(8:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Getting off on knowledge

I am only 25 years old. I don't have much experience in what is colloquially called "the real world." I sponsor a child. I give money to the ACLU every month. Sometimes I give money to homeless people. I might have convinced at least a couple people to vote for John Kerry. That's the extent of my impact -- and that's perhaps the most generous interpretation so far of my stupid narcissistic life.

I don't know that I aspire to have much of an impact in the real world, primarily out of a feeling of hopelessness. For instance, I just heard a clip of Rush Limbaugh talking about how glad he is that the peace activists got kidnapped, because that represents an encounter with reality. They're suffering for their irresponsible theories. My dad listens to that shit every day, sometimes twice to make sure he doesn't miss anything. My dad is a good man, a generous man.

So I don't know what I'm doing really. I'm writing a paper about Derrida and Neitzsche and Kierkegaard, and I enjoy it. It's important to me, even if it's not important to anyone else. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to read some Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, taking notes so that I can one day give a lecture over them. Then, of course, I'll read a bunch of Jean-Luc Nancy. This problem just keeps getting worse. Oh God -- then I want to start learning Latin. Maybe it is a problem, a real problem. Maybe I actually really should be out there helping the homeless or maybe I should be the one getting kidnapped in Iraq, or maybe I should be the one spending a month in maximum security prison for laying down in the middle of the driveway to a missile factory.

But if I weren't doing this shit, I wouldn't be doing any of that. I know that, for a fact. I'd do something "practical," some kind of office job, and I'd pay my bills, and I'd go have a drink with my buddy from high school -- that's what I'd do. No social work for me. No elaborate protests. I'm a quiet man -- I mumble. I have trouble making myself heard when ordering at a fast food restaurant. I can serve on committees pretty well. I can edit people's papers. Maybe at my last stupid office job, and maybe ultimately at this present one, I've helped to make people's lives less stressful, less overburdened by these stupid tasks.

Right? I don't even know where to begin, other than here, where I am, other than this time to learn language skills and to read seriously and to learn how to talk to people maybe. I don't want to be made to feel bad about this. It's stupid how oversensitive I am, but I don't even want to think about my motivations or about what this means for other people. Passion, all of that -- I don't want to discuss it.

I confess that I cannot bear moral judgment. I cannot stand up under it. But I hear the voices now -- Adam, you're whining. So selfish. So self-involved. Of course I am. Of course. No one wants to hear this shit. I'm just a kid who knows how to read fairly well -- or maybe not, because I don't show it enough on my fucking blog. Yes, I could be working harder here. A footnote or two on my posts wouldn't -- God, I am sick of my own sarcasm. It's too easy anymore.

I want to say something positive. I want to say something true, though I would settle for saying something beautiful. I want to have attained, at the very least, the aesthetic stage. I want to be able to say that I'm good at things without hearing the voices calling me arrogant -- the voices inside me. More arrogant than ever before, puffed up with knowledge.

Yeah?! Yeah I'm loud and intolerant and I interrupt people? Right? Well maybe that's because we're in a pretty fucking serious situation and being loud and yelling is all I know how to do -- and now I don't even know how to do that. It's like after years of torturing, they've subdued me as well. I'm used to it. It's familiar. I hate Rush Limbaugh for what he said about those peace activists, in large part because someone I love very much could very well have been one of those people if things had gone differently in her life -- but don't I like to hear these things on a certain level, too? Not the kidnappings, but the torture, the detention centers in Eastern Europe, the worse and worse and worse in Iraq -- the only hope I have is that the Bush administration will finally have their fill of their evil and their filth and will choke to death on it.

I want them to stop, but more than that, I want them to keep doing it, to keep conforming to my judgment on them -- and even at this late date, let's just say it: God's judgment. I don't want Dick Cheney ever to do a single good thing for the rest of his life. I want him to remain just as he is, just as evil as he is. The same for all the rest of them -- their punishment, the only conceivable punishment, is for them to remain as they are.

And so my judgment itself makes me complicit, as I sit back, doing nothing, precisely nothing.

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