Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece at the Atlantic rather charitable to Dunham’s latest bid for attention.
Many people want to see themselves as cool and meaningfully bohemian, radical and counter-culturally relevant, independently artsy but successful and morally virtuous. Dunham is likely a vehicle for many of these wishes.
What if also true is that the logic of the ideology Dunham holds has led to much of the desire to moralize to strangers, the potential for deceit and incentives to lie about her own experiences, and the isolated search for Self along with the branding of a political and ideological platform to gain power and influence?
As posted, three quotations that highlight how this blog chooses to look at the world (more at what people do, not what they say):
“…and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important that equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”
From this review here, on the late Ken Minogue:
Minogue concludes that instead of seeking “insane perfectionism” by, e.g., trying to abolish world poverty, we should simply be happy to live decent moral lives. This is, in effect, a challenge to build a better world by expressing our individuality through greater commitment to the institutions of family, markets, and church – an invitation simultaneously less exciting than undertaking grand projects and less destructive, as well.
From a Thomas Sowell piece, the Legacy Of Eric Hoffer:
‘Hoffer said: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”
People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,” Hoffer said. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause — the “true believer,” who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century.’