If you do, then you’re batshit crazy. I’ll explain.

How American Culture Makes  People Batshit Crazy
The most disturbing aspect — the source of all these mental and dietary health problems in the US — about American culture (Anglo culture, really) is that it trains people to have feelings about feelings.  Like Chelsea getting mad at herself for being mad at her boyfriend because his wee wee malfunctioned at the wrong time; Jessica feeling guilty about being happy after she beats her bestie to win State.  Robbie getting depressed because he’s not who he thought he was now that he’s harboring racist thoughts after getting carjacked twice in two months by Black dudes; Susan afraid about becoming anxious during her solo.

What happens above is learned — vis-a-vis American moral education — and it’s not natural or healthy to behave like that. Real, raw, instinctive emotions are already tough enough to deal with, adding a layer of manufactured ones is bound to drive people nuts not just because there are more emotions to deal with, but because now there are conflicting emotions that make people’s internal compass — ie. instincts —  go haywire. Without instincts, people are as good as dead.

Below are some emotions Americans are taught to avoid feeling

• Anger
• Hate
• Fear
• Sadness
• Anxiety

because they’re “negative.”  Okay, how so?  Dylan Thomas didn’t think anger a negative emotion when he wrote to his dying father:

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Or how about Jesus Christ, who goes ape shit on those who fuck with his shit? From the book of Matthew 21:12-13:

¹² And Jesus entered the temple^[a] and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. ¹³ He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

 

What about fear? Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the ability to move forward despite fear. If there’s no fear, there’s no courage and courage is one of those acts that make life worth living. Beginning to see how those who run away from so called negative emotions are spiritually dead? It’s the combination of anger and fear that makes courage possible. Passion is the combination of anger and love.  Fear and anxiety (or as Kierkegaard puts it, “Fear and Trembling”) makes faith. Now imagine life without courage, passion, and faith. Is it worth living?

Yet the curators of American culture insist that courage is possible only when there’s no fear, serenity if there’s no anger, success if there’s no anxiety, love if there’s no hate, happiness if there’s no sadness, pleasure if there’s no pain. As with all attempts to create Heaven on Earth, the unintended consequences have been disastrous: more emotional eating, more drug addiction, more mental health problems.

How People are Trained to Have Feelings About Feelings, (how to become emotionally corrupt)
Again, it’s not natural to have feelings about feelings (aka meta-feelings). Real emotions are instinctual and their purpose is to protect the feeler of them: fear when you unexpectedly encounter a lion in the wild; sadness when your beloved child dies; anger when cheated by a trusted friend; happy when your team wins.  Fake emotions, on the other hand — and this includes sentimentality, that “failure of feeling” and “mask of cruelty” — are taught. Here’s how:

Parent says: Don’t be mad at me!
Kid hears: It’s wrong to be angry

Teacher says: Don’t be sad!
Kid hears: There’s something wrong with feeling sad.

Coach says: Don’t be nervous!
Kid hears: There’s something wrong with feeling anxious

Commercial says: Don’t be scared!
Kid hears: There’s something wrong with feeling scared.

Customer says: You need to smile more if you want a tip (some cunt actually said this at another juice bar)
Employee hears: I need to be happy all the time for people to like me

Stranger says: I’m fine, how are you?
You hear: Everyone is always happy, why not me?

How do you think those bombarded with these asinine messages and exhortations are going to turn out? Erika the waitress is going to get stoned every day before work so she looks happy, dopey, and smiley for the pleasure of her emotionally corrupt customers who think going to a restaurant should be the same experience as going to Disneyland. Jane, who once practiced and practiced to become a concert pianist now needs anxiety meds to make it to school, much less to Carnegie Hall. Adam becomes a heroin addict because he lacks the anger to produce the natural pain-killers that’d get him through work drug free. Emily is on depression meds and when she’s not she binges on carbs because that’s what happens when you’re scared of being sad.

Bloody British Cunts    (aka BBC)

In 2017, the BBC ran a health story titled “Anger and hatred can make us feel happy, study says.”  This cross-cultural study “included some 2,300 university students from the United States, Brazil, China, Germany, Ghana, Israel, Poland and Singapore.” One conclusion:

People are happier if they are able to feel emotions they desire – even if those emotions are unpleasant, such as anger and hatred.”

Specific emotions don’t make people happy. It’s the ability to feel what one wants to feel that makes one happy. Put differently elsewhere in the article:

The researchers found that while people overall wanted to experience more pleasant emotions, they had the greatest life satisfaction if the emotions they experienced matched those they desired.

Another conclusion, that Westerners are unhappy because they’re hedonistic:

People want to feel very good all the time in Western cultures. Even if they feel good most of the time, they may still think that they should feel even better, which might make them less happy overall.

Since the BBC is run by a bunch of Bloody British Cunts, this article is biased as fuck: it assigns Anglo-centric moral value to specific emotions.  Anger and hate, for instance, are described as “unpleasant” and “negative” emotions. Except they’re not but by cultural decree. Which emotion do professional athletes use most often to stay focused and to play through pain: happiness or anger? Anger, of course, because that’s the emotion that releases natural pain killers in our bodies and improves focus and strength. I may be despicable and an angry motherfucker, but there isn’t one customer who’d describe me as lacking in motivation and vigor precisely because I allow myself to access the full spectrum of emotions — without judgment — and anyone who tells me how I ought to feel can kiss my ass.

