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barely escaping a rationalist: There Are Things No One Can Tell You About How to Live | Tara Isabella Burton (https://catapult.co/stories/there-are-things-no-one-can-tell-you-about-how-to-live-tara-isabella-burton)
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Like the time we went to England for my friend’s wedding, at which my Catholic ex, a lay chaplain, said a blessing over the meal, and the Rationalist made himself vomit it up in the hotel room because it was not Good to consume food sacrificed to false idols, and my Catholic ex was not Good because he was Catholic, and Catholics valued submission over creative freedom, and if I thought he was a Good man then I did not understand Goodness, and therefore, the Rationalist could never discuss philosophy with me ever again.

That’s certainly something

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You'd have to make your conviction to not eat it public then. Which would take some courage at least, even if you make up a reason and aren't honest about it.
Honestly that part sounds more like an eating disorder or another mental health issue.
I was going to say, that sounds like some kind of reformation-era martyr story.
Tell me this is satire...
all too real

Aside from being a profoundly abusive man, the main thing I take away about this guy is – what a fucking nerd. What an insufferable, utter nerd.

What are the odds that this dude is one of the “traditionalist” motteniks? My Bayesian estimate puts it at 95%.

Very.
Wee free thinkers.

He wept for hours, once, because he could not bear the loneliness that came from being so much more spiritually evolved than I was. I held his hair while he threw up

Holy shit. What a narcissistic, abusive, condescending, self-righteous waste of oxygen.

Like the time I asked him, in tears, why telling him that something bothered me, was important to me, mattered to me, wasn’t enough, why I had to write a philosophy paper to convince him to do or not do something, and he told me it was selfish and lazy not to, then threatened—as he often did—to leave me. I wrote a two-thousand-word apology in the form of a philosophy essay explaining why he should discount my emotions before he finally forgave me.

dude’s misogynist af

I usually like Burton’s pieces, but this seems to further my standing sentiment that professional writers should never make a piece out of a breakup in the wake of it.

I do agree with you there. If not for the rationalist angle, I would have mercifully let it go unnoticed.

he seems pretty irrational

“He had, rather (he said) come to all his ideas about Virtue and the Good independently, through his own personal and extensive study of the Western philosophical tradition. Nobody had given them to him.”

I know the irony was intentional here, but it’s still hilarious.

Mental illness

What in the goddamn

Clearly the guy is a horrid waste of skin but the writer’s narrative voice makes me deeply uncomfortable. There is always something deeply disconcerting about that intense kind of scrupulosity exhibited by the writer. Something in the obsession with “Good” that feels like it grinds people away and hollows them out. It makes my skin crawl.

Yes, I agree. I hope this is exaggerated because of the genre of piece and closeness of the material.