December Days: Counter-cultural foible (ghoti)

[jack]

Good question, and I don't really have a good answer, I'd like brainstorming it with ghoti more, but at this point in December, I have to start saying if I haven't got to it yet, I probably won't get to it.

To me, "counter-culture" suggests "subculture you wish could be mainstream culture" and foible suggests "loveable weakness". And I really hope I've some personality traits in the overlap, but I can't think of any!

Most of my social group are massively progressive (usually socially, and often economically) and I agree with all of that, but it's really just "agreeing with people I think are right", I don't think it really counts as counter-cultural nor a foible.

And I have other opinions and traits which are most people don't share. I'm vegetarian, and I do think that's right (or some approximation to that, I'm not sure ethically farmed meat is unethical), but that's not really a foible, it's a principled decision, even if I'm wrong about it. And I have lots of grammar quirks, but they're not really counter-cultural.

I brainstormed this with Liv, and she suggested that I'm more law-abiding. And I agree, I am, and sometimes that's an amusing personality quirk. But I think "being too conformist" is the opposite of counter-cultural, and also, is actually a really big personality defect: it somewhat helps me following rules when they matter (eg. I rarely deliberately compromise ethical opinions, even though I'm rarely faced with a stark choice), but it's a massive risk of me following rules which don't really exist, or are harmful, or are useless, and would be better ignored.

The best I can think of is an inherited weakness for old-school socialism and singing the red flag. Which I don't think is polite to do in public, because it's been so co-opted by Stalinist USSR :( But I'm nostalgic for a remembrance of the idea of a complete cultural revolution, imposing fairness on society as a whole without regard to existing structures or national borders (even though I think it's often a disaster to try to do that rather than supporting successive improvements).

Comments

[heliopausa]

I don't think being law-abiding is necessarily not counter-cultural, because there can be a culture of treating (some) laws as floutable. Many, many rich people treat laws as not applying to them - tax laws, speeding laws, etc. And whole governments can flout the law, so that when someone who says, "Hang on, that's theft" or "infringement of civil liberties" or "torture" or something, that can be so counter-cultural that they lose their jobs. Law-abiding is counter-cultural, if the surrounding culture is law-breaking.