A sense of hostility directed at someone or something that is believed to be the cause of misfortune. Basically, it's blaming someone/something for your current state. It can also include self-abasement, especially if there is no way to change your situation.
CommunityAnnie EdisonMmmmmmmmmmmPolitenessEverything's fine, it's totall fineI've made a huge mistakeEscape please?
Last week, we finished reading Alan Jacobs' new book, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. It is a book we enthusiastically recommend. The book could perhaps be called "How to Debate," as Samuel James noted in his excellent review, but Jacobs keeps much of the focus on identity: how we consider ourselves as part of a group and what that means for how we approach differing points of view. Jacobs proposes (rightly) that much of our modern discussion boils down to virtue signaling, marking a line between people in our inner rings and the "Repugnant Cultural Others."
We'll let David Brooks explain (from his review):
Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.
There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be accepted. As Lewis put it, “The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
People will, for example, identify and attack what Jacobs calls the Repugnant Cultural Other — the group that is opposed to the Inner Ring, which must be assaulted to establish membership in it.
Other people will resent the Inner Ring, and they will cut all sorts of intellectual corners in order to show their resentment. These people are quick to use combat metaphors when they talk about thinking (he shot down my argument, your claims are indefensible). These people will adopt shared vague slurs like “cuckservative” or “whitesplaining” that signal to the others in the outsider groups that they are attacking the ring, even though these slurs are usually impediments to thought.
Jacobs notices that when somebody uses “in other words” to summarize another’s argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team. David Foster Wallace once called such people Snoots. Their motto is, “We Are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”
Jacobs might have written the book of the year—not necessarily the best book but the most essential one right now. It's brief (150 pages), easily readable, and well worth the time. You can pick up a copy of it at Amazon. Also, if you want to get a better sense of Jacobs' thought, check out the interview he did with Emma Green at The Atlantic.
WritingAlan JacobsThinkingInner RingsRepugnant Cultural OthersMan, give it five minutesThe One Ring to rule them all??