Estranged from beauty and grace

James Lileks at The Bleat.

“These are people who are estranged from beauty and grace, by their own hand. Not dark souls but lazy ones. Not bleak hearts but banal ones, looking for the perpetual frisson an adolescent male gets when he drifts to the brotherhood of the numb and the bored. They have nothing to rally around except rejection; they have no cause but the tiresome imperative of the Transgressive; they have no idea where they stand in human history, how a hundred million people would claw and climb over a mountain of broken glass to sample the ease and bounty they take for granted. They believe in nothing except the self, but as it happens they hate themselves as well.”

RTWT, it’s almost all that good.

Lileks is talking about the impulses displayed by the Dayton shooter, who apparently took his “pornogrind“ subculture a tad too seriously. Much to the chagrin of his fellow nihilist poseurs.

Jordan Peterson is not so poetic, but he would agree completely.

See also: Meaning and Millennials

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