From Edgy To Evil: The Contrarian's Fate
Reflexive contrarianism can make you feel cool. It can also send you down some dark paths.
To put yourself into the mind of the professional contrarian, remember the primal sensation of hearing your parents’ instructions, digesting those commands, and doing the exact opposite.
Recall the thrill of it all, how it made your brain buzz with a feeling of Total Independence from the repressive powers that be. All at once you were your own person, a servant to no master, a free person in a free country in a free world. You had shaken off the chains of mildly demanding expectations. Nothing had ever felt quite so good.
I was not a rebellious kid. I was the boy who urged others not to be rebellious for fear of conflict. No, no, I'd tell the other boys, you don't understand. Do the stuff you're told to do and you'll be rewarded with something more valuable than gold: Approval. It's easy. Anyone can do it.
I was the boy every mother pointed to and asked why their sons couldn’t be the same way, so happily obedient and eager to please, so self sufficient and easy going. I grew up that way and I very much enjoyed the positive feedback from my parents and teachers and my friends’ parents. In fact, I craved it. It was a self-reinforcing system: I listened, I did what I was told, I received praise, and I listened and did what I was told all over again. Then the praise flowed, on and on and on.
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One day in eleventh grade, after being exposed to a few music videos my parents had forbidden me to watch for fear of the devil working his magic, I decided it was time to paint my fingernails. Not all of them, of course. I hadn’t gone insane. I painted exactly two nails, both middle fingers. I used black polish because that’s what the dudes on the music videos had used. And they looked cool as shit.
The dopamine rush of strolling through the hallways of my ultra-conservative Baptist high school the next day, people gawking at my fingernails, felt wrong at first. Transgression should not feel this good, I thought. It shouldn’t feel good at all. It did though. It felt so good, in ways the approval of authority figures never had. Because this affirming dopamine rush was coming from peers – including girls, importantly – who in one way or another expressed their approval of my two painted fingernails. People would ask me why I painted my nails and I would shrug and they would say, my god, this guy is crazy, and we like crazy. I had always been told people don't like crazy. They did though. They liked it a lot.
I can’t emphasize this enough: Girls were into the nails. Girls who had never talked to me suddenly wanted to chat and know about me, the upstanding white boy varsity baseball player turned bad. A few jocks called me gay. Even that felt good, like affirmation that I was on to something. Doing a thing I was not supposed to do felt good and right.
Denny Carter
It felt good to be transgressive, if only a little bit. I kept my nails painted – even painting my thumbnails at one point – for a few days before the vice principal told me I faced a suspension if I stepped any further outside the prescribed boundaries of masculinity. That was that: My rebellious phase was over. I was back to being the Good Boy, clean fingernails and all.
I think about my 72-hour rebellious phase when I see clips of the professional contrarian class of writers and pundits and podcasters grace my various social media timelines. It’s always the same story when you drill down deep enough: Mom and dad said not to do a thing or think a thing or say a thing, and that would not stand. The professional contrarian, making loads of money from Substack subscribers who see contrarians as the only real truth tellers remaining in a broken information environment and obscenely wealthy men who need media attack dogs to do their bidding and pay well for such services, is told what is verboten and instantly knows which direction to turn.
For the professional contrarian, the man who is simply Asking Questions even though those questions aways – without fail – are in service of right-wing interested, mom and dad usually take the form of normie liberals and their favored media outlets. Anything these folks profess to believe – including easily provable reality – is not just wrong, according to the contrarian, but dangerous and censorious. Mom and dad say this or that political development is bad, so it must actually be good.
Mom and dad, you see, are not cool. The political movement that permits you to be your worst self is quite cool. For the teenage-brained contrarian, the choice is easy.
Denny Carter
In this way the professional contrarian is deeply immature and undeveloped as an adult, fueled by the impulses of a moody teenager telling mom and dad and teacher and coach and religious leader to shove it, to fuck off, to stop telling me what to do. It makes all too much sense then that professional contrarians appeal so widely to Gen Xers, whose disdain for authority and young adult nihilism was always going to prove vulnerable to an American fascist movement, and whose support for the country's first tyrant has been steadfast bordering on frothing.
