Thinking About Athens
23rd September 2022
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.
A little change of pace this week as the news is mostly made up nonsense about the war on Russia and, of course, stories about Trump. The obsession with Trump moved past whatever lies beyond absurd years ago. Even if you get the symbolism of Trump to the managerial elite, their obsessing over him is exhausting. It is as if they want to talk about him to the point where his fans are sick of the subject.
Scan the millions of posts about Trump in the regime media each week and it is like watching a man deliberately slip on a banana peel. His attempt to entertain the audience just creates a sense of shame. You are embarrassed for him. That is the same feeling I get when I read a New York Times piece about Trump. How humiliating and degrading it must be to write those posts.
The Finns have a word for this, myötähäpeä, which roughly translates into secondhand shame or shared embarrassment. Fremdschämen is the German version of it, which means the feeling you get when seeing someone do something so embarrassing that you start to feel shame by watching it. English does not have a corresponding word, which is odd given the history of the English language.