BIG MOOD
*sigh*
If you are not aware, saying “big mood”
on something that you share, that you really
identify with when you share it, or at least,
that maybe that’s the joke (that you identify
with something when you share it)...
That’s something of a meme.
Let’s talk about mood.
My thesis is an existentialist one, meaning
that it’s not based strictly off of an objective
survey of some given set of facts.
Nor is it a mere matter of logic, unless that’s
your mood of course.
Moods are like the source of most cultural
modes.
A cultural mode is a way of going about society.
Sometimes these are top down orchestrated
herd movements where people of a certain disposition
step in line, other times they are de-centralized
and spontaneous reactions against already
existing social realities.
In either case, moods gush forth modes of
being in the same way the source for a well
gushes forth spring water.
Set aside the poetic language for a second
and we can think about it in terms of ideology
and subjectivity, but we’ll get to that
later.
A mode is somewhat related to your cultivated
identity.
If you hear someone complaining about the
mode someone is in, whether it’s a liberal
mode, or a reactionary mode, etc., I just
think of mood.
“Fuck you, get out of here with your constant
concern trolling” is a mood.
“Fuck you, it’s not concern trolling,
it’s just checking to see if you even care
about the people you supposedly want to help…”
is also a mood.
These expressions of mood make appeals to
others.
Sometimes these appeals to the reason of others
are really just preaching to the choir…
particular usages of specific words that will
most likely resonate with others who are similarly
attuned.
Attunement is a big part of mood.
Plato talked about the human soul like it’s
a stringed instrument.
Strike a similar chord and hear it harmonize
with other birds of similar feathers.
I’m mixing metaphors but I don’t care.
That’s my mood.
There you go.
For some philosophers a worldview is tainted
by the degree to which it gives itself over
to mood.
Well, what does that mean?
Ok well if your mood seems especially romantic,
idealistic, or utopian, or transcendentalist,
then it’s going to be ridiculed by other
people whose fundamental attunement runs contrary
to those moods.
… there’s other issues people can take
with ideologies that come from those moods.
But what I’m getting at is beyond the rationalizing,
and the arguments produced by the rationalizing
in its attempt to justify the mood and the
mode, there is at the fundamental level an
attunement in/to the world that allows you
to resonate with some, and others, not so
much.
For other philosophers there is no distinction
to be made between mood and worldview, because
every worldview is fundamentally built up
on mood.
For David Hume, the philosopher Destiny would
rather be reading than Marx, rationality is
slave to the passions.
This means that David Hume is a big time critic
of those philosophers who thought they could
distance themselves from passion and lay claim
to more objective perspectives.
Some people will say that reason is not always
slave to the passions, but that people do
tend to rationalize their positions regardless
of any serious commitment to truth or justice.
Kant came along after Hume and tried to show
how we can have our cake and eat it too.
We can still be passionate about things, we
just have to know where the boundaries are
between the turf that belongs to reason, and
the turf that belongs to passion.
Kant was incidentally the same way with being
critical of authority, we can be critical
of authority so long as our criticism doesn’t
make society less safe or harmonious.
Which is kind of like saying… you can critique…
up to where… it gets… real?
Ok.
Hegel came along and said ok, but like, what
about the fact that society is never harmonious
and that it is always in a dialectical struggle
moving from one stage to another?
Hmm?!
It’s with Hegel where philosophers started
to think about mood in a bigger sense.
Germans especially have a word for collective
historical moods, ZEITGEIST (not to be confused
with the documentaries).
Hegel saw NapoleonISM as a big mood response
to the terror that followed the French Revolution,
which was itself a big mood.
He didn’t think these moods are sporadic
and purely arbitrary though, but instead saw
them as playing off of one another in a big
evolutionary sort of process.
I would get into Marx and how he saw himself
as the materialist dialectical response to
Hegel’s supposed idealism, and how this
all played out, but for now will set it to
the side to simply say that Marx and Hegel
definitely agreed with one another in their
overall mood when it came to new agers and
logical status quo defenders: two sides of
lazy ass superficiality.
Both of them prized systematic thought and
rigorous analysis.
Both Hegel and Marx hated the sophists who
fixate on appearances instead of the more
complex underlying realities.
Their mutual hatred of shit-brained ideas
is not important right now though.
These two thinkers were the biggest brained
thinkers of ZEITGEIST known to the history
of ideas…
And then along came Heidegger.
Heidegger was like the person who read every
philosopher before him 20 times and then wrote
a book that used all their best ideas to deconstruct
all of the prevailing modes of thought.
Except that isn’t quite accurate, he didn’t…
he kind of failed to deconstruct fascism.
In fact, if anything, he offers the best defense
for fascism I’ve ever heard.
It goes like this: Fascism is a mood.
You can’t reason with moods.
Ok, not quite, that’s not really what he
does...
In fact, Heidegger very purposefully tried
not be a political thinker,
Despite his horrid affiliations,
But we can set that aside for now but check
out the livestream I did with Dr. Iain Thomson
where we get into this more… but for now
let’s just say, I do think Heidegger shows
us some important insights into the reactionary
mode, but that’s something we’ll have
to come back to later.
