Once You've Declared 'War' on Bourgeois Values, You're Pretty Much Screwed

Postcards from the nihilist left. See David Thompson, via Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit:

“LEFTIST POSTURING IS OFTEN ANTITHETICAL TO PRACTICAL SUCCESS AND PRACTICAL HAPPINESS,” David Thompson writes:

To take a vivid and familiar example, imagine if your children, nieces and nephews took to heart the operatic blatherings of Laurie Penny, who tells her readers to “Fuck social mobility… Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class… Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition.” These, she says, are things “we should have abandoned.”

Well, okay. But where exactly does that leave a young person, or a person not-so-young? Once you’ve declared “war” on bourgeois values, once you’ve abandoned the conventional foundations of material and emotional reward, where do you go? How will that radicalism serve you later in life, when you’re no longer a stroppy teenager or a twenty-something poseur? Is a mix of contrarianism, hypocrisy, resentment and a colossal sense of entitlement a sound footing for an adult life? After all, those “small, ugly ambitions” are what gave Laurie her own comfortable upbringing and advantages in life, such that she can now flit around the world tweeting about how oppressed she is.

As noted before, it’s one of the classic problems for self-imagined radicals. In denouncing bourgeois habits (usually while enjoying the benefits of such behaviour, at least residually), they have little of practical use to offer their followers. If you do away with marriage, monogamy, responsibility, deferred gratification, personal territory, etc., you’re basically left with a recipe for failure, dependency and unhappiness. Though of course the resentment that follows can be very useful to would-be prophets of the left. If encouraging needless misery, and then exploiting it, is your thing...

The hideous prog-trolls who used to comment here used to hate being called nihilists, but that's exactly what they are.

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