Cultural Cuckoldry

An authentic meeting with the Other

“oh wow I wish that was me”

Introduction

I had originally wanted to write this idea as a short story, but the process quickly became frustrating and slow. I think, because it was fighting against myself: the idea came as a sudden insight into something, something being clarified and illuminated, and in my attempt to turn this, essentially, analysis, into a narrative, I was attempting to re-obscure it, with the aim of making something which the reader could use to experience the same moment of sudden insight. But I am not very good at that. I am not very good at engineering puzzles, I am only good at solving them, and cheating.

So I changed my mind. It was counter productive, since my purpose with any kind of writing is always to communicate something as clearly and directly as possible, and the desire to narrativize is is, I guess, a vanity. A desire, still, to become this character-meme of a "real author". Which is in direct conflict with my ultimate purpose. From now on I will attempt to control this impulse and just write things that come to me as they come to me.

The Nietzschean insight that the thought arrives fully formed, but I will add to that: any attempt to change its form after your revelation, will only obscure it. If the idea doesn't arrive as a statue, any amount of stonework will only make it into an ugly slab of rock.

Taking an idea that can be described in a few sentences and stretching it out to 4 pages by adding a bunch of bullshit is not "clarifying" the idea, but obscuring it. Character studies are a spook. Just like irony is just rebranded tragedy, “character studies” are just rebranded bad writing.

Cultural cuckoldry

It's a character study. You got a guy, early twenties, 2nd generation middle Eastern immigrant. 95 iq, works a wageslave job, no plans, no prospects. Very "lives in the moment", perfect modern humanist subject, lives for hedonism. Not really capable of thinking ahead, so fitting in very well as the desired subject of modernity. Easily bribed with the shiny baubles of industry into compliance.

Works his wageslave job, spends money the moment he has them, doesn't really worry about it. Happy to be a rent-tard for the rest of his life. Constantly distracted by cheap sex, drinking, hedonism. About to take the plunge into hard drugs. Lives on the outskirts of a criminal social circle, lives in conflict with himself over his family social sphere, and secretly wanting to be a full normie. He goes to the gym every day, and is well built. He goes to the gym to socialise, and that's his entire life. Work, gym, sluts. And he does well for himself, it's no “incel” thing. He does fuck the sluts. He is well built, but short.

Quintessential horny amoral rootless cosmopolitan. No plans, just consumes. The perfect modernist subject, the perfect schema for the desired male citizen of rootless globalism.

But then you humanise him. You see, this guy? He likes stand up comedy. He's crazy about it. He sees the stand up comedian with a podcast as the perfect ideal to strive towards, except he never considers being one himself, or anything like that. He just wants the lifestyle, of drinking and being irresponsible and amoral.

He has a favourite comedian he idolizes, whose act is famously about being short and ugly. He only likes white/local comedians, not the ones who's act is being brown. He really likes the ugly dwarf though.

He fetishizes him, as the solution to his own unarticulated existential anxiety: if only I was more like [him], I would [fit in], despite me being [an ugly dwarf]. “If I mimicked this lifestyle I could pass as white". This impulse then draws him towards self destructive behaviour. Because there is a lot of contractionary impulses in there, self loathing and confusion. To put it into words like this and articulate it makes the absurdity too in your face, and it only works as an operational personality because it is unarticulated.

The very idea of wanting "to be white" would be offensive to him, to his conscious self image. He grew up as a visual outsider, a “minority”, and like all people he wants the acceptance of the tribe at a pre-rational psychological level. And despite him being sexually popular, etc, he will always feel like an "ugly dwarf" - simply because he compares himself to his environment. The local population is 6'2 on average, and he is several heads shorter. Its pre-rational - he can't help feeling it. He doesn't know this about himself. But he craves validation from the white normies, and he is deeply alienated from his first-generation extended family.

His primary attempt to act out the fetish, because he is not very good at coming up with jokes, is sharing funny things he sees on his phone, with people around him. "you have to see this", when some video makes him laugh. This leads to repeating moments of social failure, because doing that never works. No person in the world has yet succeeded in showing someone a funny video on their phone, without the viewer feeling uncomfortable, because we all know instinctually, that this is a machine this guy uses to jerk off, and it feels overly intimate and unpleasant.

This repeatedly pains him, but he keeps doing it, the same thing over and over, hoping for a new result: that everybody laughs [and this somehow makes him white and tall].

Cultural cuckoldry. Bam. There it is. "Making the other man make people laugh", fetishizing that whole setup, and the acting it out over and over and over again. It's something that is only really possible in our current technological era, it's only possible because of "phones", and it's encouraged by the structure of the social media attention complex. If he didn't have a phone to watch tiktoks on during breaks at work, he wouldn't be able to act out the cuckoldry fantasy. A perfect storm of techno-social interplay resulting in a genuinely new social phenomenon. Or maybe just a variant of a more general thing, of technological cuckoldry: prioritising the representation and simulation of life over life, video games over business achievements, porn over sex, etc.

Thought there'd be more meat on that bone. But that's the idea. A fresh perspective on the immigration problem, and an attempt to provide the much demanded humanization and empathy towards the immigrant other. But I have a feeling that its probably going to be one of those "giving people what they ask for is going to ruin the fantasy that made them ask" kind of things. Because it doesn't make him look cool.

Which, to be perfectly honest, is why I wanted to write about it. Because I think that last bit is funny. Giving people what they ask for is the worst thing you can do to them, because it reveals that they didn't want it, they just wanted to want it, wallow in wanting it. And getting a genuine “empathic humanization” of the poor immigrant struggling to fit in to racist western society etc, would probably feel like if everyone actually started laughing, when you showed them little video clips on your phone.