A couple of things about this article:
1) The professional class needs to stop talking about the snob cashier / barista who looked down at their purchase... who made them feel momentarily small. Not to worry, good woman! You can retaliate in knowing that that will be only moment that that person won't serve as a human dwarf compared to your accomplishments!
Also, you can't have a world where people can get away being weird, be the kind of feminists Jessa Crispin (referenced in this article -- shit! she's getting press!) would like to see more of... the hairy-armpit, scary Andrea Dworkins, rather than the glam Gloria Steinems, unless you go back several decades when such were respectable in the feminist movement. These days, anyone like that is only going to be a barista, or stocking shelves. Leave room for the possibility that the person serving you isn't some borderline afraid of accomplishing more with their lives; that person might be the Andrea Dworkin of our time, easily forced into giving you a smile next time if you would have preferred to have complained rather than smuggled your minor humiliation out the door with you.
2) The further along into a period of growth you go, the worse the growth will appear to the sane. Growth makes people nervous. The hugely long legacy of the idea of original sin, that people are born to suffer not to self-actualize, owes to the fact that most people in history were born to unloved parents who needed their children far more than they loved them, and abandoned them emotionally when they began to individuate... when they began to leave them, grow up. These kids can't cope with that kind of apocalyptic loss and form within themselves a psychic overlord, a super-ego, a persecutory mental altar, that rages at them when they start "spoiling" themselves. We've been living in an ongoing period of growth that began right after World War Two. It was superb near the beginning -- during the 60s and 70s -- but is at a very ambiguous stage right now, and can easily be made to look preposterous. This article tries to keep faith with it, nonetheless, and deserves credit for doing so. The phase up ahead... is about the kind of horrible regression, punishment and sacrifice of talent and youth that enables a subsequent generation to feel justified in reaching for the skies again, claiming a Golden Age for themselves; it isn't about reaching those heights itself.
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