At this level of analysis, what we are going
to focus on is that any ideology and any sort
of mode people are in has a strong relation
to a fundamental mood.
Ok so, let’s go a little more in depth here.
I think the reason Heidegger’s phenomenology
in division one of his most famous work is
so groundbreaking, among other reasons, is
he shows that zeitgeist (spirit of the age,
historical collective mood) is likely central
to a person’s sense of orientation in the world
(I mean, there’s other reasons too, like
the deconstruction of modernity he is so
famous for, but we’re going to stick to mood for
now)
If you don’t care about being oriented in
the world, which is to say you enjoy getting
lost and confused, then you’re either bored,
privileged, or just way too oriented already
(ok there could be plenty of other reasons
to evade stability, for instance, if the stable
thing, like normalcy itself, is what is causing
you harm, etc), but the fact is, most people
but we can set that aside and just say that
for a lot of people some sort of stability and orientation is more important than chaos
 
the point is: people want/need a sense of place and direction.
like, if you're threatening to abolish what's giving them a sense of place and direction... well, um
uh, yeah, a lot of people don't like that. so
that's not a justification (obviously) of their mode
the point is just that world orientation is really important.
and with "the death of God," de-throaning of the king, and a lot of the revolutions
these have all decentered and destabilized people's sense of orientation in the world.
we're all reacting to different forms of world implosion in our own ways
and different philosophers react in their own ways, as well
For Heidegger though, mood is original.
—but really important to drive home though —is that
this point about having place and direction in one's world
isn't just about one's self. [Mood] is also about one's social networks.
or the people one relies on, and the people dependent on oneself...
It's not just about the self, it's also about the collective the self is enmeshed in and reliant upon.
For Heidegger, mood is as original to the
development of your way of seeing the world
as is your understanding—which is deep.
For Kant, mood would have never been on the same level as the understanding.
Kant believed everyone has the same fundamental structure that can reasonably come to the same perspectives as others if all the facts are just laid out.
Heidegger's like, "Yeah, well, there's also your fundamental mood that's on the same level as understanding
AND on the same level as the language you're habitually thinking with
+ the broader cultural discourses and practices going on.
Maybe reason helps you understand another’s
position, but without the right mood it’s
hard to imagine a person changing from one
ideology to another.
So yeah, all of this is just to build up to
saying that mood makes for modes, that ideologies
encode and institutionalize certain modes,
and then we tend to see people rationalize
on top of the modes they’re already fully
a part of.
—in the language of the ideologies that they've been institutionalized into
To the 
removed bystander this usually looks like
NPCs playing out their scripts.
For the uninitiated—it's doctrine!
If you want to change the mode someone is
in, then you have to go after the mood.
And you can’t just go after a mood with
reason.
When I see people I like arguing, and one
person is making bad arguments because their
feelings are hurt, and the other person is
angry because they see bad arguments being
made, and then there’s a whole fallout of
overly sensitive complaining and insensitive
assholery, what I see is a battle of moods,
where egos war over their preferred mode,
with whatever validation mob that resonates with that mode.
Rally the troops with your bullshit, but everyone
who isn’t already convinced just thinks
the whole controversy stinks.
Appeals to reason and appeals to empathy (or strength)
are too often little more than appeals to mood.
actually they can be a lot more than just appeals to mood, but
we'll get to that
Empathy actually means something, but just
like anything else it can be overly simplified,
weaponized, and rendered rhetorically useless.
It can be a way for self-congratulatory groups
to rally around being emotional, in opposition
to other groups who rally around using arguments
that, in theory, should work regardless of
most moods.
But a call to use reason, and to renounce
mood, is also itself a mood.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings”
is a huge mood, as obvious with Ben Shapiro
as it is with Destiny.
In both cases though it seems a bad idea to
renounce something just because it is a mood.
Maybe sometimes certain modes have more of
a role in certain spaces than in others.
I guess that depends on what the goals (stated
and personal) of the people involved even are.
Empathy is something we all need to practice
in recovery groups, in our interpersonal relationships,
aaand in other ways that are more interesting when it comes to the rest of the world?
(how that pans out is open to argument and will actually decide a lot of the differences between political ideologies)
E.g. Empathy tends to not be something to get distracted by when debating fascists.
Like if you go to an Antifa protest you're probably not going to practice empathy, but to shut. them. down.
If you're debating them on a stream, for instance, you're not sitting there practicing empathy with them.
But just because it’s a mood doesn’t mean
it should be disregarded.
It seems like any broad movement we want to
see in the world needs to be able to encapsulate
a wide variety of fundamentally different
moods, personalities, experiences, etc.
Calling some people to empathize is ableist,
because some people can’t.
Calling other people to reason is also ableist,
because some people can’t.
Sometimes calling someone ableist is itself
little more than name-calling because you
need words to articulate your gut feeling
of disapproval and that’s the closest you
can come up with.
But either way, calls to be patient, be understanding,
be nice, be reasonable, be strong, these are
all appeals to people to change their behavior
enough to make them tolerable in our presence…
adjust your mood to my mode or get the fuck
out of here.
