The tyranny of feelings goes pretty much unquestioned at this point. Everyone falls for the reigning sentimentality of the moment—left, right, young, old, rich, poor, faithful, pagan—because everyone believes, or at least acts as if they believe, that feelings are as important as real things. The overvaluation of the feels is growing into a dangerous confusion between what is material and what is perspective. The bullshit can be bright and shiny. In Tina Fey's Netflix gem Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the heroic narrative that dominates almost all American comedy and drama—once you set your mind to it, you can do whatever you want—is taken to a parodic extreme. "You can stand anything for ten seconds. Then you just start on a new ten seconds," Kimmy tells her fellow kidnapping victim while turning the "mystery crank" for the 26th hour. She is the ultimate representative of the new Lean In–style pluck. Kimmy triumphs because she doesn't let the world alter her feelings. Her cheerful spirit is the key to her success. To which I can only say: Take a look around. The financial collapse and the emergence of class in America—the fact that success depends far more on what's in your father's bank account than what's in your heart—hasn't altered the myth a bit. The bullshit survives, giving the world as it is a free pass: It's not the external reality that matters; it's your feelings about it, so deal with your feelings rather than the world. Political sentimentality has been on the march since the end of the '60s—since the introduction of the victim impact statement in court in the 1970s (as if the murder of nice guys were worse than the murder of assholes, as if the feelings of people about a crime mattered as much as the crime). But the culture of outrage and public shaming that surrounds us in a numinous digital miasma has taken the feels to a new level of constant fever pitch. Nobody bothers to find out what really happened anymore—we're too busy dealing with the emotional fallout, sometimes with tragic outcomes, as with the UVA story in Rolling Stone, but mostly just with a generalized nonchalance toward substance, as in every case of Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, in which little lives are ruined every day by the indulgence of outrage. The Internet is a global sunburned neck, but that's not the problem. The problem is the instinct to take feelings as if they really matter—as though offense were given, not taken, as though offense is a material fact. Now anyone who becomes publicly notable, no matter how obviously decent, must be chewed over by the feels of the whole world—Trevor Noah comes to mind, as does Stephen Colbert, as does practically everybody. The thrashing out of feelings is the replacement of righteousness. Rather than battles over laws or policy, it's about tone, the imprecision of language, the politics of the feels. It isn't just narcissism, this confusion of feelings with reality; it's worse. Feelings become the theater of conflict exactly when real hope for real change falters. The final feel is despair, because feelings are unknowable and infinite and so cannot ever end. That's why there's that dreaded emptiness when the hollering finishes. Bullshit is ultimately bullshit, no matter who cares how much.
Published in the June/July 2015 issue.
