Free Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You by Greg Gutfeld

(a nice word for “batshit crazy”) originates from a kernel of cool philosophy: Anythingthat rebels against structure has to be good. In fact, it has to be better! The white picket fence is just a symbol of oppression (it’s white, after all); the man who tears down that fence is the hero. When a drifter convinces you to join his revolutionary group in the California desert, you can bet what’s next isn’t opening a frozen yogurt stand. More likely, it will be forced sodomy. But no matter. Cool makes evil just a part of the romantic resistance, and if you reject it, well, then, you’re “the man” too. How many people lost their lives buying into an alternative lifestyle that defined itself against the repressive nature of contemporary society? (If you only count Jonestown, it’s 918 members.)
    Cool suspends critical thinking, the thought processes that can discern between good and evil—letting the harmful in. Being a dangerous asshole has somehow become an aggrieved group. I’m only surprised they don’t qualify for subsidized housing. Oops, they do. See our prison system. According to the cool, those are no longer criminals—they’re just victims of an unjust society railing against suffocating traditional norms. They are often “political prisoners.” If you just got to know them better, you’d see that you’re the problem. And when they rape you, it’s probably your fault.
    (If you get the chance, see a wicked little movie called
The Paperboy
, which details an infatuation between a flighty woman and a ruthless killer. She works tirelessly to free him from prison, and when she does, he ultimately, and brutally, kills her. That’s the way it goes. Cool is nothing more than an avenue for the evil to trick the good into letting the evil in. This weird, messy little film should have won Best Picture on morality alone.)
    What about actual crazy people? Does this romanticism of their predicament help? Hardly. As Heath and Potter point out, referencing the 1967 book
The Politics of Experience
, by R. D. Laing,the author maintained that schizophrenics weren’t really ill but on “a journey of discovery.” Discovery of what? The land of hallucinations and random violence? Translation: It’s society’s pressures they’re reacting against, and their perceived illness is their way of breaking free from these evil structures that we’ve imposed against these deeper, more nuanced thinkers. We aren’t cool enough to see how the illness isn’t really an illness at all. It’s just an alternative lifestyle—one that achieves more than our boring lives because it refuses to subscribe to our nine-to-five dreariness.
    Never mind if the poor families dealing with the schizophrenic are going through an unmitigated hell trying to provide some peace for themselves and their tortured family member. What’s important to the cool is that the sick person is the hero, and the people trying to help are the evil oppressors. “Madness itself becomes widely regarded as a form of subversion,” write Heath and Potter. And subversion is always cool—regardless of the pain and suffering it causes others, or even the subverter himself. By this logic, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were just Elvis without the guitar.
    It’s dangerous to treat mental illness as a lifestyle rather than actually
treating
the mental illness. When the cool focus on guns as the impetus of violent acts, they avoid dealing with people who need help, who get those guns. We are a vast, rich country, with resources to care for those in need, but for reasons beyond comprehension we see treatment as an attack on individual liberty. We can no longer give people help, for it infringes on their freedom to be who they are, even if who they are might be a risk to others. So as talking heads rail against assault rifles to help their meager ratings, they avoid facing the uncool reality all around us: We fear to help the unstable few because it’s cooler to let