Grandpa Hates Japs

My Chinese aunt once paid a compliment to the Japanese.  Since her father  (my grandfather) was present, she prefaced it with:

I hate the Japanese as much as anyone, but I have to admire how they’ve…

The preface makes clear that there’s no taboo among the Chinese against hating an ethnic group. In this case, this show of (manufactured) hate is used positively, as a show of respect for an elder’s experiences and perspective. Nobody in the family calls grandpa a racist for hating the Japanese, nobody tries to change his mind. I mean, why shouldn’t he hate the Japanese — he grew up watching them rape and pillage half his fucking country. Not saying forgiveness  isn’t a better option, but that’s for him to decide, not anyone else, because none of us understand what he experienced so it’s best to leave him be. He’ll stop hating once he’s ready to do so, not when other people tell him to do so.

Stand-Up Comedy Doesn’t Exist in China (and what that has to do with the cost of therapy)
Nor in Russia, Germany, France, most of the world actually. Stand-up comedy is a uniquely Anglo invention, started and gained popularity in the UK during the emotionally repressive and imperialistically expansive Victorian Era (1837-1901). Historian Harold Perkins writes about the transformation of manners during the time leading into the Victorian Era:

Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.

In other words, Anglos went from being assholes to being politically correct, self-righteous, emotionally timid, phlegmatic assholes. Why did this transformation of manners happen? Let’s see what was happening geopolitically. During the 19th century, the British Empire added

…around 10,000,000 square miles (26,000,000 km²) of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire. Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman…Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain’s dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina, and Siam, which has been described by some historians as an Informal Empire. (wiki entry on British Empire).

Here are a few details about what the British were up to:

• 1789 To annihilate Australian aboriginals, British military brought bottles of smallpox to infect them. Ninety percent of aboriginal population died within 15 months.
• 1806 Abandonment of Spanish POWs on barren island on the Rio de la Plata river during Napoleonic Wars to starve to death.
• 1842 To reverse trade imbalance, Britain forces China to legalize and buy its opium, leading to an opioid epidemic that nearly destroys China.
• 1845-1849  British policies lead to Great Potato Famine in Ireland, resulting in one million dead and another million emigrating to escape starvation because throughout the famine, the British continued to export out of Ireland agricultural products, such as wheat and beef, the English wanted.
• 1857 The aftermath of the Indian Rebellion (1857–58), when convicted mutineers were tied in front of cannons and blasted, or sewn into pig or cow skins after death (for Muslims and Hindus respectively).
• 1899-1902 The roundup of Boer civilians (mostly women and children) into the world’s first modern “concentration camps” during the Second Boer War

Is it an accident that the rapid rise of Britain to world dominance coincides with the sudden transformation of Anglo manners? I doubt it. To begin with, what do the British need to do to convince their subjects that they deserve to be ruled by the British? What do the British need to do to convince the themselves that it’s their divine “burden” to rule over their colonial and neo-colonial subjects and to treat them the way they do?

Answer: Everyone needed to be convinced that the  British are more civilized, that is, more removed from the state of nature than are their subjects.  And that begins with the repression of emotions and sticking a chopstick up one’s ass while one eats. After all, only animals and children act on instinct, while humans act on reason only, right? Rudyard Kipling writes about the imperialist mindset, from the satirical “White Man’s Burden,” 1899:

Take up the White Man’s burden
Send for the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child

Anglo politeness, especially in the US, have become like religious prayers, entreaties for forgiveness for the forgotten and denied sins of a nation and its individual citizens.  Americans will, for instance, incessantly and inappropriately say “please” and “thank you,” as if chanting a mantra to showcase their good breeding and virtuous intentions, when in fact, these gratuitous mutterings are meant to mask their bigotry, hypocrisy, and cruelty. The more vile and socially inept they are, the more polite they are.

Which brings us back to the question: “Why is stand-up comedy a uniquely Anglo form of entertainment, most popular in English speaking nations?” It doesn’t exist in China or Russia or Germany, even though other forms of American and British entertainment — hip hop for instance  — are popular in these nations.

Because there’s no need for stand up comedy in places where political correctness doesn’t exist and emotional repression isn’t normal. The reason why stand-up comedy is so popular in the US is because since the end of the World War II, the US has taken over the role of the world’s police and asshole and now we have to convince ourselves and everyone else that we deserve that role. So we stop saying what’s on our mind and feel what we want to feel in order to convince ourselves that we’re somehow superior to those backward ass bigots even though we’re as bigoted and hypocritical as the British at their worst. Since it’s not natural and healthy to behave this way, we watch stand-up comedy to let out our repressed selves in a way that won’t desecrate our carefully curated public identities — successful stand up comedians say what everyone is thinking but are afraid to say.  Stand-up comedians are the modern court jesters of American middle-class society.

Ask a German, “How are you?” and he’ll respond truthfully. Ask a Russian “How are you?” and he’ll tell you it’s none of your business.  Ask a Chinese person that question and she’ll ignore you.  The people from the aforementioned don’t serve customers with a smile plastered on their faces and they never, ever smile while walking down the street unless they have an instinctive reason to do so because anyone who smiles like that must either be a fraud or an idiot. They navigate with their instincts, not with what they’re told is proper, polite and pleasant.

Life Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Instead of telling ourselves and each other to not be sad, or angry, or anxious…we could ask each other why we’re sad, angry, or anxious, whatever it may be we’re feeling. And let each other know that it’s normal and expected to be anxious before performing solo, and nervous while performing it; to be angry when cheated; sad when your team loses; ashamed when you let someone down.

Instead of judging, let’s ask questions. Exploring why we are who we are instead of hiding who we are may be the first step toward recovery from an addiction to overthinking that’s ruining us.