Cool

Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.

In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism for conformity. “Cool” is just a more satisfying alternative word for “normal,” or rather for a kind of heightened or romanticized normality. Normality reconstrued as something desirable, and therefore as a defensive weapon with which to protect oneself from the self-doubt or self-loathing of uneasy or shameful compliance.

Cool is John Dewey’s “individuality” translated into vernacular, collectivist social control theory reduced to lingo. It is the surface kaleidoscope of transient colors with which the carefully indoctrinated and unswerving “social mind” celebrates itself. More directly, it is the obedience-obscuring attitude with which the soul of man tries to console itself for its surrender. It is a logo T-shirt that proclaims, with all the force of self-delusion, “I wear this factory mass-produced T-shirt to show everyone that I have a mind of my own.”

Blessed are the profoundly uncool in thought and deed; for they are all that will be left.