Last night while walking with Brett before the battle, we had a semi-serious and semi-drunk conversation about pretension and more.
Here’s a recap and my basic understanding of the convo:
- it’s entirely possible to be pretentious by virtue of trying not to be.
- this is the hipster’s dilemma (ie. the moment you deny yourself to be a hipster, you are one)
- pretension does NOT necessarily mean arrogance
- one level of pretension is considerably more annoying and grating, and that is the level that combines with arrogance.
- arrogance in this sense could mean knowing (or thinking) you’re pretentious and embracing it publically
- or not knowing you’re pretentious and just being a jerk about it
- or thinking you’re pretentious (and not actually having any reason to be; for example, being a strip club connoisseur does not warrant an attitude) and being a jerk about it
So basically we’re talking about 4 distinct but related things: being pretentious, not being pretentious, being arrogant, and not being arrogant. Pretentiousness comes about in at least 3 ways - obvi, one is simply being pretentious (ie. only enjoying the finer things in life, whether or not you ’show off’ about it or not); trying hard NOT to be pretentious (dumpster diver / live off the grid extremists included); and being arrogant (refusing to take the subway, or refusing to be nice to waiters). Note again that being arrogant does NOT make you pretentious in the traditional sense, but if one acquires that level of attitude about himself, there’s no choice but to perceive him to be pretentious on top of arrogant. Clearly this is the least “desirable” level of pretension.
All that said, there’s certainly the special case where one are pretentious by virtue of trying not to be, and arrogant by virtue of being self-loathing. One man comes to mind when thinking of this case.
Tags: arrogance, attitude, culture, pretension
