How Cool Is It To Be Cool?
March 17th, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters
It seems to be getting a little less cool to be cool.
The rigidly laid-back evaluative framing central to the notion of cool is slowly but surely coming unglued here and there more and more, leaving a load of cool out in the cold, dying to chill, to somehow avoid being just more cultural roadkill.
Cool has been around for a long time, occasionally shoved somewhat into the background by upstart variations and offshoots – like awesome, neat, hip, bad, sweet, and bitchin’ – but is in danger of being put out of business not by any of these, whatever their coolness quotient, but rather by its own operational core.
What this means is that the stylized invulnerability, the fashionably attired dissociation, the show of savvy ease, the engaging disengagement, the contrived display of emotional immunity – that in various combinations underlie and animate cool – are now more widely recognizd as signs of dysfunction than of having it together.
How cool is that? No more cool than wanting to be cool, but with one difference: Cool itself is losing more and more of its privileged status (“If the neighbors are doing it, it can’t be cool”), and is coming undone. Unstrung. The sense that cool ever really was where it’s at is fast unraveling. Cool is losing its cool, losing its shades, suffering a long overdue exposure.
Cool is run by shame, and not just run, but driven.
Of course, cool doesn’t look like it has anything to do with shame, other than perhaps to make others feel shame when they are in the presence of someone apparently cooler than them. But cool is shame that’s run about as far as you can get from shame. If we didn’t already feel shame – which is the nastily gripping, self-shrinking sense of being seriously flawed in the eyes of a convincingly critical audience, outer or inner – we wouldn’t have so much investment in being or acting cool. There are other tracks that shame can take, as when it is converted into aggression (both self-directed and other-directed) or flat-out withdrawal, but cool looks a lot better than these.
Cool doesn’t – mustn’t – look ruffled, not because it is courageous or knows how to get centered when there’s a crisis, but because it’s pathologically attached to looking good in a in-the-know kind of way, and ruffled just doesn’t look so good. Cool does not, does not, does not want to lose face – and what is shame, but a painfully mortifying loss of face?
Monday, April 04, 2011
Robert Augustus Masters - How Cool Is It To Be Cool?
Here is this month's free article from Robert Augustus Masters, posted at the Masters Center for Transformation. I could be wrong, but this seems to be a response of sorts to a couple of posts a while back by Diane Hamilton on using "cool" as a test of ethics - as in "it's not cool to [fill in the blank]" - posts which garnered a lot of heated discussion and dismissiveness - posts which were subsequently deleted (I blogged about it here).
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