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fundamentally, i tend to read bill as more….. distant… from the bill we see than i think most people do. personality-wise, i mean. i think that Being The Mole is more central to the way he relates to the world than you might think.
i think he conceptualizes his entire life as a Grand Deception, a Performance. and i think he considers the shallow, sex-obsessed, unempathetic asshole who treats politics like a game and the people around him like pets to be a long joke he’s playing on the world. a living satire of his own class.
now, here’s the thing. it totally gives him license to be a shallow, sex-obsessed, unempathetic asshole who treats politics like a game and the people around him like pets. but in his own mind, everything he does is appended with a silent “jk lmao.” he’s the channer who posts a racist meme but then says it’s satire. he is allowed to simultaneously act out his own worst impulses, and feel superior to everyone around him on both moral and intellectual grounds (moral because they are the people he’s satirizing, intellectual because they don’t get the “joke”).
i also think that his ideology is both genuine and not. i think he feels betrayed by britain, because he was promised glory by virtue of his birth, but he was born into a declining nation, swiftly falling into irrelevance. i think he needed a reason to hate britain, to find flaws with it. communism was a convenient ideology to use, so he adopted it. it also gave him the bonus of believing himself a Revolutionary, granting him the glory he was denied just by participating.
i also think that in particular his relationship to imperialism played a role. i think he thinks that he’s strongly anti-imperialist, and that the motivation behind this is the fact that he feels he was denied a glorious role as a colonial warrior and overlord, and he’s reacted by turning on the institution of imperialism. essentially, if i can’t have it, no one can. i think communism’s relationship to imperialism was seductive to him. the fact that the soviet union espoused inti-imperialist policies while fighting colonial wars would have appealed to him.
now, i think that he thinks that he’s a true believer in communism and anti-imperialism and the like. but his actual reasons are more self-serving and petty.
fundamentally, i tend to read bill as more….. distant… from the bill we see than i think most people do. personality-wise, i mean. i think that Being The Mole is more central to the way he relates to the world than you might think.
i think he conceptualizes his entire life as a Grand Deception, a Performance. and i think he considers the shallow, sex-obsessed, unempathetic asshole who treats politics like a game and the people around him like pets to be a long joke he’s playing on the world. a living satire of his own class.
now, here’s the thing. it totally gives him license to be a shallow, sex-obsessed, unempathetic asshole who treats politics like a game and the people around him like pets. but in his own mind, everything he does is appended with a silent “jk lmao.” he’s the channer who posts a racist meme but then says it’s satire. he is allowed to simultaneously act out his own worst impulses, and feel superior to everyone around him on both moral and intellectual grounds (moral because they are the people he’s satirizing, intellectual because they don’t get the “joke”).
i also think that his ideology is both genuine and not. i think he feels betrayed by britain, because he was promised glory by virtue of his birth, but he was born into a declining nation, swiftly falling into irrelevance. i think he needed a reason to hate britain, to find flaws with it. communism was a convenient ideology to use, so he adopted it. it also gave him the bonus of believing himself a Revolutionary, granting him the glory he was denied just by participating.
i also think that in particular his relationship to imperialism played a role. i think he thinks that he’s strongly anti-imperialist, and that the motivation behind this is the fact that he feels he was denied a glorious role as a colonial warrior and overlord, and he’s reacted by turning on the institution of imperialism. essentially, if i can’t have it, no one can. i think communism’s relationship to imperialism was seductive to him. the fact that the soviet union espoused inti-imperialist policies while fighting colonial wars would have appealed to him.
now, i think that he thinks that he’s a true believer in communism and anti-imperialism and the like. but his actual reasons are more self-serving and petty.
