4.10.25 - Some thoughts on Kanye West, Stopping Hitler, and the State of Young Men
In my long phone conversations with my parents, where I let myself ramble and talk like a schizophrenic person, I've been circling around an idea that I think carries a lot of weight. I don't have very much time to develop it fully but want to jot it rough contours.
Since like WWII western culture has been scarred, and has essentially been centered around the idea of "stopping Hitler." That is, preventing anyone like him from every cropping up again. When I say Hitler, I really mean, a great man who sees the world as a canvas for his will, and not a cooperative enterprise.
A lot of this is a good understandable project. We read the Sneetches in elementary school. We watched My Friend Martin every year. We watched "The Wave." We had to look at all of those Holocaust pictures. I mean, so much of inculturation of small children in the early 21st century was really fascism prevention. I remember a school exercise where we divided the class by eye color or something of the sort to show how bad division is. I remember that they made us lay on the ground like the slaves did on the slave boats in the elementary school hallways to have us imagine what it must have been like. All of it to stop one of us from becoming Hitler 2 I guess.
But a lot of it, I think, has been problematic. Any young man that has been run through the public education system knows that there is a sort of systematic effort to convince us to make ourselves "small." Make space for others, don't be cocky, don't act too clever. Like Dash from the Incredibles a lot of us were incentivized not to shine as bright or move as fast as we could have. We had to be good comrades, do all the steps everyone else had to do, glue in the worksheets into our AP Notebook for our class grade. We were explicilty told about this ridiculous "Great Man" theory of history and how it was all wrong, then told to read Guns Germs and Steel. See? The world is just run by impersonal forces. New age dialectical materialism. Human will, your ability, your ego, it doesn't really matter. Actually, Hitler, Napolean, none of them mattered, someone else would have filled their niche because there was structural demand for that kind of person.
Maybe I'm overstating what they said a bit, but that was the vibe. And I think that, unconsciously, society was telling this all to young men to dampen our ambitions and to stop Hitler. They wanted to culrivate workers and technocrats, not great men. They didn't need us to read great books or anuything, or to learn history to draw strategic lessons, that wasn't the point. The point was to make us into agreeable members of society who could play nice. If were lucky 9one of us could work as an analyst for Capital One or something. But don't any of you think about being great---remember that's sort of the path to Hitler! Male ego, pride, its all what leads to bigotry fascism and Hitler. In case you forgot, we will remind you!
I do thiink this is the cultural environment where we created the dmenad in young men for something more, for someone who offers them a BIGGER vision. It's the environment where someone like Andrew Tate develops a cult following. For me, it was the environment that made Kanye West's so resonant.
I was thirteen when Yeezus came out. Listening to that album was like crack. It was a shot of adrenaline.
"Fuck you and your corporation you can't control me!" (I wouldn't feel something like that until I read the Antichrist by Nietzsche in Sophomore year of college. I remember reading "We thirsted for the lightening and great deeds . . . ")
Kanye West, his words, his music, his interviews, were an antidote for a young man who was growing up in a culture more interested in stopping Hitler than cultivating his abilities, than channeling his energies and ambitions into something meaningful. I had so much anger, so much energy, so much passion, so much ambition, and all everyone wanted to do was to cut my balls off. I was Randall P. McMurphy in the madhouse. That's what High School felt like.
His interviews would just resonate with fifteen year old me so hard. When he described how everyone wants to program you with low self-esteem . . . I knew exactly what he was talking about, and to me he was always an inspiration to RESIST that, to resist being neutered, to resist being lobotomized.
The alt-right Andrew Tate type stuff hadn't started while I was in school, but maybe I would have taken to it. I'm glad it wasn't really out there and I ended up––I think––normal enough. All I had was Kanye, My Chemical Romance, and some books. But now, there are kids like me in the schools, who are just as angry as I was. And the man who was so influential in counteracting the "stop Hitler" culture during my time, I guess unsurprisingly, now very pro-Hitler.
It's all very confusing and upsetting. But it makes perfect sense right? This was always his role. Kanye has always been far more of a Nietzschean than a Christian. This is just his final transformation. When I was in High School, there was still enough confusion about that that I got YEEZUS. What was really going on could be obfuscated to a degree. But now, a thirteen year old gets YITLER.
This seems like a bad development. But it's all logical. And i don't know exactly what we do about it.
(by the way, Hitler is BAD, antisemitism is BAD, and I hate bigotry. I know sometimes you just have to state that clearly. HITLER WAS BAD).
knxnts