how that works right on the surface it might seem like all conservatives are just frauds or liars or they have tiny mouse brains that can't understand the contradictions of what they're saying but I don't think that's true it only really looks that way if you view it through the lens of individualism versus collectivism and I don't think that's the real divide between so-called left and so-called rights so the left doesn't want collectivism we think the collectivism is a useful tool to get what we actually want which is the quality we think that collectivism is kind of the best way for individuals to have a shot at developing themselves as individuals because like they can have artificial constraints remove so like for example it's it's really hard to be good at I don't know math if you're starving to death but when you have lots of food it's comparatively easy to be good at math or soccer or anything you need to be alive to do all right so if you want food to eat you should just work harder right oops you can't you're dead conversely I don't think the right actually wants individualism I think that they want Authority specifically they want to defend the current power structure that's the thing that that conservatives want to conserve that's why they're called that the individual in question when they talk about individualism isn't you it's an authority figure who should be respected and obey that might become you if you try hard enough but right now it's not right now you got to do with what daddy says it's a whole daddy Dom thing that the right has going on and I'm not look if that's your thing that's great but please don't involve me or the economy without our explicit consent when you view their beliefs through this lens all of the examples I gave earlier which seemed contradictory when viewed through the lens of individualism versus collectivism are now entirely consistent we can't raise the minimum wage because it helps poor people to the detriment of rich people taking that power and spreading it around is destabilizing concentrating money and power the way that we do now will allow natural leaders to emerge and guide society better than the ignorant and impetuous masses we can't make sure people's basic needs are met because the ability to withhold people's basic needs allows the people in authority to control the behavior of the rest of us it's how they make sure that their will is obeyed without that the people will just do whatever they want that's chaos that's people doing whatever they want that's collectivism affirmative action is unfair because it might make things more difficult for people with lots of power by which I mean white people but hiring bias is less so because they only make things harder for people with relatively little power by which I mean people of color the people with lots of power deserve it or they wouldn't have it obviously people with power just worked harder for it and I'm not saying that some people don't work as hard as others but it's kind of it can be hard to sell people on the idea that concentrating power into the hands of small groups of people is going to be good for them unless they belong to that group of people which most people don't and God knows they can't defend what they actually do with power they just have to defend the right for someone hypothetically maybe you wink to wield power hypothetically look obviously people should be allowed to control their own stuff and individualize the right to stuff that's important okay just the same way that you have control over like your PlayStation I should be able to have control over any pharmaceutical patents that I own that if if I decide to jack up the prices people die needlessly it's the same thing and look if that didn't convince you how about this you're gonna have power someday if your point but game right so if the right to use that power however you want goes away then you did all of this stuff to get power for nothing how's that fair so you get to control your property which alright great deal cuz you don't have much of that to begin with but you don't get to choose how to live you don't get to choose who you want to Dougy with or like what kind of sausage rolls you eat you eat the sausage rolls that people used to like goddamn it wait sorry no I this isn't it this isn't a real controversy right oh ok these sausage rolls now is the thing that the the culture war is is talking about his sausage rolls make sure to eat the meat sausage rolls to trigger the libs obviously people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their own property the most powerful and therefore best people have lots of property and they have to be able to do whatever they want with say I don't know one hundred and fifteen billion fucking dollars or else the whole world is going to slide into chaos I mean who's gonna work hard every day and get up in tippity-tap type on a little computer and make a website when they can only have a couple hundred million dollars it just doesn't make sense likewise collectivism is self-evidently bad because it allows people without power to fight back more effectively against the people with lots of power individual poor people can't do nothing about wealth inequality but if a bunch of poor people work together they can become as powerful as wealthy people and that's cheating because they didn't win it's social Darwinism we have to live like we're in nature with the strongest and fittest animals all have billions of dollars and the less bit animals get trapped into a vicious cycle of perpetual debt by student loans that that's the way lobsters do it and if lobsters do it it's good enough for me that's what I've always said people aren't stupid and we have a natural instinct to be able to tell when we're getting hosed and most people right now are supremely hosed it's time for my classic thought slime catchphrase did you know that one percent of the global population controls more than 50% of the total wealth on the planet that's what economists like to call a real oopsie-doodle of a wealth distribution curve and if you have self-respect you're not gonna take that you're gonna fight back and then if enough people fight back the people will win so it becomes necessary for the people who currently hold a lot of power to destroy people's self-respect you're not special you're not unique the world doesn't owe you anything it is it is essentially a marketization of self-worth your self-worth is literally a dollar amount that you can measure and unless your dollar amount measures to what it should be you haven't earned the right to feel good about yourself or feel special in fact you're not special nobody's special everybody's the same that's the individualist way to look at things you little snowflake it's no longer enough that we're so atomized that we can't effectively fight back they want to take away even your instinct to fight back they want to break you they want you to feel bad about yourself to feel ugly to feel stupid to feel crazy to feel unlovable to feel like you're not enough and they get away with it with insulting us every day because we feel like we're too small and powerless to do anything about it and alone we might be but one would work together or not so that's the thing about collectivism you have one individual snowflake that's not too dangerous but if you collectivise the snowflakes get them together and have them all move in one direction you've got an avalanche on your hands these systems of oppression are so deeply ingrained in our society that it's difficult to even root them out of our minds it's difficult to even remember that we're special people unique people worthy of love because we've just been reminded so often that we're not by a system that doesn't care about us let alone actually dismantling that system we find it difficult to imagine that the system is wrong about us I'm not saying it's gonna be easy or simple but we can do it we have a secret weapon it's something they don't count on it's something you've known about your entire life but you've always underestimated something so powerful not to mention beautiful that if it's pointed in the right direction we can accomplish anything with it something that our enemies have tried to control for as long as they have known about it and they haven't been able to and when they realize they couldn't control it they tried to destroy it but they couldn't do that either because it's too powerful it's too strong it's unbreakable do you know what it is yet hey everybody thanks for watching my video about snowflakes this is a weird one for me and I don't know if I made a point at any time when I was speaking for the last 15 minutes or so hey my content might be slowing down a little for the next few months because I'm going back to school to learn to do computers but I'm gonna try and keep some stuff up I don't know how regular I'm gonna be with content so please be patient with me I am real stressed out about that so it's gonna be okay we're gonna get through this I'm gonna come out the other end better at videos than ever before because these are the videos they make without knowing computers imagine how good my videos will be when I know computers hey if you like the video then you know what you can do did you know that you can hit the like button and you can you can subscribe to me and you can hit the Bell this is the part of the video where I pretend like I don't I don't care if you do those things because it makes me look like oh look how cool and detached I am from from the corporate process but it actually helps me a lot when you do those things so that's just an app that I put on at the end of videos to make you guys think I'm cool case you were curious about that you can also go to my patreon where I accept money money for videos and there's a cofee link if you just want to give it a little bit but don't you don't have to do either if you don't want to this is the end of the video here's some other ones if you want to watch those I recommend them they're very good videos [Music]

