Ascetic Narcissism

Ignorant, self-involved morons with money. No, it's not about law students, it's about the obnoxious, self-righteous specialists in empty-gesture environmentalism that have multiplied like insects in the past few years. Conspicuous nonconsumption is the hilarious result of amputating the religious, cultural, and intellectual limbs of modern man, and expecting that cutting off a desire from its objects will simply make that desire wither. Well, rather than let the phantom-limb pains convince them of the folly of cabining human experience to eating, sleeping, and fucking, people have chosen simply to alter the way they eat, sleep, and fuck - go Green! This secular religion has all the bizarre ritual of a real religion, but because it, by definition, focuses on no objects other than those created by the human mind (the "environment" representing nothing but subjective, anthropocentric judgments about relations among essentially unrelated, purely existent things), it has no higher purpose than to make people feel good about themselves. And boy, do they feel good about themselves.

"I'm a happy person," he said. "It's great to do something that you believe in doing."

The problem with materialism is that it's so apparently self-indulgent - if pleasure is the sole good, and I buy and consume a lot of things to attain that pleasure, my selfishness isn't mediated by anything. Religious man didn't have this problem because his activity was directed to an external end - soli Deo gloria. The trick is to feel good by mediating the bare pursuit of pleasure with an artificial end - activity is directed toward improving the environment, certainly not to make the actor himself happy, so, you see, the motive is pure!

Because "the environment" is meaningless without a human correlate (do you think nature would be any more nature if we stopped emitting carbon? if we emitted more carbon?), it's really another way of saying "Me." But, because the new Environmental Man (here's your one-dimensional man, Herb) doesn't bother learning logic, this bug is really a feature. Watch this:

Yawns hate ostentation.

Except the ostentation of the hybrid car, right? Does BMW have to make a hybrid for the self-parody to hit home?

You are yuppies. Deal with it, you clueless tools.

There is so much more I could say about that pathetic little article. "Self-absorbed idiots are idiots" didn't seem to be a difficult point to make, though, so I'll quit now. Enjoy.