Cultured Victims: The Obscene Cosmetics of Trauma

We must begin with a necessary premise, almost an inevitable equation: today, it has  become impossible to draw a clear line. I am referring to that once-insurmountable  boundary that separated genuine emotional participation from tactical positioning. 

Digital manipulation has become so layered that the spectator is left disarmed, no longer  able to distinguish between those who champion a cause out of a pure urgency of the  heart and those who extract an aesthetic dividend for their own reputation. The boundary  that has vanished is the one between the authenticity of feeling and the strategy of  communication. Commitment to collective drama and the payoff of image have merged  into a single, indistinct electrical signal. If the language used is the same—the same black  and white, the same high-brow citation, the same studied silence—how can we separate  real pain from "rebranding"? When this vampirism becomes seamless, the litmus test of  intellectual honesty disappears. 

I have observed, from a close and unwanted distance, this "aesthetic vampirism" that  feeds on mourning and transforms it into a pose. There is an inherent baseness in those  who attempt to mask their own malaise with a solemnity that does not belong to them.  Real pain, on the other hand—the kind I have known intimately, despite myself—is a  profoundly anti-aesthetic experience made of neglect, messy rooms, and a weariness of  the self that strips away even the desire to look into a mirror. It is a pneumatic vacuum—a  non-place without an editorial plan—where vital energy is entirely hijacked by the mere  attempt to survive the next minute. 

In this Society of the Spectacle, I have seen the birth of the "Cultured Victim" (CV).  Someone who does not inhabit their own pain but stages it, using the pain of others as  construction material. They are Architects of martyrdom using the rubble of others to  build an altar to their own personality. "I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe":  alien stories populated by stolen images, reposts of world-wide tragedies, rarefied art  borrowed from distant profiles (distant more from the heart than from the eyes) forming  tailor-made collages. Cool outfits for souls who are perhaps a bit less cool, but highly  skilled in smuggling their intellectual facade using the skin—synthetic skin—of others. A  society without pain that suffers by borrowing the pain of those who truly suffer; cognitive  empathy instead of emotional empathy. The Cultured Victim knows which buttons to  press to simulate suffering without feeling its specific weight (which is usually what they  are fleeing from). It is "culture" by the pound, sold as spiritual substance. It is a  throwaway market of pain where one displays the merchandise of others as their own, 

paid for by the condolences of distracted spectators with cries of: "Look how they suffer, yet how dignified their state is!" 

This theft of solemnity is a surgical operation. Stealing the weight of a tragedy "X" to hide  the meanness of a condition "Y". If suffering always has the perfect framing, it is not  mourning: it is a production. It is a way to avoid looking at the violence occurring in  private; it is a narcissistic attempt to escape oneself by participating in the "universal  drama." This pathetic solemnity serves to construct moral impunity with the sole objective  of hiding the absence of a real ethical foundation.

Screaming one's pain with the care of  an art director feels like propaganda to me. The hope for moral impunity. 

Authentic pain does not seek an audience; it is the flame burning within us that wishes to  break out through our ribs, yet it is so deeply ashamed of itself that it struggles immensely  to be seen; it is the fire no one must witness. It is precisely at the moment it is exposed to  an unsuspecting public that the suffering contained within is translated and, therefore,  betrayed. Because pain does not burn the spectators when it is conveniently displayed  from behind a screen; in fact, the screen is the perfect recipe for those who prepare their  agony, seasoning it to make it more digestible for the viewer—provided it is properly  cooked and plated. Perhaps, after all, showing oneself to those far away is less painful  than simply facing oneself? To me, it seems like nothing more than dreaming of oneself  through the dreams of others. 

"The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of this sleep." 

Externalizing suffering through the filter of social media creates a synthetic pagan rite—a  desperate attempt to hurl "outward" a psychic event that needs to be processed  "inward." What is obtained in return is not catharsis: it is a feedback loop filtered from  below, a stagnation in the swamp of the human. "Reheated soup," to put it bluntly. 

It is the tragedy of those who reject the Divine—understood as Truth or a higher Ethics— as the "better" to which one should aspire. If there is no longer anyone to answer to  "inside," one must answer to everyone "outside." It is a condemnation to the eternal shop  window. The rite becomes a sacrifice without transformation. The pain does not ferment.  Everything remains exactly as it was—in fact, it worsens—it only becomes louder. Like  the loop of an old synthesizer: a cold experiment that simulates life but lacks an organic  heartbeat. While authentic pain is an act of friendship toward oneself—a way to shift  attention from the distorting mirror of the "other" to the care of one's own self—exposed  pain is a premeditated act of submission to the gaze of others. 

There is a further myopia: the refusal to see pain as an opportunity for healing. When  reduced to an aesthetic object, pain ceases to be an alarm signal pushing us to seek  beauty in a necessary play of chiaroscuro: without the shadow, we would not know how  to distinguish the light of love. A child, who is on average much wiser than an adult,  knows that within the pain of a stomachache, the hand of the mother ready to soothe it is  already contained. Pain is a request for authentic relationship, not for an audience. It is a  bridge, not a stage. 

When we freeze it into a rarefied image, we prevent it from burning away to make room  for a new awareness. Those who aestheticize suffering refuse to be healed, perhaps  because healing would strip them of their most precious commodity: the pedestal of the  victim. In this pornography of trauma, the suffering of others is consumed. It makes us  feel like better people without ever getting our hands dirty with reality—a reality that is perhaps too real to be lived. Especially in a world where truth is the ultimate sin, real  suffering remains elsewhere: in the silence beyond the frame, in the darkness of a room  where there are no filters to protect us. Lies take the elevator, while truth takes the stairs.  But truth arrives—it always arrives—the moment one stops compulsively pressing the  talk-back button to grant themselves an existence, finally accepting to stand naked  before their own self, without the headphones' monitor of an audience to forge a  reflection. 

And the rest is noise. 

Viaggi Andromeda

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Cultured Victims: The Obscene Cosmetics of Trauma