There is an evident fascistic impulse to self-infantilization as a tentpole of one's entire personality. Cut from the same cloth as those people who buy their peace of mind at Disney land. Strikes me as something that can only be built on the insular luxury of the angloid world. Walling-out reality in favor of something more palatable. Something simpler. If everyone is just a big kid, then nothing really matters. It's all just a practice run. This seems to be something generated by a lot of American therapy culture, too. This kind of eternal adolescence.
i agree, and some theorists have identified a “right to comfort” as a cornerstone of contemporary white supremacist culture.
But conceptually I see a lot of other connections too.
it kind of reminds me of how the nazis conceived of “degenerate art.” to the nazis, their vision of “good” art was art that promoted the most conventional, the most nostalgic, the most kitsch, the most neoclassical, the most conservative, the most comfortable. Thus, they despised modernist art from movements such as the impressionists and the expressionists, particularly work that depicted the horrors of war (rather than an uncomplicated view of war as an honorable enterprise) such as the work of Otto Dix. Obviously there was also a blunt, vulgar motive to simply discriminate against Jewish artists and anyone who was “influenced by Jewish or non-Aryan ideals” but there was also a formal artistic basis as well.
one could even say that the nazi party censored and burned avant-garde art as a grotesque act of “self-care.” I think there are conceptual echoes of that in every “why i left the left” thonkpiece. Or in the contemporary appropriation by reactionary white people of the term “Black Fatigue,” wherein racist white people complain they are “tired” of seeing and/or interacting with Black people.
Even though Walt Disney died decades ago, I think it’s still worth analyzing his idea of a completely curated amusement park that utterly immersed the guests in a cohesive pampered experience. That was, essentially, the idea that Walt was attempting to achieve when he opened Disney Land in 1955, and there has not, in my opinion, really been a coherent break from that goal after he died and after the construction of subsequent Disney theme parks. Workers have described disney parks as, essentially, high-control environments for them, with extremely strict standards for their behavior, language, and appearance, and Walt Disney World in Florida has a history of relying heavily on workers from economically oppressed backgrounds such as Haitian immigrants (especially for the worst jobs like custodial positions!), and the pay and benefits were always pretty bad.
But all of those very real issues with the working conditions are concealed to park visitors, so as not to break the illusion, the “disney magic.”
An aside about Walt: While Walt Disney was “technically” not a fascist, he was in fact still a political reactionary (especially later in his life) who, in 1941, took out a magazine ad deriding his employees at his animation studio as communists (or at the very least part of a “communist plot”) when they went on strike. In 1947 he went on to give names of animators and labor organizers to HUAC, a clear antagonistic act against ‘uppity’ workers. (Funnily enough, Salvador Dali, whose own work was derided by the Nazis and who fled to america until after the war, became friends with Walt Disney, collaborating on an animated film that remained unfinished until long after both of them were dead. Both of them tilted rightward politically over time and Dali ended up a supporter of fucking Franco and had even been expelled from his own art movement for his right wing politics in the 1930s.)