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 254,167

Rating: 4.8937392 out of 5

Keywords: snowflakes, cucks, SJW, the left, the right, left wing, right wing, individualism, collectivism, communism, socialism, anarchism, thought slime

Id: 9Sc67W4ilVI

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mrxulski]

Good video. Conservatives love big government. They lie, but they love prisons, wars, borders, cops, and using government to assist big corporations in class warfare. Fascism is highly individualistic with everyone educated to be a hero. The right is delusional and thinks that so called "individualism" is pure good. Truth is, the word "individualism" has been used and abused to the point it's meaningless. Every society in history is a mix of individualist and collectivist values. Fascism sees mass elitism and individualism win out over democracy and collectivism.

[u/ayolark]

Let us be real: the right has always been about conformity. Pretending otherwise has always just been pretending. Claiming the left does it has always been projection. The landscape and language is shifting but those fundamentally have not changed.

[u/Buffalo__Buffalo]

But if this were true then you'd have conservatives constantly crying out "There are two genders!!" and they would demonize anybody who is transgender...

[u/525627]

For a way of life that's supposedly natural to humans, conservatives sure do spend virtually all of their time threatening/shaming people into adopting it. Why is coercion necessary if conservatism is so natural and good?

[u/Mr_Conductor_USA]

It's like worshipping the original Magna Carta. Rights for robber barons, but where is 90%+ of the population? Exactly nowhere because a strong monarch actually benefited the peasants because of the imposition of rule of law and a channel to justice above the level of their (land)lord. (Btw this is why the Church was so tyrannical, they were landlords too but didn't have to answer to anybody.)

In fact in the first phase of the French Revolution, the lower classes appealed to the monarch but he was too weak to really do anything.

This is the original "class struggle", not industrial working class against owners, but barons--major landowners--against the supra power of the state. This continues in America political rhetoric to this day due to the plantation system under slavery which was effectively a feudalistic system and their descendants and ideological inheritors wish to continue a system where they can do whatever they want without Johnny Law breathing down their necks--the "jackboot" of the federal government telling them neh neh neh, knock it off with the segregation and neh neh neh, debt peonage is illegal and neh neh neh, ixnay on the child labor.

[u/Snugglerific]

As I mentioned re: lobsterson, this pseudo-individualism is not really unique to the right but a necessary component of the ideology of liberal capitalism. The standard narrative posits that the corporate "Medieval mind" gave way to modern individualism with the fall of feudalism. In reality, if you'll allow a bit of vulgar Marxism, the first thing the nascent bourgeoisie did was to reinforce class divisions and identities that marked themselves as a group apart from both the crumbling ancient regime and the rabble of proles and peasants. The rise of new state bureaucracies required "scientific" categorizations, natural kinds, of people so they could be placed within the proper institutions -- workhouses, asylums, sanitaria, prisons, etc. Capitalists profiteered off the unpaid labor of slaves and women, necessitating again a "scientific" categorization of superior and inferior natural kinds of humans. But, according to lobster king and armies of other capitalist ideologists, we're supposed to believe this is "individualism."

[u/[deleted]]

It's just another example of the right adopting liberatory language to sell their poisonous, anti-human horseshit.