Pop Politic: Barney Stinson and the German Nihilist

I love being pretentious. It’s my third favorite thing to do in the world (don’t ask). I’m really good at it. I’ve being doing it all my life. Knowing things granted me the attention I was desperate for at school, I soon became addicted to it, and like many addicts I soon found it surprisingly easier than I thought to “phone it in”, and sound smarter than I really am. I think all swots and teacher’s pets are pretentious people in training. I especially enjoyed the gambler’s adrenaline rush of multiply choice questions.

Yet modern society frowns on pretense. At least, it does in our face to face everyday interactions. It’s important to distinguish between this form of pretense and the on-line form, because on the Internet we have entered a golden age of pretense. The ability to edit our lives, find videos of cute cats to share, intellectually pose on reedit, in other words; make ourselves and our ideas sound far more important than they really are.

Goggle has also had a warping effect on pretense. Now anybody with an electronic device such as a smart phone and a connection to cyberspace can access the biggest library of information in human history with their finger tips (or if you’re a star trek fan, talk to it). This has switched the focus from knowing things to the formation of opinions. Yet, by their very nature opinions are much less solid than facts, they are as the great philosopher of the 21st century; the T-shirt says “like assholes - everybody has one.”

It is in this context that I believe we can start to think about being pretentious in a positive way. First we must look at the negative form. The “I’m letting you know, I’m so much more clever than you” form. Here the intention is to harm the ego of the other, whilst  inflating your own. Again ,I feel Goggle takes away a lot of this form of the “I,I,I” type of expression (or gives you the tools to shut it down). We all have access to the same vast pool of information. This negative type of pretense is also where a lot of our disapproval comes from. We understand most people know something that the other doesn’t. A degree in the humanities doesn’t help you much if there’s a pipe leaking and flooding your bathroom. Which is why we disapprove of the intellectual posturing of this type.

Friedrich Nietzche’s essay  "Why am I so clever?" is an exquisite example of this kind of pomp - don’t get me wrong, I love this essay. Nietzsche writes about his own genius without a hint of irony or self deprecation and it’s hilarious. Nietzsche takes delight in the fact that his books have so few sales in his own time, as he claims he is ahead of his time. To be fair to Nietzsche, when he declares his books will be read in every university at some point in the future, he’s right, you’d be hard pressed to find a philosophy course which doesn’t at some stage refer to his books and ideas. However, he doesn’t challenge our ideas of his work in this essay. It is poetically written self love. The positive kind of pretense points out that your opinion of reality isn’t as certain or concrete as you think it is. It is  the “I know more than you” that Nietzsche waxes lyrically about in this essay, not the “are you sure that this is the case?” type of questioning we wish to get across.

Nietzsche refers constantly to himself and his ideas, to the possessive and reflexive, he is not thinking about his impact on others, he has already decided the value of his work before it is read. He is comparable to the Hipster. Those who are exclusive in their pompousness and hive mind in their “original” thoughts.

 
Nietzsche recognizes the importance of overcoming our problems, making us stronger, he calls us to war on philosophical conundrums.

“War is another thing. I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts. To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy - that perhaps presupposes a strong nature, it is in any event a condition of every strong nature. It needs resistances, consequently it seeks resistances: the aggressive pathos belongs as necessarily to strength as the felling of vengefulness and vindictiveness does to weakness.”

Nietzsche doesn’t need an army to wage war - just an enemy, an individual intellectual conflict. However he supposes that he will always be the victor. I propose it is much better to over promote our ideas safe in the self awareness that we could be wrong, in fact it’s very likely we are.

The narrowness of his book collection should also send off alarm signals.He claims to have read a handful of books.  We should be suspicious of the specialist, because his focus may lead to myopia and narrow mindedness.Also, a small library easily read in a lifetime indicates a belief of being right and a lack of acknowledgment in being ignorant. A vast library of books too big to read in a lifetime, it is a recognition of the limits of the human mind, and how little time we have to rectify this.
 
A good example of positive pretense is Barny Stinson from the series How I Met your Mother.In his own words the problem with Barney is he’s “too awesome”. Although the character at times seems pathologically lacking in self awareness, it’s important to see his role in the group of beautiful, white, well off New yorkers. His message is one of carpe dieum, seize the day. His battle cry of “suit up!” is meant to provoke his conservative friends into living to the nth degree. Whenever a trivial, but seemingly impossible task is mentioned (often as a joke or a throw away comment) Barney’s reply is “challenge accepted.” Barney teaches his fictional friends and the audience to see past their everyday routine and grind of their middle class normality. To aspire to something more than work and a great apartment.

It’s important to see that Barney often does this through the ordinary, almost infantile. His obsession with laser tag, the star wars decoration in his apartment, high fiving everything.

However, it is in his crazy schemes that Barney raises his pretense to maestro levels, often employing Machiavellian levels of trickery in increasingly overly complex and intricate machinations to achieve something banal. In fact sometimes it seems that the act itself is more important than the reward. Here perhaps, we see the ultimate form of positive pretense, one where being right doesn’t matter, but executing the idea in a brilliant manner is the most important thing.

Pretense should challenge our ideas about how we live, why we do things, are we doing the right things. There should always be a hint that the opinions, traditions and routines we build our reality on, are built on shaky foundations and only the constant public testing of these things through shameless self promotion of them to a cynical public will keep us on the correct path.

The joy of good pretense is like a tantric orgasm. It is ecstasy without the need for solely physical stimulus. It is the transcendence to the world of ideas (if used correctly).

To use a dirty word - it’s marketing.  Just as marketing is the idea of making something appear to be more desirable, more important than it really is, the pretentious person must reinforce the brand name of philosophy with hyperbole.