i recently watched a youtube video where a german guy was saying that political discourse in the u.s. goes nowhere because our fractured education prevents us from having a shared political language. like we literally cannot have intelligent conversations with each other because we do not all have the same baseline understanding of basic concepts
a literary example i've noticed is that many people will talk about i who have never known men (both negative and positive) without using the term "absurdism" despite the narrator calling her life and world "absurd" multiple times in the text
i know 1) the book is mainstream popular right now and 2) we haven't all read camus, but it's annoying to see people attempt to do a deep-dive into IWHNKM's themes only to see them mention feminism, patriarchy, dystopia, etc. and make no direct reference to philosophy. people literally lack the language to conceptualize and discuss it accurately
i'm at a point where i'm happy to see people use the word "existentialism" to describe it even though i disagree, because at least they understand it's primarily a philosophical novel with feminist undertones rather than a "bleak" "feminist" "dystopia" where "nothing happens" and there are "no answers"
it's that thing where once you reach slightly deeper than a surface-level understanding of something, you can't stomach a majority of discussions about it because they're too shallow. but if a particular space is not actively being gatekept, it's going to be overrun by the shallow newbies. so you either take on the burden of gatekeeping/educating ("being a snob") or drown in a sea of shallowness