After a certain point, you might realize you
can’t always be patient with everyone, because
some people derive some satisfaction taking
license with your patience.
Likewise, you cannot empathize with everyone.
For anyone who does that kind of labor, you
know it’s real work.
Compassion fatigue is also a big mood.
What happens when you realize all the compassion
you’ve cultivated led to a burnout and now
you have like zero tolerance for people who
try to manipulate your position based on nothing
beyond feels?
It’s the same fucking thing with calls to
be reasonable though.
Appeals to reason are undoubtedly a call to
someone’s more mature side… but what if
that person is just fed up with people always
making these demands in the most unreasonable
ways ever?
One way this gets particularly noxious is
when people use these calls to practice a
certain mode as though if you only did it
right you would obviously agree with them
and stop doing what you’re doing.
Like, “Toughen up” or “Use empathy”
are both examples.
But whereas some people are forever at home
in one mood, other peoples’ moods change
over time.
Some moods are more fundamental to a person’s
identity than to another’s.
Compassion and outrage are two things that
can mobilize people to make political change.
Some people try to over-cultivate these feelings
though and at a certain point folks generally
burnout on these, unless of course they just
love being outraged all the time.
Burnout leads to fatigue.
Compassion fatigue, outrage fatigue, these
can be temporary, but if the burnout is too
severe it can lead to a complete mood shift
into some other mode where the anger of others
becomes intolerable based purely on the fact
that it’s TOO relatable.
Reason fatigue might also be something.
At a certain point, if you feel hurt and others
always try to use reason to get you out of
your mode, then maybe being reasonable also
has its limits.
Obviously we need to be strong, reasonable,
and empathetic… but to find all of these
qualities present in a person at the same
time is rare.
It’s kind of what we used to mean by the
term “presidential,” a person who could
do it all while giving us just enough courage
to not give up yet.
But we live in terrible times.
Even if we can get a candidate who speaks
to all of our most pressing problems, there’s
no way those crises can be averted if everyone
is just doubling down on their moods, modes,
and mobs.
I decided to bring the word “mob” into
this point of the discussion because we can’t
talk about the individual without talking
about the group(s) that individual identifies
with on a primal level.
But if groups online are little more than
mood validation gangs, then we have a lot
of reasons to be scared about the future.
Oh well, good thing I’m fear fatigued too.
Totally over it.
We need a broad based movement that will maximize
inclusivity for all kinds of different identities,
cultures, personalities, moods, etc.
Not just because we want to have a big movement,
but because things need to be radically reorchestrated
on this planet… and if the movement that
pushes for that reorchestration only appeals
to a couple of fundamental attunements at
the expense of the rest of the moods, then
entire human ways of being will get erased,
or will be forced to find oppositional movements
to join.
Moods cut across gender, sex, race, ability,
and all of the other axes of oppression.
What would a mood-intersectional movement
look like?
What would its mode, or modes, look like?
This isn’t supposed to be a sermon against
fracturing or infighting.
There are ways to make these things overall
beneficial to a movement…
diversity and difference can drive growth
and concentrate different forms of power in
different centers… different modes/moods/mobs
have different roles to play in different
spaces, and this could all ultimately harmonize
in ways necessary to bring about a society
that is sustainable, and which would put people
before profit… but
But what about online?
On the web where appearances override realities?
Where identities are primarily cultivated
on the basis of group loyalties…
Where what we share is more about our mood
than anything else?
I’m not going to close out by proposing
any solutions, but I will lay out one important
distinction.
A call to another person to BE ____ (reasonable,
compassionate, strong, vulnerable, etc) can
either be a genuine call to someone’s conscience,
or it can be a way of framing how you want
yourself seen vs. how to make sense of the
way the opponent is acting for your audience…
is the audience their audience, or your own?
If it’s your own, then are you just trying
to
make your mob feel validated in its current
mode?
If your target audience is the opposition’s
following, are you just telling someone else
to “be like us” because, you know, you’ve
got it
all figured out?
Because it feels so right to be on 
the side of what’s right because, you know,
it’s your side?
How’s that working out?
Are people lining up to get on board your
little bandwagon?
Is this bandwagon likely to become the
kind of inclusive and diverse vehicle needed
to spark a zeitgeist that will raise billions
of
people 
to some important form of consciousness?
Or is it likely to actually have the reverse
effect?
If you are genuinely speaking to the other
person, asking them to BE a certain mode so
that you can take them seriously, does that
mean their current mode is so intolerable
you couldn’t fight climate change and fascism
with them?
Are your calls perhaps a waste of time because,
relative to that person’s standpoint, there’s
little they could do differently, and the
very thing you’ve asked them to do is actually
part of the problem?
Like, maybe telling people not to be like
X is why they’ve had to take on doing Y?
Who knows, right?
This is totally not complicated at all.
Justice has never been so easy, all you gotta
do is keep saying the same things, because
you’ve got the right mode, and soon enough
the world over will fall in line, get on board,
and then we’ll reach the end of history
you’ve already seen and are leading us
all towards.
