JD Vance Is the White Kendi

As long as I remember, I’ve always deeply hated self-pity. The world is full of enough cruelty, sadism, and injustice. The least we can do is not add to the suffering by imagining new forms of oppression that don’t exist, or sitting here as privileged people living centuries after the start of the Industrial Revolution feeling sorry for ourselves.

This naturally influenced my politics. To me, leftists were the people who exaggerated their problems and blamed others for them. Anyone living in a modern developed country is absolutely blessed by historical standards. We can of course complain about remaining injustices and work hard to try to make the world better. But this should be done in the context of understanding that in the grand scheme of things, we are very lucky. And even if you have been objectively victimized, what good is wallowing in self-pity? Pessimism should be treated as a narcotic. It dulls the pain but makes the problems that caused it worse. And it is fundamentally indecent, reflecting a dearth of understanding about one’s place in the human story and a lack of gratitude towards what has been accomplished. Marcus Aurelius was right two thousand years ago about how men should live their lives, and his philosophy is more true and useful in an era of antibiotics and central heating. In fact, at this point, to live any other way is grotesque.

Life has gotten so good and so easy that for a large percentage of people, their problems overwhelmingly result from their own choices. We used to not have enough food to eat, now we stuff ourselves until it requires medical intervention. We used to lack affordable and enjoyable entertainment options, now we are so overwhelmed by them that many of us have trouble finding the motivation to go out and do things in the real world. Childbirth used to carry a substantial risk of death and women produced offspring anyway, now it’s become a relatively safe medical procedure and we don’t bother populating the next generation.

The problem of modernity is that people have become weak. Leftists were those who told their followers to embrace the weakness, and tear others down in the hopes of temporarily feeling slightly better. This was especially true when their politics centered among those who fell into “protected” categories: women, minorities, and later LGBT. Conservatives, in contrast, talked of lifting yourself ...