[AnonymousBosch]

Scorp:



Since all history is cyclical, a lightbulb just went off in my head. It's been staring me in the face all this time.

After months of going from unaware of this rubbish to seeing how unavoidable it is in every form of media, I have completely accepted that Progressivism is a theological offshoot of Catholicism / Puritanism. The similarities in behaviour are too similar, and I can see we're transitioning into a period of sexual repression, which explains the dismissive-avoidant nature of suspicious, uncomfortable Millenial Dating, and, as we're seeing here, an obsession with childhood innocence long past the age a healthy person would have discarded it.

It's simply Neo-Victorianism. Hell, Progressive Men are even competing for social status via the lengths of their beards again.

I posted a while ago about the Victorian-Era feminists and how they were simply beating the same drum as the modern ones, including the same damn talking points (equal pay, slut shaming, gay marriage), because Privileged Women of the time were obsessed with Social Reformation. Why, though?

After 125 years of 'progress', all it takes is the same combination of factors to exist in society: social class stratification; a privileged female upbringing; sexual discomfort and repression; a dominant religion; and a belief in one's own superior morality, and the end result is the same as then. We're simply seeing the return of The Cult of Sensibility.

The term is rarely used now and most people would confuse it with common sense, so I'll try to explain, pinching some parts from Wikipedia.

Quote:

Sensibility: refined or excessive sensitiveness in emotion and taste with especial responsiveness to the pathetic.

It originated as a way of thinking in the 18th century, and was originally considered virtuous. To be 'sensible' meant to have a deep emotional reaction to a stimulus that most people would find insignificant - to cry over the beauty of a sunset; to gasp in shock at a perceived rudeness; to beat your breast over the poor. These were all signs that you were closer to Godliness than other people, even though it made you much more fragile. Sensibility was a display of piety.

This is where the concept of sentimentality comes from, as sensibility was used in sentimental novels to provoke emotional responses in readers, done by juxtaposing tenderness with scenes of distress, as the plot is designed to advance emotion rather than action. (Modern analogues would be Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Twilight. Progressive science fiction is entirely-sentimental, more concerned with fucking aliens than fighting them. As readers and viewers grow more hysterical, the emotional stakes have to increase. The end result: modern television is obsessed with shocking viewers by killing off characters to get everyone talking (Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones, True Blood).

'Especial responsiveness to the pathetic'?

Quote:

The sentimental novel complemented social trends of the time toward humanism and the heightened value of human life. The literature focused on weaker members of society, such as orphans and condemned criminals, and allowed readers to identify and sympathize with them. This translated to growing sentimentalism within society, and led to social movements calling for change, such as the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. Instead of the death penalty, popular sentiment called for the rehabilitation of criminals, rather than harsh punishment.

So why the transition from 'refined' to 'excessive' sensitiveness? In the race for privileged women to prove that they had greater moral refinement than the other women in their peer group, women acted with increasing levels of histrionics. This was the age of the fainting couch. Modern psychology now recognises that the descriptions of hysteria matches those of Clinical Depression. Eventually, this obsession with one's own feelings and reaction to stimulus became to be considered extreme Narcissism rather than godliness, and it had withered away completely by the First World War.

Jane Austen was a brilliant observer of social interaction, and was far too intelligent to tolerate such nonsense, (though her writing goes over the head of the modern hysteric reading it).

Quote:

[Love and friendship [sic] is] an exuberant parody of the cult of sensibility, which she later criticized in a more serious way in her novel Sense and Sensibility. For the main characters in Love and Freindship, including the narrator Laura, violent and overt emotion substitutes for morality and common sense. Characters who have this "sensibility" fall into each other's arms weeping the first time they ever meet, and on suffering any misfortune are too preoccupied with indulging their emotions to take any effective action. They use their fine feelings as the excuse for any misdeeds, and despise characters without such feelings.

Samuel Johnson similarly mocked it with one of his characters:

Quote:

She daily exercises her benevolence by pitying every misfortune that happens to every family within her circle of notice; she is in hourly terrors lest one should catch cold in the rain, and another be frighted by the high wind. Her charity she shews by lamenting that so many poor wretches should languish in the streets, and by wondering what the great can think on that they do so little good with such large estates.

So, for a Modern Cult Of Sensibility to be identifiable, we'd have to look for these women:

- Privileged upbringing

- Lack of true hardship so a need to inflate small slights into hardship

- Easily offended

- Genuinely and meaningfully triggered by the insignificant

- Emotionally fragile

- Morally superior

- Clinically depressed

- Extremely narcissistic

- Indulge their emotions instead of taking positive action

- Treat their emotions as justification for bad behaviour

- Hate those who don't emotionally-react

- Obsessed with emotion-based entertainment

i.e. every Social Justice Warrior, female journalist, the majority of women in Humanities, and every teenage girl on Tumblr.

We have to accept that any society where women from privileged, comfortable backgrounds hold the power will naturally encourage a cult of sensibility, and, as such, will celebrate neurosis and react with hysteria instead of common sense.

Said women will never achieve anything, because they're too busy indulging their emotions than actually taking action, so 125 years now from them, some historian is going to be reading old twitter accounts and saying "Hey, they used to talk about fat shaming back then too!" We will just go around and around, getting nowhere, until men take the wheel again.

Of course, I'm only theorising here. If only someone could exclusively-research a group of upper class, spoilt, privileged women and perhaps note the links between depression, hysteria and neurosis, and then posit psychological theories that accurately-predict their emotional responses and behaviours.

Oh, yeah. Freud's patients were almost-exclusively upper class women.



I'm no writer. If any of you clever bastards want to research and run with this idea and do it better justice, go for it. I don't need credit.